Public addressing inside MPLS

Question

Question on MPLS connectivity to a new Cloud Voice Offering:

My cloud service is deployed in a service provider data center, and I can obtain an MPLS connection from them, as well as a direct internet connection to the backbone.

My service is targeted at enterprises, not residential users. The enterprise can also obtain an MPLS connection from the same service provider, and send packets over that connection to my service.

I want that for QoS purposes, ie to be able to honor Diffserv markings end-to-end - I cannot achieve that over the public internet, and I want to take advantage of bandwidth SLAs.

I could allow each enterprise to connect using IPVPN, but then I would have to accomodate many different overlapping IP address ranges in my datacenter, and I don't want to do that, so I want to use publicly routable addressing over the MPLS connections.

Does that make sense?

A related question would be can the enterprises use MPLS from a different vendor, and then can I set up an NNI between the two MPLS networks?

Answer 1

You mean except that it wont bring you anything short term?

You would have to run MPLS over.... ;) PPTP or another tunnel technology.

You can do the same without MPLS and MPLS will not really give you anything at this level, as the internet / underlying infrastructure simply does not have MPLS (exposed) to users. The internet is IP based.

Answer 2

Your question about creating NNIs is easy to answer so I'll address that first. MPLS/VPN providers can create NNIs between MPLS networks. Any type of gateway function in your data center to link multiple providers' MPLS networks probably will not give you what you want and would not scale.

I don't have a good understanding of your connectivity requirements for your service in the cloud. For situation such as yours, I usually recommend to my clients to take a step back from the technology and consider what they want to accomplish. Once all business requirements are established, fleshing out the technology underpinnings of your cloud-based service becomes much easier.