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Case Study (III) Campus Network Revolution: Asterfusion Powers Global CSP Efficiency!

written by Asterfuison

January 17, 2025

Case Study: Global Leading CSP — Enhancing Campus Network Efficiency with Asterfusion open campus network architecture, Supporting Business Expansion, and Integrating Campus Networks with Data Center Cloud Technologies

Background:

A global leader in integrated internet services is experiencing rapid growth on one of its campuses, with an increase in traffic and business demands. As the number of users continues to rise, the company is setting higher expectations for its campus network. The goal? To boost network stability and scalability, while reducing operational costs. With mobile office work becoming the new norm, their existing network simply can’t keep up with these evolving needs.

Challenges and Pain Points:

The company faces several key challenges:

  1. Managing Massive Device and Traffic Demands: With mobile office work on the rise, the number of devices and data traffic has skyrocketed. Traditional network architectures are struggling to support this level of demand.
  2. Ensuring High Availability and Redundancy: The network needs to recover swiftly in case of failure to ensure business continuity without disruption.
  3. Supporting Dynamic Access for Mobile Office Needs: The network must accommodate employees moving freely across the campus, both inside and outside, with seamless access at all times.
  4. Enhancing Network Virtualization, Isolation, and Security: The solution must ensure secure data isolation for different departments or sub-networks to safeguard sensitive information.
  5. Simplifying Operations and Minimizing Human Intervention: The company aims to reduce operational complexity and cost while streamlining management processes.
  6. Solving Large-Scale Wi-Fi Roaming Challenges: Ensuring smooth, uninterrupted, and low-latency Wi-Fi roaming is key to providing an excellent user experience for mobile users.
  7. Mitigating Layer 2 Broadcast Storms and Network Congestion: The network must eliminate the risk of broadcast storms, preventing network overloads and ensuring smooth data flow.

Asterfusion Open Campus Network Solution Highlights:

To address the challenges above, we provided the company with an efficient, stable, and cost-effective network solution based on Asterfusion. The main elements of the solution include:

Leaf-Spine Clos Switch Architecture:

By deploying a two-layer Spine and Leaf switch architecture, we significantly improved the scalability and flexibility of the network, enabling effective management of large-scale traffic and supporting tens of thousands of endpoint devices. This architecture provides horizontal scalability for the campus network, effectively handling the growing business demands:

High Availability and Redundancy Design:

To ensure network continuity, our design incorporates redundant paths and failover mechanisms. Using technologies such as ECMP and EVPN Multi-homing, we provide high availability, ensuring rapid recovery in the event of device or link failures and preventing business disruptions caused by network downtime.

Network Virtualization and Isolation:

In large-scale campus networks, virtualization plays a crucial role. Asterfusion utilized VXLAN and BGP-EVPN technologies to virtualize physical network resources, successfully supporting the isolation needs between multiple sub-networks or departments, thereby significantly improving resource utilization. Additionally, this solution is consistent with the client’s cloud environment, realizing a virtual multi-tenant architecture for the campus network, ensuring both security and flexibility.

All-IP Loop-Free Secure Network:

The company’s original Layer 2 network faced broadcast storms, causing broadcast packets to circulate endlessly, resulting in continuous bandwidth consumption and resource exhaustion on devices. In large enterprise campuses like this one, especially with complex network topologies, the impact of loops can spread quickly and lead to uncontrollable network failures. To address this issue, we implemented Asterfusion’s all-IP network architecture, which effectively solved the broadcast storm problem. The optimization measures included:

  • AP Forwarding Optimization: By implementing strict traffic forwarding rules, traffic is directly sent to the Leaf switches, avoiding unnecessary detours.
  • Leaf Switch Traffic Management: Most broadcast traffic is discarded, and only necessary traffic (such as ARP and DHCP) is forwarded as unicast.
  • BGP Control: BGP ensures the network is loop-free, further preventing broadcast storms.
  • ARP Suppression: Reduced ARP broadcast traffic to lower the risk of broadcast storms.
  • Unicast Conversion: By converting broadcast traffic to unicast, security risks are reduced, and wireless resources are optimized.

Asterfusion’s all-IP loop-free secure network is crucial for ensuring the efficient and stable operation of large campus networks like the one at the company.

Support for Large-Scale Wi-Fi User Roaming:

Due to the high mobility of employees, they frequently move between different offices or floors, attending meetings or video calls. As a result, there is a strong need for an efficient and stable Wi-Fi roaming solution to ensure seamless connectivity when moving between floors or areas. During peak times, over 50% of employees will be roaming on Wi-Fi, presenting a challenge for network architecture to support such a large scale.

Traditional Wi-Fi roaming solutions no longer meet these needs. When a user moves from one access point (AP) to another, the traffic typically has to be tunneled between the original AP and the new one, which increases latency and complexity, similar to roaming mechanisms in 5G networks. Moreover, traditional detour solutions are unable to handle large-scale roaming demands, necessitating a new distributed gateway Wi-Fi roaming solution.

Asterfusion’s WiFi Roaming Solution:

Asterfusion introduces the innovative Anycast Gateway technology, which perfectly solves the challenges of large-scale Wi-Fi roaming. The key advantage of this technology is that traffic is distributed across multiple gateway nodes, avoiding the traffic detour or concentration issues seen in traditional solutions, and significantly improving network efficiency.

The Anycast Gateway configuration ensures that users maintain the same IP address while roaming, preventing re-authentication or disconnection, thereby achieving true seamless roaming. Additionally, by utilizing the BGP-EVPN protocol, the Leaf and Spine switches share ARP table information, ensuring smooth traffic routing and synchronized client data, greatly optimizing the Wi-Fi roaming experience.

This solution not only enhances the stability and responsiveness of Wi-Fi roaming but also ensures seamless network connectivity as employees move freely between different areas. Furthermore, it supports large-scale roaming during peak periods, meeting the network demands of high-density environments.

Effects and Benefits:

  • Enhanced Scalability: The new network architecture supports the global expansion plan for the next five years, enabling flexible expansion without the need for large-scale reconstruction.
  • Cost Savings: Operating costs have been reduced by 35% because Asterfusion’s campus network architecture is highly consistent with the company’s internal data center cloud architecture. This allows the operations team to manage both the cloud and network seamlessly through their cloud management platform, improving operational efficiency and reducing manual intervention.
  • Effortless Large-Scale Wi-Fi Roaming: Asterfusion’s distributed gateway perfectly solves the challenges of large-scale roaming scenarios, avoiding network congestion issues and the disruption of cross-floor disconnections.

Customer Feedback:

“Partnering with Asterfusion was a key decision for us. Their cloud-based campus network solution was exactly what we needed, aligning perfectly with our data center cloud architecture. This integration allowed us to harness the full power of cloud computing across our campus network while empowering our operations team to manage both the cloud and network seamlessly through our cloud management platform. The results were impressive—operational efficiency skyrocketed, manual intervention dropped, and our TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) was significantly reduced. The new network architecture not only boosted system stability but also gave a strong boost to our expansion efforts. A big thank you to the Asterfusion team for their invaluable support!”

Summary:

Through Asterfusion’s innovative solution, Company A successfully overcame numerous challenges related to network scalability, high costs, and operational difficulties, thereby enhancing business efficiency and user experience. This case demonstrates how our technology helps global enterprises address challenges in network architecture and provides a solid foundation for their continued development.

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