Over 25 years and three major technology generations, OSHEAN's 600+ miles of owned fiber optic backbone has become a cornerstone of our region's Community Anchor Institution (CAI) critical infrastructure. The first few years utilized a mixture of circuits and centralized routing. Next came the $32M Federal BTOP grant which brought a build of dedicated fiber infrastructure and a sophisticated MPLS backbone. Now, with major expansion of the topology, feeds and speeds and the complete upgrade of the packet layer to Segment Routing and EVPN, the Beacon network has become one of the finest examples of cutting-edge innovation in our industry.
More than 160 member organizations use OSHEAN services, including colleges and universities, healthcare organizations, K-12 schools, libraries, government agencies, and community organizations. The OSHEAN membership enjoys the security, performance and flexibility of a private network infrastructure within a regional collaborative as well as global internetworking through multiple IP gateways.
The Beacon middle-mile core network is a private, 48 strand optical network. Strands can be offered as lit or dark services and configured in either point-to-point, point to multipoint or fully meshed topologies.
Technology Platform and Resilience
The Beacon network is a state-of-the-art optical platform built on Cisco's 15454 Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) systems and Network Convergence System (NCS). The power of this network enables OSHEAN to offer cutting-edge transport and IP services to Members at greater speeds and lower cost than other providers. The Network is designed with a highly resilient multi-layer architecture. The network infrastructure is best described as a Segment Routed (SR), EVPN meshed architecture with multiple and diverse BGP routes, to and from, core nodes. Beacon is engineered with redundant core infrastructure, diverse network paths, and multiple regional peering points to reduce the impact of individual failures. The fault tolerant design, with 50 millisecond (ms) optical path failover, adds a layer of redundancy required to meet the most demanding network Service Level Agreements (SLA's). The Beacon network leverages advancements in DWDM technology to meet the future needs of networking capacity and bandwidth. Today, OSHEAN is able to multiplex 40 DWDM wavelengths (each capable of 400Gbit) on a single pair of fiber. With 24 pairs of fiber strands available, that equates to a bandwidth pipes totaling hundreds of Terabytes.
Beacon “Lit Services” provides members with Ethernet port interface(s) to fit a variety of packet switched networking applications – including bridging of distant local area networks or creating high-speed gateways to the public internet. Internetworking this large amount of data is achieved by the use of WAN Segment Routing and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing. After 25 years, WAN MPLS has retired to the much simpler and scalable SR technique which is more conducive to application specific domains and evolving network perimeters. By design, Beacon is designed to reduce latency across the network, ease provisioning and maintenance and improve user experience particularly with bandwidth intensive applications. In addition, Beacon maintains multiple vendors peering points with commodity Internet suppliers and employs BGP routing at the network's edges. This comprehensive infrastructure allows OSHEAN members to aggregate multiple network services in a consistent way, be it site-to-site, site to partner, commodity internet, or “ON-NET” cloud offerings. This technology also allows virtual private instances to exist and be managed within the framework. We have architected a network fabric that enables members to coexist and share resources even while maintaining separate management domains and partitioned bandwidth.
Internet Services
OSHEAN provides our members access to the commodity Internet, major brand Content Distribution networks and access to the Internet2 national and international research network. Internet Access service is provided via OSHEAN's diversely located aggregation facilities and utilizes redundant core routers and redundant upstream Internet Service Provider (ISP) connections to provide enhanced capacity and reliability.
A few of the key features of OSHEAN's unparalleled Internet Service that sets us apart from other providers:
- Bandwidth to the internet is treated as a pool for the member as an entity and is not charged per site. Therefore, the member can allocate BW to sites as it sees fit and can provide access from multiple sites at no additional charge.
- OSHEAN's Internet Services allow a 50% constant burst over the subscription rate thereby reducing the committed rate requirement and smoothing transitions.
- OSHEAN provides unmetered access to Internet2 advanced layer 2 and 3 services including a fully functional Cloud Exchange. This is exclusive to OSHEAN in Rhode Island.
- The Internet2 Cloud Exchange brings the major cloud hubs in Ashburn, Chicago, Dallas and Santa Clara for direct access to AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and many other major application providers.
- Direct peering and content-delivery relationships can reduce reliance on commodity Internet and improve path efficiency. Actual traffic distribution varies by member and application mix.
- Beacon provides secondary and tertiary ISP peering sessions in different cities for a DR/Secondary Site functionality at full subscription rate at no additional charge.
Network Caches
Direct peering and content-delivery relationships can reduce reliance on commodity Internet and improve path efficiency. Actual traffic distribution varies by member and application mix.
Regional Partner Peering and CDN Routing
OSHEAN is a founding member of the Northeast Regional Education Network (NEREN) which operates a 400Gbps fiber network throughout New England and New York. This collaborative relationship, with regional network partners, greatly increases connectivity options to national resources and provides geographic diversity in the region. NEREN operates fiber rings that connect important Northeast data centers in Hartford, Springfield, Worcester, Cambridge, Providence, New York City and Albany NY. Through NEREN, OSHEAN also connects with the Mass Green High Performance Computing Center for supercomputing resources.
Peering is an important aspect of today's application specific destination routing. It is the objective of the design and underlying technology to optimize the route of individual payloads as required for latency, bandwidth as well as visibility and maintenance. OSHEAN peers directly with a number of important peering partners such as Apple and DE-CIX. Coupled with the Cloud peering's, OSHEAN is able to offer the lowest latency, lowest hop route structure.
Internet2
OSHEAN is the Regional Network Connector for Internet2, the Nationwide 400/800Gbps research and education backbone. Internet2 (Internet2) sites and services are accessible by all on-net OSHEAN members. Built by and for the research and education community, the Internet2 Network offers Terabits of capacity and 100 gigabit Ethernet technology on its entire footprint. Internet2 offers a portfolio of layer 1, 2 and 3 services as well as a significant suite of cloud and application services under the Net+ program. OSHEANs Beacon network has direct and diverse access to Internet2 peering points for tight integration and networking with the Internet2 community.
Security – Denial of Service (DDoS) Protection
Every OSHEAN Internet tier includes integrated DDoS detection and mitigation through OSHEAN's Cloudflare and Kentik architecture.