Optimizing Eurasian network resilience

RETN logo

How RETN leveraged BENOCS Analytics to overcome submarine cable outages

About RETN

RETN, a leading provider of telecommunications and data transmission services, is a global internet backbone, operating a Eurasian network that seamlessly connects Europe and Asia through its extensive fiber-optic infrastructure. Founded in 2003, the company delivers services such as IP transit, Ethernet, and cloud connectivity to enterprises and carriers. With a presence in over 40 countries, RETN operates one of the largest independent networks, ensuring high-performance connectivity across key international markets.

RETN logo

Challenges

Managing a network across Eurasia comes with its own challenges, especially when geopolitical issues and unexpected disruptions occur. In 2024, submarine cable outages became a major problem for connectivity providers. Several key cables in the Red Sea, including Seacom/TGN, AAE-1, and EIG, were damaged on February 24 and remained offline until August 7, 2024. This created significant pressure for operators relying on these routes. To make matters worse, the SMW-5 cable had a fault on April 19, adding to the difficulties. RETN has capacity in both AAE-1 and SMW-5 cable systems and now had to quickly reroute large amounts of traffic going via these two terrestrial links to keep their network running smoothly and serve their customers.

A screenshot of a colorful sankey diagram and a time series diagram at the bottom showing a sudden drop in traffic levels
Screenshot: Traffic dropped abruptly on April 20 when the submarine cables were cut.

Solution

BENOCS Analytics has been deployed and operational in RETN’s network since 2022. Our solution offers end to end visualization of all traffic traversing through the network. Specifically, the ability to see ingress and egress points of all the traffic in our 6 dimensional Sankey diagram proved crucial to RETN’s current challenge.

25%
traffic shifted swiftly
100%
service upheld

Implementation

Back when we released the Tagging and Grouping module, which has the ability to group different dimensions, RETN grouped all their ingress & egress routers into different regions such as Western Europe, Central & Southern Europe and Asia Pacific. The ability to see both the ingress and egress routers in one view and, in addition, grouping them based on different regions helped RETN identify all the traffic traversing through the terrestrial links. With this visibility, the operations team could further reroute some of the traffic from the terrestrial links to their local backbone in Asia.

Results and Benefits

By April 23, 2024, RETN were able to remove a further 25% of the traffic from their expensive and in-demand terrestrial links running from Europe to Asia and shift it locally to Asia. This allowed them to keep serving their customers in Asia without any disruptions. As a consequence, this freed up more bandwidth to serve other customers. Resulting from this experience, RETN was also able to further deepen their expertise in the area of network vulnerability and resilience.

A screenshot showing a colorful sankey diagram and a time series at the bottom with a cyclic traffic flow pattern
Screenshot: The BENOCS Flow Analytics 6-dimensional view of traffic flowing through the RETN network
“With the help of BENOCS Analytics we managed to remove about 25% of the traffic from terrestrial links and shift it locally to Asia. This helped us a lot with traffic localization and keeping existing (and new) customers served in Asia. Might not look a lot, but back then it was quite an achievement! Moreover, we had a clear view of what else we could optimize to save some bandwidth for other customers. Happily, it wasn’t required in the end, but it was good to be assured we had enough room.”
Andrey Gazizov
Chief Operating Officer
RETN

Recent Improvements

RETN wanted to have visibility at IP subnet level, so recently implemented the Raw Network Analyzer (RNA) module in their BENOCS Analytics deployment. For RETN, this means more than 30 different data fields, sourced from BENOCS’ complex data and intelligence model, providing comprehensive visibility of their entire IP traffic flow.

Conclusion

RETN’s ability to overcome significant challenges in network management during the 2024 submarine cable outages highlights its commitment to ensuring uninterrupted service to its customers. By leveraging BENOCS Analytics, RETN achieved exceptional operational efficiency and traffic optimization. The six-dimensional visualization and regional tagging capabilities enabled RETN to swiftly identify and reroute traffic, reducing reliance on costly terrestrial links and improving network resilience.

The results – such as a 25% reduction in traffic on critical links and seamless service continuity – underscore the value of BENOCS Analytics in addressing complex network challenges. RETN’s proactive approach, coupled with its partnership with BENOCS, demonstrates its focus on delivering high-performance connectivity, even during unforeseen disruptions.

How SURF reduced the indirect traffic of a CDN from 58% to 20%

About SURF

SURF is the national research and education network (NREN) of The Netherlands. As a collaborative organization, SURF works with members of Dutch education and research institutions to ensure and increase the quality, efficiency and security of their nationwide networks.

Challenges

SURF had held a direct interconnect with a well-renowned CDN since 2019. At the end of 2023 the IP Transit providers of SURF changed, and since then, SURF had been receiving 48% of the CDN traffic indirectly through one of the new transit providers. Without BENOCS Analytics, they didn’t have the visibility of the direct vs. indirect traffic, so this was an undiscovered challenge – or rather, a missed chance.

Before: SURF traffic from March to May 2024

Solution

BENOCS Analytics offers network operators full visualization off all traffic traversing the network, Having seen the capabilities it offers, the team at SURF decided to invest in the tool to functionally and financially optimize their network. Specifically the ability to see direct and indirect traffic was an integral part of the decision for the peering team: a Sankey diagram that displays the traffic flow, as well as a time series and statistical table that reveal traffic levels over time, would uncover various opportunities to optimize their peering strategy.

90%
increase in direct traffic
100%
traffic visibility

Implementation

After Flow Analytics was deployed, BENOCS’ data quality assurance team noticed the large amount of indirect traffic from a major CDN and informed Joachim, network engineer at SURF. Joachim was already in contact with the BGP Engineer of the CDN in question, and suggested corrections to the BGP announcements to steer traffic towards the direct interconnection and not via a transit provider.

Results and Benefits

After this change was implemented by the CDN end of May 2024, the direct traffic jumped from 42% to 80%, an absolute increase of 90%. Consequently, the indirect traffic fell, from 58% to 20%, bringing the traffic flow to the IP upstream provider below the Committed Data Rate (CDR). This shift in traffic to the direct interconnection with the CDN network saved substantial monthly costs for SURF.

After: SURF traffic from Jun 2024 to Jul 2024
“BENOCS Analytics is indispensable for SURF to be able to analyze and guard peering traffic that runs over many separate interconnections (both direct and via internet exchanges). This case study is a great example in which BENOCS Analytics helped us to analyze the suboptimal flow of traffic between a CDN network and SURF, in this case resulting in saved costs for IP transit. In general, the Border Planner module provides a regular usage health check on peering interconnections, as well as during events (e.g. during DDoS, traffic shifts), when it is a great solution for analyzing traffic flows; especially for traffic that originates from a network with which there is no direct peering.”
Niels den Otter
Teamlead Network Experts
SURF

Future Plans

In the coming months, SURF will cooperate with BENOCS to implement BGP-LS functionality within the product. For SURF this provides a secure and scalable way to update the network topology within BENOCS automatically, and be able to visualize backbone traffic.

Furthermore, SURF will work with BENOCS to look at traffic in multiple VRFs and analyze traffic flows in separate services that run on the network.

Conclusion

Implementing BENOCS Analytics was a lightbulb moment for SURF: upon seeing the amount of indirect traffic entering their network, the Dutch NREN was able to adjust their peering accordingly. This resulted in substantial financial savings and optimized traffic flow. BENOCS Analytics is now an essential tool in SURF’s peering management and strategy.