Irevna is the high-end financial research and analytics outsourcing division of CRISIL, India's leading ratings, research, and risk and policy advisory company. The company's clients include financial institutions with investment banking operations, insurance companies, asset management firms, and corporates. For clients, spread across the globe, Irevna is an ideal knowledge partner in cutting-edge financial analytics and thought leadership. Irevna's domain expertise, rapid execution and quality output help it maintain deep and engaging relationships with clients.
Irevna's business requirements and challenges
Being a technology-savvy enterprise, Irevna uses sophisticated IT solutions. But to help meet its clients' distinct business needs, it required high Internet availability. Irevna has offices and delivery centers at multiple locations where Net connection is provided by different Internet Service Providers (ISPs). This made it difficult to ensure high Internet and mail server availability as well as VPN tunnels uptime. Irevna already had a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)-based network architecture that used a Cisco solution to ensure Internet availability. Nonetheless, it wanted to enable Performance Routing (PfR) across locations; this involved routing Internet traffic along the best performing ISP link across locations.
Cisco provides networking solutions to meet Irevna's business needs
Considering Irevna's business needs, Cisco deployed a BGP-based wide area network (WAN) architecture. This involved using Metro Ethernet links to form a ring which connects the WAN edge of all locations. Steps to tackle Internet redundancy were implemented in such a way that they addressed failure of ISP, hardware and media. An enhanced object tracking mechanism was also used with Hot Standby Routing Protocol (HSRP) functionality to address the issues associated with the Ethernet-based termination from ISP. Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) was then used as an Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) in the WAN edge across locations, and fully meshed iBGP architecture was adopted across all Internet routers. The Cisco 2800 series routers were used for this architecture.
Additionally keeping Irevna's existing BGP network architecture in mind, Cisco deployed its PfR technology to route Internet traffic along the best-performing ISP link across locations. Since Irevna's BGP architecture involves multiple geographic locations and ISPs, Cisco upgraded WAN components to meet the PfR requirements. The Cisco partner and design team then analyzed Irevna's network architecture to come up with a PfR design which included positioning the following PfR components: Master Controller (MC) and Border Routers (BR). MC availability was addressed by using HSRP on edge routers.
PfR policies were applied globally in the BGP network to enable all the Internet-based applications to utilize the best performing Internet path based on defined PfR parameters. Then, Irevna identified business critical applications across locations to which Cisco applied unique policies based on a combination of parameters such as delay, utilization, etc.
Irevna benefits from Cisco's solutions
At a time when companies strive to lower the cost of running their networks and increase the productivity of their end users with network applications, Irevna was able to use the network to handle any business needs related to Internet availability. After observing the PfR behavior in the BGP network, Irevna saw a significant difference from the plain BGP environment in terms of load distribution and the applications that got routed through the best performing ISP path. As a corollary, Irevna was also able to offer a much higher SLA and secure environment to their customers and their employees.
In addition, the solution deployed was able to better resource utilization, transfer knowledge to their staff which enhanced skill-set, give them competitive advantage that opened up new market opportunities and increased the stability and availability of their network.
