Frans-Jan van Steenbeek

Recognizing Spil's global reach and the ever-increasing drive towards dynamic, personalized content, we had a clear incentive to build a second physical hosting suite on the far side of the Atlantic.

Since Spil was historically built on one strong central location, this project was all about rethinking our infrastructure and getting things right from the start: how do we scale our network to provide for a multi-location setup, what changes in our software are necessary, how do we manage… Show more

Recognizing Spil's global reach and the ever-increasing drive towards dynamic, personalized content, we had a clear incentive to build a second physical hosting suite on the far side of the Atlantic.

Since Spil was historically built on one strong central location, this project was all about rethinking our infrastructure and getting things right from the start: how do we scale our network to provide for a multi-location setup, what changes in our software are necessary, how do we manage a data-centre suite that isn't a 30 minute drive away?

After a lot of testing, we settled on Toronto ON, Canada as the perfect spot for out second hosting PoP. After a lot more testing, building and trying out, we finally started to roll out a platform in Toronto that should be easily portable to any PoP we would want to set up. Show less

We needed to replace our ageing routers/firewalls with a solution that could scale towards multiple locations, as well as being able to handle high amounts of traffic with full availability. After a failed marriage to HP F1000 firewalls, we decided to go with Vyatta on commodity hardware with 10Gb NICs.

Given the age of the old systems, a lot of legacy use-cases needed to be figured out and be discontinued or ported to the new platform. What we ended up with is a clustered Vyatta setup… Show more

We needed to replace our ageing routers/firewalls with a solution that could scale towards multiple locations, as well as being able to handle high amounts of traffic with full availability. After a failed marriage to HP F1000 firewalls, we decided to go with Vyatta on commodity hardware with 10Gb NICs.

Given the age of the old systems, a lot of legacy use-cases needed to be figured out and be discontinued or ported to the new platform. What we ended up with is a clustered Vyatta setup, providing us full redundancy and control while giving us way more performance than we had by using redundant 10Gb links (rather than 1Gb) and IPsec+GRE (rather than OpenVPN). This setup is now implemented in all our locations and is being rolled out in new locations as well. Show less

Architected and executed a complete rework of our network infrastructure from a STP-supported ring to a hierarchical, fully redundant star topology that supports our growth. This involved selecting hardware as well as planning a migration that avoided all downtime.

Planned and executed the migration of our co-located hardware from individual rented cabinets to a private suite in the same building. This involved planning the physical contents of our new suite as well as migrating all hardware while avoiding downtime of our operations.