TierPoint

Customer Overview:

TierPoint is a leading US provider of cloud, colocation and managed services designed to help organizations improve business performance and manage risk. With its corporate headquarters in St. Louis, Mo., TierPoint operates 13 highly-redundant, Tier III plus data centers in the states of Washington, Texas, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Business Challenges:

TierPoint’s Dallas data center is the facility that carries the highest amount of the company’s traffic volume, connecting to 13 leading Internet transit providers. The NetOps team used route optimization technology since 2007, when they deployed the Internap FCP™ solution. With such technology, TierPoint was able to proactively route around Internet congestion and brownouts by automating BGP route optimization in real-time.

In 2014 the company’s NOC faced a critical hardware failure on the Internap FCP™ route optimizer, which resulted in the choice to re-purchase the solution entirely or to search for an alternative.

Solution:

Since the Intelligent Routing Platform is provided as a software, TierPoint considered Noction’s solution to better fit the company’s needs. “We had an Internap FCP previously and we are familiar with Intelligent Routing as a concept, but Noction IRP is much more intuitive and transparent, it’s easier to work with and it seems more flexible that what we were getting from FCP.” Said Dave Ellis, Director of Technical Operations at TierPoint. “Noction provides a software solution, therefore we avoided the burden of hardware deployment. Our IRP instance is currently running in a virtual environment, which is considerably easier to deploy and operate; and what’s most important – our customers are getting a better experience with IRP than they ever had before”

TierPoint’s network team extensively uses IRP’s troubleshooting tools to diagnose and fix issues in the middle-mile segment of the Internet. “If any of our customers are facing performance issues, we can test the Internet current path using IRP’s troubleshooting tools and easily locate the problem. The VIP Prefixes feature allows us to boost data delivery performance to specific destinations of high priority. For instance, we have several customers that run site-to-site VPN to our facility in Spokane. They were witnessing very low traffic performance on this specific path. As soon as we configured this destination as a VIP Prefix , IRP was able to detect a better path and site-to-site performance improved considerably. Normally to troubleshoot such a problem would be much more resource- and time-consuming, putting at risk our commitment to meet customer expectations.” stated Dave.

Results:

By running for almost half a year in TierPoint’s network, IRP optimized over 3,000 TB of traffic by announcing over 4.5 million route improvements to the company’s edge routers. The platform reduced latency by an average of 26% and dropped packet loss by an average of 93% for the analyzed prefixes.

With IRP’s Commit Control, TierPoint manages to spread its traffic load across all links to lower the 95th percentile billing rates and increase the headroom in its overall network. “IRP provides us the ability to manage our traffic usage based on our ISP billing arrangements. We are able to keep our commits tight, meaning that we avoid overages that could eventually get passed onto the customer.” further mentioned Dave.

“IRP freed our engineers. When normally they would be reactively troubleshooting problems, we can fully rely on IRP to diagnose and quickly find solutions to any routing issues. Beside making our engineers more efficient, the platform improves our customers’ experience, who are now receiving a resolution faster or even before they are affected by the issue.”