EAPS Benefits
EAPS (Extreme Automatic Protection Switching) offers the following benefits:
- Fast Recovery time for link or node
failures—When a link failure or switch failure occurs, EAPS provides fast recovery
times. EAPS provides resiliency for voice, video and data services.
- Scalable network segmentation and fault
isolation—EAPS domains can protect groups of multiple VLANs, allowing scalable growth
and broadcast loop protection. EAPS domains provide logical and physical segmentation, which
means the failures in one EAPS ring do not impact network service for other rings and
VLANs.
- Resilient foundation for non-stop IP
routing services—EAPS provides a resilient foundation for upper level routing
protocols such as OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) and BGP (Border Gateway Protocol), minimizing route-flapping and dropped
neighbors within the routed IP network.
- Predictable convergence regardless of
failure location—EAPS provides consistent and predictable recovery behavior regardless
of where link failures occur. The simple blocking architecture and predictable performance
of EAPS allows for enforceable Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This allows easier network
troubleshooting and failure scenario analysis without lengthy testing or debugging on live
production networks.
EAPS protection switching is similar to what can be achieved with the
STP (Spanning Tree Protocol), but EAPS offers the advantage of converging in less than
one second when a link in the ring breaks.
An Ethernet ring built using EAPS can have resilience comparable to that
provided by SONET rings, at a lower cost and with fewer restraints (such as ring size). The
EAPS technology developed by Extreme Networks to increase the availability and robustness of
Ethernet rings is described in RFC 3619: Extreme Networks‘ Ethernet Automatic Protection
Switching (EAPS) Version 1.
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