This is the story of Max.

Max is your typical network guy. Not many companies have a Max today thanks to a beautiful term called “outsourcing”. When he works for Service providers, he is a hero. He has other Max’s with whom, he can chat, gossip, go out for drinks, etc.

However, in this case, he works for an enterprise now where no one notices him much. But the $$ has to come from somewhere right? So let’s leave it at this.

Enter Bob.

Bob is the typical IT director who is busy in meetings all day long. Bob obviously has a lot on his plate right now. He has IT budgets to finalize, analyze spends, decide IT strategy, get rid of the legacy stuff, manage vendors, internal teams, etc. Bob obviously has the CFO asking him to cut costs but Bob knows it is easier said than done.

Max is desperate to prove he is not useless and the $$ is justified. He obviously also wants to impress Bob for the annual performance appraisal and for the coveted “reference check” for future jobs.

Enter Service Providers.

Max’s enterprise has a few IP transit links and private layer 2 links in their DC’s which they use for their internet and business connectivity from a few SP’s. Max knows, if he can somehow reduce the bandwidth /usage on these IP transit links, there could be a potential of some cost savings. Yes. You heard it. Savings!

Max is excited.  He now has a way to make Bob happy and piss off his service provider(s).

Max quickly sends a meeting invite to Bob and voila, he manages to book some time on Bob’s calendar later that week! Bob does notice this weird invite and the follow-up email from Max, but he has a busy day so does not give it much thought.

The meeting:

Max does not leave this golden opportunity to impress his boss. (The DJI Mavic could just be in sight this year without pissing the wife off).

He uses the whiteboard to explain what the plan is. He shares the estimated figures on the spreadsheets he has prepared for so long. He is confident that they have a winner on the table and sure enough, Bob gives the go-ahead for setting the plan in motion.

Enter Megaport:

In layman’s term, Megaport is a service provider which will give you many logical links on one physical link/port. These logical links/VLANs can be used to connect to cloud services like AWS, Azure, etc or even another one of your other sites, customers, vendors, etc securely on a layer 2 basis with all routing control left to yourself.

The more specific definition and documentation here. Obviously, there is much more that can be done using Megaport.

1. Can you connect two or more of separate cloud environments together without routing that traffic back to your DC securely without using the internet? –Yes
2. Can you connect your enterprise to the cloud environment ( GCP, AWS, Azure, Alibaba, etc) without getting tied to a vendor contract and with you having complete control of the routing and on the same physical port? –Yes
3. Can you connect to an internet exchange on the same physical port ( as used for cloud connectivity) and exchange some routes with local service providers /participants so that traffic doesn’t traverse the IP transit links? –Yes
4. Can you connect to an internet exchange in another country? -Yes
5. Can you know how the pricing looks like or do you need to engage with one of their solution consultants for the pricing and wait forever? -Yes and No. All pricing info here.
6. Is there something more that you can do with Megaport? -Absolutely. Find that our yourself!

 

The Plan:

Max quickly orders a Megaport at all of his DC’s. The provisioning time is literally 5 mins. He gets the LOA from Megaport and emails it over to the DC vendor. The vendor’s quickly assign someone to provision the cross-connect viz, connecting Megaport equipment and Customer equipment together.

• Max provisions an IX service (free) and joins it from his internet edge routers. This way, a bulk of his traffic breaks out locally as his cloud-based proxy vendor also participates in that exchange. This also means Max can now get a better deal from his IP transit provider due to reduced BW usage on those links.
• Max gets rid of his expensive layer 2 connectivity to another DC via a service provider. He uses Megaport to connect his sites instead. He only has to pay for what he uses so he adjusts his BW on Megaport Logical connection accordingly.
• Max connects to all his cloud environments via Megaport and Megaport cloud router. This way he just has one logical connection to Megaport cloud router /Cloud environments. All cloud environments connect to MCR. He does not need to worry about provisioning a physical subinterface for each direct connect /express route anymore. All that happens on the MCR viz. virtual.
• There is potential to do a lot more here with the flexibility Megaport offers so Max is just waiting for the right email asking “Hey, can we do this? “

 

The Outcome:

Bob.