TowardEX has been selected to provide guest WiFi coverage to the Markley Data Center Summit 2013 event this coming Thursday.
We've been busy in the past couple weeks, scrambling to upgrade our wireless network infrastructure to fully cover the guest areas where event activities will be held. Being a large facility, 1 Summer Street can be challenging to sufficiently cover wireless access for 400+ people attending the event. Moreover, being a 24/7 busy data center, you can expect lot of interference from tons of EM sources.
Punching through lot of interference..
We needed to find ways deliver at least 10-20 Mbps+ bandwidth to every smartphone attending the event and we needed it fast. We also had to make sure that main event areas can simultaneously handle up to 200 devices at any given moment.
Given the short time we have to prepare, we've once again turned to Ruckus Wireless for help. We are deploying two ZoneFlex AP7982, four AP7962 and two AP7363 antennas throughout areas where the event activities will be held. These antennas are dual-band, so they'll automatically detect and support both 802.11b/g and 802.11n clients simultaneously.
But perhaps the most important aspect of Ruckus hardware is not the speed, but their ability to counter signal interference through use of adaptive beam steering. Unlike traditional WiFi access points, Ruckus devices use an array of directional antennas that dynamically generate "beams" on a per-station, per-packet basis. Known as BeamFlex, we've found that the technology is able to virtually triple the coverage area of another vendor's access point.
Building a Carrier-Class WiFi in 2 Days.
We've quickly come up with a new network design which will provide transport for the event's wireless network. The network consists of a Mobile Transport Core (MTC) with Subscriber Management (SM) capability. Ruckus' ZoneDirector controller and associated accounting servers are located inside the SM network layer. The MTC layer is designed to support LTE/3G smart cells in the future (though not provided for the event).
The challenge however came from the short amount of time we have to get all the connections hooked up and configured. Further complicating the situation is that Subscriber Management systems and accounting servers are all located inside the colocation data center floor, far away from the areas where event activities are being held.
To solve this time-constraint challenge, we've turned to our new Switched Digital Interconnect (SDI) platform. Being a scalable MPLS based Layer-2 Ethernet network, SDI allows us to quickly dispatch connections between the wireless MTC network and the colocation data center floor. In just 10 minutes, all of the necessary transport links have been built on the SDI cloud, connecting all of our wireless equipment, antennas and subscriber management system together into a holistic cloud.
FreeBSD operating system is used to provide Admission Control for wireless clients. Transport VLANs are dynamically assigned and pushed through the SDI cloud for each individual wifi network, with full support for roaming.
One /24 and /26 IPv4 space were quickly assigned to expand the DHCP scope to 314 addresses for event wireless coverage-- every guest device will be assigned with its own globally unique, public IP address during the event. IPv6 may also be enabled as final details are being wrapped up in advance for coming Thursday.
A Juniper Networks EX3200 switch is providing VLAN transport and terminations necessary for the wireless network, while an upstream Juniper MX80 router is providing flexible-ethernet service interface to handle all of SDI MPLS interfaces carrying wireless & admission control traffic across the building. The MX80 has once again proved quite versatile in its ability to deliver various network services at the edge, while taking up only 2U rack space!
Let us see how it all works out!
We built a heavily over-engineered carrier-grade wireless network, that was designed not just for WiFi, but also for running LTE/3G smartcells. It may be quite an overkill, but this is what happens when you select a wholesale IP provider that has too much time on their hands :)
Many special thanks goes out to Markley Group and their Meet Me Room personnel for invaluable assistance and professionalism while working under short deadlines. This has truly been a great team effort!
