What is MS Azure?
What is Oracle Cloud?
What is ExpressRoute?
What Belnet can do for me?
What is the difference between an Express route and a classic VPN connection through Internet?
What about the advantages?
Need more technical information about ExpressRoute (guidance and manual)?
What is MS Azure?
More and more institutions are looking to cloud providers to host their infrastructures and services. Instead of investing in hardware onsite, in the form of virtual platforms or servers, institutions are looking to Microsoft or Amazon for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). It is in the context of Microsoft that we need to situate Belnet Cloud Connect.
Microsoft has a platform named Azure which provides software as a Service (Office365), platform as a service (Active Directory) and IaaS (Windows Servers, Linux Servers). These services are hosted in Microsoft data centres at different locations in Europe.
What is Oracle Cloud?
Please refer to the Oracle website.
What is ExpressRoute?
- A private connection to the Microsoft or Oracle cloud services.
- A redundant layer 2 VPN tunnel to Microsoft or Oracle.
- A routing protocol (BGP) to guarantee connectivity.
What Belnet can do for me?
We will set up a Layer2 VPN from your connection at Belnet (access port or VLAN on one of Belnets acces router or CPE) to the edge where Belnet meets GÉANT. ExpressRoute is always set up in a redundant way. This means that we need to set up two Layer 2 VPNs which terminate on the primary and secondary connection with GÉANT. You will have to set up a Layer 3 architecture so traffic can be exchanged between his infrastructure in Azure and the on premises network.
We provide guidance to set this up, because it implies knowledge of certain protocols such as BGP and QinQ, which are not always standard technologies known to the customer. We will also serve as SPOC when problems arise with ExpressRoute.
What is the difference between an Express route and a classic VPN connection through Internet?
- ExpressRoute:
- Available only from the endpoint of the tunnel that we will create.
- Private network with dedicated bandwidth.
- Up to 10 Gbps bandwidth.
- Dedicated cloud services for datacenters.
- Classic VPN:
- Available from anywhere on the Internet.
- Public network, subject to congestion and bottleneck.
- Up to 100 Mbps bandwidth.
- Classical cloud services for end users.
What about the advantages?
- Dedicated Layer 2 connection.
- Scalable bandwidth (in theory up to 10 Gbps).
- Private IP addressing with BGP for better resilience.
- Independent from IP connectivity (commercial Internet connection).
Need more technical information about ExpressRoute (guidance and manual)?
You can find more relevant information about Belnet Cloud Connect MS Azure on Clouds GÉANT website.
ExpressRoute circuit and workload guidance check list
GÉANT ExpressRoute manual
More technical information about Belnet Private Cloud Connect - MS Azure? Read our manual