Klantcase Investing.com

Quanza engineering successfully deploys juniper networks’ vmx routing technology for investing.com

In today’s digital economy, the availability of digital services and speedy delivery of content has become a key requirement for online businesses to be able to thrive. This means that internet connections are not allowed to fail: downtime is simply unacceptable. Additionally, superb interconnectivity is needed to be able to quickly and safely transfer data all over the world. At Investing.com, both could do with improvements.
Gabriel Mizrahi, CTO at Investing.com, elaborates: “Investing.com is a global financial portal and internet brand composed of 30 editions in 22 languages and mobile apps for Android and iOS that provide news, analysis, streaming quotes and charts, technical data and financial tools about the global financial markets. Each edition covers a broad variety of local and global financial assets including Stocks, Bonds, Commodities, Currencies, Interest Rates, Futures, and Options. The site has a growing readership worldwide with more than 12 million monthly uniques and close to 400,000,000 monthly page views across the network.”.

Eliminating single points of failure

To be able to best serve its readership and
 continue to expand, Investing.com wanted
 maximum uptime and the lowest latency 
possible. Says Mizrahi: “We have our own
 Autonomous System (AS) but were reliant
 on one Internet Service Provider (ISP) for our
 connectivity. We had a redundant connection 
to our ISP, but if an ISP major outage had
 occurred, it would have severely affect us. As such, we had a single point of failure regarding our connectivity which we needed to eliminate. We had two requirements: true redundancy and an acceptable cost/benefit ratio.”

“Despite an extensive in-house IT knowledge, we usually don’t deal with carrier grade projects. It turned out that the solution we desired could not be implemented without making a significant investment. Based on our previous experience with Quanza, when they implemented core switches in our network, we decided to ask for their advice. After some very constructive conversations, Quanza recommended Juniper Networks’ vMX routing technology, which is essentially a virtualized router. At first, we were sceptic, but it turned out great.”

 

 

Quanza Engineering quickly recognized that Investing.com required a new setup of its infrastructure. To achieve Investing.com’s requirement for more reliable redundancy and better connectivity, a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) solution, in addition to extra carriers, was needed. Three additional carriers were contracted and a port at the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX) — the largest internet exchange in terms of connected autonomous networks — was set up. To make sure all traffic was managed in an efficient way, Quanza implemented Juniper Networks’ vMX routing technology to handle the BGP peering.

Excellent connectivity

Stephan Haak, network engineer at Quanza Engineering, and the person responsible for the vMX deployment at Investing. com, thinks vMX is a very promising solution for a wide variety of networking user cases. Notes Haak: “Given the requirements Investing.com had, the need for true redundancy and an acceptable cost/benefit ratio, we proposed to implement Juniper Networks’ vMX technology. In short, this virtual router technology allows for rapid deployment and on the fly changes to routing tables at a fraction of the costs of a physical router.”

The vMX router was configured to implement BGP at the edge
of the network. Haak continues: Juniper Networks’ vMX is
currently a leading virtual router technology that supports high
bandwidth applications and is one of the few high potential
and supported virtual routing solutions that can be used for a
high variety of network use-cases. This technology is very cost efficient and deployment can be automated to a very large degree. Whether you are looking for a fast BGP edge solution, a critical routing component in your enterprise network, or cloud virtual extended LAN tunnel endpoints (VXLAN VTEP), vMX might be an interesting cost-efficient solution to your needs.”

Already a third of Investing.com’s traffic is routed through AMS-IX and is efficiently handled by the vMX platform. Besides the excellent connectivity AMS-IX offers, an additional benefit quickly presented itself. “Our new port at AMS-IX not only reduced our latency and improved our connectivity, but it’s also a very cost-effective way to route traffic. Due to their extensive knowledge of networking, peering and routing, Quanza Engineering has been fundamental to all of the improvements that were realized, including our AMS-IX setup”, Mizrahi concludes.

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