Customer Success Story
Italian service provider Lepida shrinks digital divide
In Northern Italy’s Emilia-Romagna, Lepida is the principal public operator of the region’s information and communications technology (ICT) strategies and policies. Lepida’s network must connect every public administration agency in the territory (hospital, municipality, university, school, etc.) and provide seamless delivery of ICT services to these public entities.
The last decade brought incredible digital growth to the regional operator. In response to greater customer demand, Lepida increased its network core to 100 GbE and expanded its data center. Furthermore, Lepida wanted to create a 2 layer backbone to extend mpls on 40 secondary PoP. To make the transition smoothly, Lepida turned to Juniper routing, switching, and security.
437
Public administration agencies and public entities served by Lepida
3000+
Juniper devices support 4 data centers and expansive regional networks
10X
Increase in network capacity to meet needs of an underserved community
4
Data centers support overall operations
Difficult geography limits the region’s Internet connectivity
Emilia-Romagna covers an area of 22,446 square kilometers, and more than half is hilly or mountainous.
With such challenging terrain, service providers were rarely able to offer high-quality digital services in the more remote regions. The unfortunate result was that not all citizens, schools, or businesses had the same great digital experiences that others enjoyed in Bologna, the region’s capital.
Lepida wanted to break that pattern and provide excellent digital experiences everywhere.
In Lepida’s vision, everyone—no matter where they are located—can easily stream video, share large files, and browse the Internet. Improving digital experiences is especially important for schools and businesses. High-speed communications services also would spur growth, attracting students and businesses to the area.
Lepida realizes easy, seamless transition to 100-GbE network core and MPLS extensions to edge
Lepida has steadily enhanced its network by investing in the latest secure, high-performance networking solutions from Juniper.
Lepida’s network spans 64,000 km of fiber, 2700 km of wired infrastructure, and more than 3000 points of access. With a 100-Gbps backbone, Lepida can offer from 2-Gbps to multiple of 10Gps guaranteed connectivity at its fiber points, and with an extended mpls backbone, Lepida can offer also more reliable and scalable service to its customers.
The Juniper MX960 Universal Routing Platform forms the core network. In its data centers, Juniper QFX Series Switches provide a flexible network fabric. The Juniper MX204 Universal Routing Platform extends secure bandwidth to local service providers. The metro networks use a combination of Juniper ACX Universal Metro Routers, Juniper EX Series Ethernet Switches, and Juniper SRX Series Services Gateways.
Achieving digital equity for all
Businesses, consumers, and ISPs throughout Emilia-Romagna now experience faster speeds and improved connectivity.
“The time needed to upgrade the network was minimal and the benefits were many,” says Andrea Odorizzi, Head of Network Design at Lepida. “We like the scalability and reliability that is built into the Juniper platforms and appreciate the openness and programmability of the Junos operating system. Our stakeholder and ISP customers will be much happier with the additional capacity and improved connectivity.”
In the next phase, Lepida will connect schools across the region to improve collaboration among the institutions. Having a Juniper network will make it easier for Lepida to add additional services and solutions.
“We like simple and elegant networks design. Building this second layer mpls backbone connecting all secondary POP, makes our network more reliable, scalable and simplifies day-by-day service configurations: Juniper devices and Junos operating system give us these building blocks,” says Stefano Bonino, Head of Network Operations and Delivery.
The Products
With a robust portfolio of SDN-enabled routers, the MX Series provides industry-leading system capacity, density, security, and performance with unparalleled longevity.
QFX network switches deliver industry-leading throughput and scalability, a comprehensive routing stack, the open programmability of Junos OS, and the broadest set of EVPN-VXLAN and IP fabric capabilities. Juniper offers a wide range of switches for data center spine and leaf switches, campus distribution and core, or data center gateway and interconnect.
The EX Series Ethernet Switches are cloud-ready, high-performance access and aggregation/core layer switches designed for enterprise branch, campus, and data center networks. Wired access networks don’t have to be complex—you can reduce risk and cost without compromising performance, quality, and innovation.
High-performance ACX Series Routers serve metro access, aggregation, and data center use cases. They are energy-efficient, CE 3.0 compliant, and support 5G high-precision timing and synchronization.
Protect your network edge, data center, and cloud-based applications with Juniper next-generation physical, virtual, and containerized firewalls, all managed via Juniper Security Director Cloud.
Published March 2022