ABOUT ORANGE ROMANIA
Orange Romania is the largest local telecommunications operator, with businesses of over one billion euros and over 10 million customers. The subsidiary of the France Telecom group provides the most extensive national coverage for the 4G network – 98.21% of the country’s population and 100% of the urban population – as well as higher levels of performance, independent tests showing that Orange owns and operates “Fastest Fixed Network”, “Fastest Mobile Network”, “Best Mobile Coverage” and “Best Mobile Network” in Romania, according to Ookla reports from July 2021.
The operator offers a complete portfolio of services, addressed to both individuals, and SMEs and large companies, delivered through data centers in Romania.
IDENTIFYING OPTIMAL TECHNOLOGIES
To achieve these results of the network’s modernization, Orange Romania opted to implement a VXLAN EVPN Multi-site architecture model, which also offers the advantage of eliminating dependence on certain proprietary technologies, a critical aspect in the case of service providers. The company chose this solution to combine the advantages of standard Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) and Ethernet VPN (EVPN) virtualization technologies, thus benefiting from the possibility of creating multi-tenant services, which can be extended on-demand, using computing resources of multiple data centers. EVPN allows the company to connect geographically dispersed customer sites, creating virtual bridges at the Layer 2 level, while VXLAN technology facilitates the ability to extend Layer 2 connectivity over a Layer 3 intermediate network.
Additionally, by opting on EVPN technology, Orange can use the BGP (Border Gateway Protocol), through which traffic routing decisions are taken based on the system’s routing policies which it belongs to, and moving workloads can be done dynamically from one data center to another.
„Orange Romania has chosen this network architecture model to maintain its multi-vendor openness. A service provider’s solutions and services require not only IP connectivity but also routing protocols with different variations and filters, multi-tenancy capabilities, extended horizontal scalability, and – last but not least – ensuring security as close to the customer as possible. No solution vendor completely covers all these requirements, but by using technologies such as standard VXLAN and EVPN, Orange Romania has managed to coherently integrate several solutions in a unified architecture, enabling it to deliver optimal results for end customers.“ Horia Gunica, IP Network Architect Orange România
CHOOSING THE IMPLEMENTATION PARTNER AND DEVELOPING THE PROJECT
In order to identify the implementation partner, Orange Romania carried out a selection process, following which Datanet Systems company was chosen, a system integrator with over 20 years of experience on the local and international markets, and with numerous implementations in the telecom field.
Based on the mentioned business requirements and the specific conditions of the client’s IT infrastructure analysis, Datanet specialists proposed the adoption of an “IP Fabric” type solution. After approving the technological recommendation, the Orange Romania and Datanet Systems teams closely collaborated in the design stages of the architecture, Proof of Concept, implementation, documentation, and acceptance of the solution.
The project was completed in just three months, before the established deadline, and the implemented architecture meets all the requirements of the Orange Romania team, as well as the recommendations of standard VXLAN and EVPN technologies.
The project was carried out using Cisco network equipment from the Nexus and ASR series. The implemented Clos architecture is of leaf-spine-leaf type, in each Data Center also being installed a pair of special leaves with the role of Border Leafs / Gateways, as well as DCI Gateways that connect the VXLAN BGP EVPN network and the existing MPLS VPN network.
„I believe that Datanet’s technical expertise, together with the great collaboration with Orange’s IP Engineering team, has ensured the advanced customization of a reliable open-standard solution based on EVPN VXLAN and its implementation in particularly complex production conditions.” Costin Deac, Service Provider Team Leader Datanet Systems
„Datanet Systems delivered very well from the early stages of the project, communicating with Orange Romania’s technical team at every step, which allowed us to customize and refine as much as possible the solution we implemented. The current design of the solution was made following several technical iterations and modifications that Datanet treated with maximum seriousness and professionalism. The Orange Romania network integrates several customized solutions, with a high level of complexity, and the professionalism, technical knowledge, and experience gained by Datanet specialists have been a great help in this project.“ Horia Gunica, IP Network Architect Orange România
MAIN BENEFITS FOR ORANGE ROMANIA
By implementing the multi-site architecture EVPN VXLAN, Orange Romania has achieved the following benefits:
- Increased the level of geo-resilience – any workload can be easily and quickly moved from one Data Center to another, and in case of any event (either at a link or equipment level), the reconvergence time has decreased by up to 10 times that of the previous network architecture.
- Simplify the migration efforts – moving workloads between data centers no longer requires reconfiguration processes and can be performed without altering specific network parameters (IP, netmask, gateway, etc.)
- Improving the reaction speed – the time required to make configurations, provision of resources, service development, migration of workloads, etc., has been substantially reduced, and the implementation and commissioning of a new solution can now be achieved up to 75% faster.
- Limitation of the end customer’s felt disturbances – the migration of workloads between data centers can be achieved with an interruption of fewer than 2 seconds of the services provided by them.
- Increased scalability – the implemented leaf-spine-leaf architecture facilitates horizontal data center expansion, and End-of-Row (EoR) and Top-of-Rack (ToR) placed leaf solutions allow an optimal allocation of network equipment, as well as connecting racks with a high density of servers.
- Achieving a higher level of network programmability – the integration time of network equipment is currently very low, in terms of minutes, and the new leaf that integrates into the VXLAN EVPN Multi-site architecture benefit from Zero Touch functionalities Provisioning (ZTP).
- Improved end-client security – VXLAN technology offers multiple network segmentation capabilities (without the limitations of traditional VLANs), and multi-tenancy capabilities (similar to MPLS VPN ones) natively provide a higher level of security.
POTENTIAL FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS
In long term, the implementation of the IP Fabric solution based on standard VXLAN and EVPN technologies ensures Orange Romania with the capability to integrate solutions from various vendors and to flexibly adapt the network architecture to the evolution of the business requirements. Thus, one of the projects already launched by the company provides an extension of the VXLAN EVPN Multi-site network in an additional data center, the process being facilitated by the automation features of the system.
