The Internet Association of Australia, or IAA, operates an Internet exchange network that provides peering, virtual leased line (VLL), and cloud access services throughout Australia, with a goal to create better, 100% reliable Internet for the country. Internet peering is the building block of what makes up the Internet, and is critical for businesses, public organizations, and individuals to connect to valuable digital resources. This means the proper critical infrastructure must be in place to support the growing demand for everything from web hosting, to education, video streaming, gaming, and the myriad of other digital services.
But for IAA to keep up with their performance targets — which aim to provide 100% availability and 900Gbps speeds during peak times — they must sustain their infrastructure with frequent improvements, updates, and modernization efforts. This means constantly evaluating which equipment supports their goals, and which equipment holds them back.
IAA’s existing network management solution reached end of life and became the focal point of this dilemma. With 35 distributed locations containing Arista, Cisco, and Extreme Networks, and Juniper equipment, not to mention numerous server resources, IAA required a new network management solution that could provide fiber connectivity and true lights-out management to keep their infrastructure operational around the clock. This involved overcoming the following obstacles:
- Achieving a true out-of-band management network separate from the production network, to provide management access in case of routing errors
- Providing a fully remote virtual presence at all 35 points of presence
- Providing remote upgrades to network switches and servers, with the ability to remotely recover from failed upgrades, configuration problems, and human error
- Running tools locally for packet capturing and troubleshooting
- Enabling automation for fast deployments and reduced human intervention
IAA addressed their problems by deploying the Nodegrid Net SR and Nodegrid Gate SR. Read the full case study using the link below.