CARI.net’s Enterprise Network was designed from the ground up to support our customers’ ever growing need for speed! While lightning fast page loads and bandwidth on demand are some of our primary objectives, overall redundancy is the next big focus of the CARI.net Network Managers.

Transit to the major carriers is routed using Border Gateway Protocol (BGP-4 ), a protocol that provides automated detection and redirection in the case of a transit carrier failure. Edge routers – those that connect directly to the transit carriers – are linked by multi-Gigabit, multi-paths that are wholly owned and operated by the CARI.net network engineering group. This provides facility-level redundancy for Internet transit, backed by both AC and DC power plants.

Distribution redundancy is achieved by multi-facility non-active fiberoptic links to the transit routing infrastructure. No single fiber, transit carrier, or power failure can cause an interruption of service to the distribution routers. The distribution routers are the gateway routers for client connections; Hot Standby Routing Protocol (HSRP) provides redundancy for the gateway IP address to remove the distribution routers as single points of failure. Dedicated Virtual LAN’s are assigned to clients to enhance network security and to allow customized Access Control Lists (ACL’s).

Network access consists of dual switch connections, 100Mbps or 1Gbps. The switch connections are provided from separate access switches that are connected to the distribution network by redundant trunk ports. Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) is used to ensure automatic failover in the case of a switch or uplink failure.