Read this document to learn about the connection planning before building a network architecture for Direct Connect.

Background

A connection planning improves the stability and high availability of the network architecture for Direct Connect, and minimizes the impact from failures including device, port/fiber optic component, connection and data center at the access point. See the table below for the description and cause of failures.

Planning Ideas

Capacity panning

The capacity planning is designed to meet business bandwidth requirements at a reasonable cost and guarantee the business operation in the event of a connection failure. To achieve this, you can:

• Apply for connections twice your actual needs.
• Maintain the connection utilization (current peak bandwidth/connection bandwidth * 100%) 50% or less.

Assume your business needs 3 Mpbs of bandwidth, you can apply for two connections with 5 Mpbs of bandwidth to each Tencent Cloud access point, each connection will be used about 30%. If one connection faults, the business traffic will quickly switch to the standby connection to ensure the business continuity. After the switchover, the standby connection will be used about 60%. In this way, only the connection load temporarily increases, and the business data is unaffected.

Expansion planning

The expansion planning is designed to meet the surging business demand at a reasonable cost. Depending on the expansion cycle, you need to plan differently as follows:

• If you need an urgent expansion, you can apply for a connection based on the estimated business bandwidth, so that you can adjust the bandwidth limit to maintain your business when the traffic surges.
• If you don’t need an expansion in the near future, you can apply for a new connection based on your actual expansion needs. The expansion will take 2-3 months.

  Note：

  A single expansion exceeding 100 Gbps of bandwidth requires a longer period. Please develop an expansion plan in advance for high-bandwidth businesses.

Disaster recovery planning

The disaster recovery is designed to improve the high availability of a network architecture and minimize the failure (including port/fiber optic component, network device, and data center at the access point) impact on business operations.
To avoid single points of failures, we recommend that you develop a disaster recovery plan for access points, physical lines, and hardware devices.

• Access point: the local IDC uses connections of different physical lines to two intra-region Tencent Cloud access points.
• Physical line: different physical lines provided by carriers are used to connect to a Tencent Cloud access point.
• Hardware devices: both network devices and fiber optic components have redundant backups.

Assume you connect your local IDC to two intra-region Tencent Cloud access points according to [capacity planning (#capacity) requirements, as shown in the figure below. If the connection to access point A is disconnected due to port/fiber optic component, network devices or data center failures, the business traffic will quickly switch to the connection to access point B, without losing business data or interrupting businesses.

Sample Architectures

Tencent Cloud provides the following four network architectures for Direct Connect to facilitate your network planning.

Four Connections to Two Access Points (Recommended)

Overview

• Description: this architecture connects your IDC to two intra-region Tencent Cloud access points using primary and secondary connections respectively, and then accesses Tencent Cloud VPCs.
• Use cases: suitable for use cases that require excellent business availability and elasticity, including the key production and real-time data transaction.
• Cost: high.
  

Disaster recovery

The following table describes the impact of this network architecture on business under various failures when the planning ideas are met.

Two Connections to Two Access Points (Recommended)

Overview

• Description: this architecture connects your IDC to two intra-region Tencent Cloud access points using one connection respectively, and then accesses Tencent Cloud VPCs.
• Use cases: suitable for key business that requires high availability and elasticity.
• Cost: medium.
  

Disaster recovery

The following table describes the impact of this network architecture on businesses under various failures.

Two Connections to One Access Point

Overview

• Description: this architecture connects your IDC to one Tencent Cloud access point using two connections, and then accesses Tencent Cloud VPCs.
• Use cases: suitable for non-critical business, such as cloud development and testing environments.
• Cost: medium.
  

Disaster recovery

The following table describes the impact of this network architecture on businesses under various failures.

• If each connection is used 50% or less, the connection loads burst and the business continues.
• If each connection is used greater than 50%, the connection will be full-loaded, some data will be lost, and the business continues.

A Connection to One Access Point

Overview

• Description: this architecture connects your IDC to one Tencent Cloud access point using a connection, and then accesses Tencent Cloud VPCs.
• Use cases: suitable for non-critical business that does not require high elasticity and availability.
• Cost: medium.
  

Disaster recovery

The following table describes the impact of this network architecture on businesses under various failures.