With so much riding on the performance of the network, today's wide area networking solutions must provide increased reach, greater application awareness, and higher capacity to improve response times - while lowering implementation and operating costs. Internode Business Connect (IBC) can deliver these benefits to your organisation.

Internode Business Connect

IP communications promises an intelligent, evolved future with increased productivity, mobility and collaboration alongside greater staff and customer satisfaction.

Today's IP networks also require careful traffic engineering to ensure peak performance - in terms of high data delivery ratios, low latency or 'round trip transit delay', and minimal latency variation or 'jitter'. When combined, these parameters provide the necessary Quality of Service to meet the demanding requirements of internal business networks.

Figure 1: Example Internode Business Connect network diagram.

IBC - Better By Design

Unlike an Internet Virtual Private Network (VPN), IBC is constructed over Internode's private network backbone, so it isn't transported over the Internet. Our Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) design delivers a number of benefits for your organisation:

• The flow of traffic is improved, as is the end-user experience for real-time traffic.
• IBC is an 'any to any' network, with each site having a connection into the IBC MPLS virtual network dedicated to that customer, and implemented on our international IP network backbone.
• The IBC service supports priority queuing, so if one site is having a 'real-time' Citrix session on the head office server, a 'non-real-time' email from another site won't hinder the session.
• Under the IBC scenario, the corporate Internet connection is focused to one point, improving control and incurring less management overhead.
• All IBC traffic is routed with priority on our dedicated IP network delivering superior, reliable and consistent performance.

IBC has multiple levels of security, including physical POP security, strict authentication requirements and MPLS and L2TP traffic separation. This security is fully managed by Internode's support teams.

Key Benefits

• Solutions tailored to your organisation - IBC solutions are tailored to meet the exact requirements of individual corporate customers.
• Quality of Service (QoS) prioritisation - For optimising the performance of applications with differing network requirements (for example, voice and video over IP).
• A variety of high-speed access technologies - Ranging from cost-effective Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) services including Easy Broadband ADSL2+, through to high performance SHDSL and Ethernet services delivering both scalability and performance.
• Online performance monitoring - NodeMonitor is included with every IBC network, providing you with 'at a glance' status reports on your business network.
• Access to our world-class Internode Data Centres - Providing high speed connectivity to co-located equipment, managed servers, data storage systems or firewalled Internet.
• Optional ad-hoc 'secure roaming' access - Stay connected to mobile staff, management and teleworkers through Internet VPNs, or our well-proven Virtual Private Dial Network service.
• Equipment services - including design, supply, configuration and management of class-leading Cisco networking equipment.

Quality of Service

IBC offers the capacity for customer specific Quality of Service configuration, so that you can prioritise business-critical traffic to better manage throughput and latency. During the design process our engineers will consult with you to understand your specific information technology environment, in order to optimise your IBC solution.

The High Availability Solution

Internode provides a tailored range of service levels for IBC, reflecting the wide range of business requirements. For example, the core MPLS network is backed by our service level agreement of 99.9% availability. We believe high availability is a natural result of careful design and implementation, and provide options for redundant network access services at business-critical sites.

In addition, IBC customers have 24x7 access to the Internode Corporate Help Desk. This is a dedicated and highly skilled technical team, responsible for the implementation and ongoing support of your network solution.

Performance and Management

Being routed with priority on Internode's own MPLS IP network ensures reliable performance. A single connection point for each site into the IBC network reduces the need for time-consuming and complex network management - leave that to us.

Our NodeMonitor Basic system is provided with every IBC network at no additional charge - giving you a convenient, real-time view of your network status, 24x7. This service is automatically upgraded to Premium whenever you select Internode for management of your on-site routers, providing more detailed traffic analysis capabilities. Alternatively you can manage your own site routers, and purchase NodeMonitor Premium for your key business sites as required.

Further Information

Further online information about Internode Business Connect is available:

• in the IBC Product Brief (PDF), a two page PDF summary of the main features of IBC; and
• in the IBC Case Study (PDF), a two page PDF description of the benefits of IBC in a typical multi-site business environment.