SYDNEY, July 15 2016 – eintellego Networks takes ElasticISP from beta to full production launch.
Background
Skeeve Stevens, Chief Architect of eintellego Networks first started talking about the concept of a ‘Cloud ISP’ at industry event Commsday in 2014. His theory was that cloud provider capacity and elasticity and the availability of Elastic Fabrics such as Megaport could be used to build a dynamic Internet Service Provider network was sound – but was missing a few key items such as Layer 2 networking and Vendor certified vitualised products.
In 2015, when vendors Cisco, Cumulus Networks, A10, and Juniper released solid virtual products eintellego Networks searched for a cloud provider. Once they’d found OrionVM – a wholesale cloud provider, who exposed their underlying Layer 2 network to their customers – all the pieces were in place.
ElasticISP provides the Core networking infrastructure functions of an ISP – the layer 2 switching and internal layer 3 routing functionality. ElasticISP then uses products from Cisco, Juniper, A10 and others to deliver the primary network functions of an ISP such as Routing, LAC/LNS, CGN, and Firewalls. The Core is based on Open Networking OS Cumulus Linux and fully redundant 40G switching that is directly connected to multiple Cloud or Virtual infrastructure providers as well as cross-connected into internet tail (xDSL, Fibre, NBN, etc) providers and Elastic Fabrics.
Server infrastructure such as Web, DNS, Mail, Database, Authentication, Backup, and Security – can be deployed on a dozen cloud providers via Megaport, physically cross-connected in a datacentre or via classic co-location hosting.
ElasticISP is fully customisable and customers can add their own hardware for specific functions. Almost anything is easily integrated into the platform. There is almost no limit to the flexibility of ElasticISP.
Strong partnerships have been established with Megaport, OrionVM, APNIC, networking vendors and solution providers for Operational Support Systems (OSS) such as the billing system Smile by Inomial.
Previously, building an ISP – even a small one – took significant expense and ramp-up period. After developing a orchestration and automation platform, eintellego Networks is able to deploy an ISP – depending on complexity – as soon as 24 hours.
With ElasticISP your costs and deployment times are drastically reduced. Not only that, but much of the risk is gone because most of the hardware that was previously deployed is not required – as hardware, but can be deployed as Virtual Machines.
Customers also maintain their direct relationship with all their suppliers without the need of a middle man. This allows them to negotiate their own agreements and terms as they see fit.
“ElasticISP is not a VISP solution where you could only buy services from one supplier.” Skeeve Stevens said. “You can buy anything you want from anyone you want and just connect it into the ElasticISP infrastructure.”
“For example, if you are a VISP with Telstra, the only place you can buy products from is Telstra. You can’t buy an Optus, Vocus, BigAir, tails an and deliver a converged or creative solutions to your customer. With ElasticISP you can buy tails from any wholesaler, and you can blend them together in any way needed – without owning any infrastructure or having to manage it. We handle everything for you.” Says Skeeve Stevens.
Over the last 20 years Skeeve Stevens has been involved in the building of over 300 ISP networks. “It is heart breaking that something you put a lot of time engineering, building and supporting ultimately fails because the owner does not know how to sell or maintain an ISP business. With ElasticISP, we take the worry out about the many issues relating to having your own infrastructure. We let the customer concentrate on selling their services and building their businesses.” Skeeve says.
Initially ElasticISP was designed to be a stopgap to help bootstap small ISPs to get started while minimising the risk and lowering the CAPEX requirements. Soon after deploying ElasticISP it was realised that the Cloud Providers such as OrionVM, technology advancements such as Open Networking and product revolutions such as Elastic Fabrics like Megaport all meant that the ElasticISP solution could scale to very large numbers.
“When you have 40/100Gb networking, massive elastic compute capacity and vendor virtual products like the Cisco CSR1000v which has 10Gb throughput licensing – you can do almost anything you need to. I don’t see why we couldn’t deploy ISPs with hundreds of thousands of users in exactly this method.”
Uptake
Since the beta launch in January over a dozen ISPs have been testing with several fully deploying on the ElasticISP platform. CareTel, a business focused ISP, are one ISP who have been using the platform from the start. Shelva Selvakumar, owner of CareTel says “ElasticISP has enabled us to deliver on our promise to give our customers exactly what they want from a telco, flexibility and reliability. This platform has enabled us to ramp-up the capacity we needed faster than anyone else could deliver in time-frames that we’ve never been able to achieve before.”
Skeeve Stevens, the architect of the ElasticISP solution says, “Our only issue with ElasticISP is that because it is such a radical departure from the old ways of building networks, sometimes people are a bit nervous about trying new things – even the engineers. It is the same reaction that many initially have had to Elastic Fabrics and now to Open Networking. Once they see the game-changing savings that can be had, and the speed to market is almost instant, they pretty quickly change their way of thinking.”.
Currently there are over a dozen ISPs provisioning or planning to in the next couple of months. Several established ISPs are working on plans to migrate their existing business onto a special version the platform called ‘Dedicated ElasticISP’. The dedicated version of ElasticISP is where eintellego Networks, utilising their framework and architecture, builds a dedicated instance of the platform to be exclusively used by a single customer. This option takes longer to deploy, but provides an ISP the ability to rapidly scale up without any additional hardware costs needed.
ElasticISP is presently available in Sydney but has plans to deploy in Melbourne by Q1 2017. A new variation, specifically for enterprise networks will be announced soon.
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