Client Overview:
Blackmores is Australia’s leading natural health company. To enhance network performance and reliability, the company sought to improve its BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) routing architecture.
The Challenge:
Blackmores faced several challenges with its existing routing setup:
- Inefficient Traffic Routing: Lack of control led to suboptimal traffic paths and higher latency.
- Complex Policy Management: Numerous peering agreements made routing policies difficult to manage and update.
- Limited Traffic Control: The company lacked the ability to optimize traffic flows and routing decisions.
- Scalability and Asymmetric Routing Issues: Expanding the network was becoming more complex, requiring manual interventions and leading to asymmetric routing scenarios.
The Solution:
Sydco Networks implemented a global BGP routing design using BGP communities to address these issues:
- Traffic Control with BGP Communities: Prefixes were tagged with community values to ensure compliance to a global routing policy and greatly reduce the risk of asymmetric routing scenarios.
- Simplified Routing Policies: Grouping prefixes with BGP Communities allowed for simpler policy management across peering relationships.
- Improved Traffic Engineering: BGP community tags were used for dynamic traffic adjustments based on network conditions.
- Scalability: The new design facilitated easy expansion with minimal manual intervention, allowing Blackmores to add global sites and peering’s seamlessly.
Results:
- Optimized Traffic Routing: Critical traffic was routed more efficiently, reducing latency and improving performance.
- Simplified Policy Management: Routing policies were standardized, easing network management.
- Improved Scalability: Blackmores could scale its network without overhauling the routing design.
- Greater Control over Traffic Engineering: The company gained more control over routing adjustments, improving performance during congestion or outages.
- Reduced risk of Asymmetric Routing Scenarios: BGP community prefix tagging and filtering greatly reduced the risk of asymmetric routing scenarios.
Conclusion:
By adopting a BGP community-based routing design, Blackmores improved its network performance, scalability, and traffic management. The solution enabled the company to control routing decisions effectively, optimize performance, and streamline policy management, supporting its global expansion needs.
