Service providers that have a lot of real-time traffic through their network, like mobile network operators (MNOs), are very keen on a fast restoration of service once a failure occurs in the network. In the past a lot of networks were based on SDH/SONET transport networks, which took care of sub-second (50ms) failovers. Nowadays Ethernet is THE standard for any transport within a service provider network. This introduces an issue, as Ethernet is not built for automatic failover when certain things fail.
Now there are many ways to solve this and I want to dig deeper in these technologies in several posts. I will discuss various protocols that can solve the fast restoration requirement in different ways. Some are used in local situations (so failover to local neighbor, like a twin sibling) and others can be used in inter-site locations or can be an end-to-end protection for certain traffic.
The posts are broken down as follows:
Please be aware that these technologies are all related to fast restore the layer 3 forwarding path, therefore restoring the MPLS forwarding path. The MPLS forwarding path may be Continue reading
As I’m preparing for the various exams (up to the Expert lab) of the Enterprise Routing & Switching track of Juniper I needed a lab to support this. In this blogpost I would like to explain my choice of hardware and software and how I’m going to use this set-up to prepare for the written exams and the lab exam.
Based on the blueprint, available on the Juniper website (http://www.juniper.net/us/en/training/certification/resources_jncieent.html), I needed to select hardware and software. The current software version used in the lab is JUNOS 10.4. On the various communities I heard that they want to upgrade this to a JUNOS 11.x (probably 11.4, which is a long-term-support version) software track somewhere this year, but until that time I chose the latest version of 10.4. At time of this writing this is JUNOS 10.4R9.
On the official blueprint there is no real indication of which hardware is used on the lab exam, but when you find your ways through the community sites and with the help from some community friends (special thanks to Chris ;-) I decided to use the SRX100H as router and EX4200 Continue reading
This blog has also been published to the Juniper J-Net community portal
In 2005, when I was 18 years old, I finished high school I already knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to start a career in IT! The only thing I didn’t know was in what direction I wanted to go. So, I did a little bit of everything. The first important decision I took was to only finish high school and start working without going to university. I figured that, with enough dedication and focus, 4-5 years of work experience added with the right technical certifications would get me further in the IT world than a degree would get me. After 6 years I think I can say that it definitely worked for me!
Servers and Programming
I started with passing exams and getting my MCSE on Windows 2003. I had a few small companies where I was managing all IT systems. The largest one was my dad’s company where I was managing 4 servers, 10 workstation and 20 mobile devices (yes even in 2006 we had a custom developed Windows Mobile 5 application and all engineers were carrying smartphones). I was co-developing the custom Continue reading