Records of the Uruguay Electrical Backbone Network Project

Uruguay State Power Corporation is the only state-owned countrywide power supply company.

At the end of 2008, the company planned to upgrade and expand the current network. After the pilot use in Montevideo, the Capital of Uruguay in 2007, it is possible to dispatch the power based on the IP network. The key of the upgrade and expansion is how to isolate the power dispatching data and other ordinary service data, and how to distinguish the relevant functional departments. The company used the Metro-E equipment of other famous Chinese vendor in 2009. Therefore, another key problem is whether new solution is compatible with their equipment. At the end of 2008, the other Chinese vendor and Maipu provided two solutions for the customer. The key technology of the solutions adopts MPLS to isolate the information of various services and different functional departments. In their proposed solution, MPLS is recommended in the entire network. We studied the service features of the customer. The network of Uruguay Power Corporation is a typical enterprise network. Although services should be isolated, the types of services are less than five, and the types of functional departments are less than 10. If the entire network adopts MPLS devices, the investment is equivalent to the investment for a national telecom network. Their quotation is 2-3 times of customer's budget as expected. In this case, Maipu thinks that MPLS should be applied in the backbone nodes, and in the access nodes, Multi-VRF should be adopted to reduce the investment. Therefore, Maipu finally submits the solution of backbone MPLS + Access Multi-VRF. The configuration of the solution is more complex than the full-mesh MPLS solution. Owing to the limited service types of Uruguay Power Corporation, the disadvantage of the complex configuration can be ignored. At the same time, our operation is similar to that of Cisco; therefore, the engineers of the customer can easily configure and manage Maipu devices. In addition, the cost advantage of the solution is accepted by the customer. Naturally, the customer chooses our solution at last.

Currently, from the backbone to the access in the entire network, 80% of the devices are from Maipu. The customer also adjusts the original devices to work in Maipu solution. Excellent compatibility protects customer's original investment. The CTO of the customer highly praised us by saying that "it is you that really understand me!"

Network Topology: MPLS VPN Application

Key points of the solution:

1.         EIPS provide Ring-protection: Ethernet Intelligent Protection Switching  technology can provide 50ms ring-network fail-over protection;

2.         Q-in-Q provide 4K*4K Vlan-id: Q-in-Q technology for separating different customers and different services, providing intensive services management;

3.         L2VPN provide high network performance: The Q-in-Q tunnel can be injected into VPLS instance and be handled as L2 VPN

4.         Other vendor compatible: Q-in-Q and VPLS is a kind of standardized protocol which can be supported by other vendors, and also Maipu EIPS is compatible with Cisco's REP and EAPS protocol

Data Flow on Access Layer

1.         We define VPN as VPN user or Different services, like IPTV or Voip or Internet, when different VPN data reach S34 access switch;

2.         S3400 will add a vlan tag to different VPN , this tag define as public VPN tunnel; normally the public tunnel will arrive S39 in one way, as the red line on picture;

3.         When the uplink break down or one S39-1 break down, EIPS protocol will help data shift to another way to S39-2 and the fail-over time within 50ms;

4.         S39 will handle the public tag and different VPN will inject into different VSI instance, two S39 have some instance information, but just one is active, another is backup at meantime.