Bumblebee Edge Switch Solution

The Background

As Internet connectivity is mission-critical for most businesses, more and more offices deploy dual Internet circuits from different Internet service providers (ISPs) for higher connectivity resilience.

To support dual ISPs and achieve full redundancy at the edge, they also need to deploy two sets of firewalls or SD-WAN routers. Since each ISP handoff is a single physical port, a pair of edge switches is required to connect the two firewalls.

The Challenges

These edge switches cannot be commodity devices, as they are mission-critical and require remote manageability.

• If the ISP handoff is a single /29 subnet, the edge switch must be a Layer 2 switch but still needs a public IP to reach the Internet for management. The Bumblebee CPE is the only product on the market that supports this deployment.

• If the ISP handoff consists of two public subnets, the edge switch functions as a Layer 3 router.

• To deploy consistently across all branch office sites, you need a device that handles both scenarios and allows you to add the second circuit without re-IPing the firewall addresses.

Bumblebee Edge Switch Solution

The Bumblebee edge switch solution is a deployment use case in which Bumblebee CPEs are deployed as edge switches. A fully redundant office edge deployment is shown below.

Bumblebee CPE as edge switches in a fully redundant deployment

In the diagram above, the office site has two independent ISP Internet circuits, each directly connected to a Bumblebee CPE. The second CPE also has an optional 5G cellular or Starlink failover function that serves as a backup in case ISP 2 fails.

In this setup, ISP 2 acts as the backup link to ISP 1, and cellular serves as the backup link to ISP 2. Each Bumblebee CPE is connected to two firewall devices—a primary and a backup. This is a fully redundant deployment commonly used in branch offices and general office sites.

How it works

Each Bumblebee CPE monitors its connected ISP circuit. When ISP 1 goes down, the connected CPE 1 shuts down its LAN-side Ethernet interfaces connecting to the firewall devices. This causes Firewall 1 and Firewall 2 to route traffic to CPE 2. If ISP 2 fails, CPE 2 routes traffic to cellular.

When ISP 1 recovers, CPE 1 brings up its Ethernet interfaces connecting to Firewall 1 and Firewall 2. This allows packet forwarding to resume to ISP 1.

The Bumblebee CPE can be deployed in Pass Through mode or Router mode, depending the ISP hand off design, whether it is a single /29 subnet handoff or a dual subnets handoff.

The Bumblebee CPE Edge Switch Benefits

1. Bumblebee Allows you to verify what ISPs say

   The Bumblebee solution gives you the ground truth on ISP connectivity.

   • It tells you instantly when an outage occurs and whether it is a last-mile or middle-mile issue.

   • It monitors and detects brown circuits and degradation before your customers complain.

   • It provides instant speed-test capability to confirm that the link speed matches what you purchased and isolates whether the bottleneck is on the WAN or LAN.

   • Easy packet capture significantly reduces troubleshooting time.

2. Versatile to all deployment scenarios

   Bumblebee CPEs can be deployed in Pass Through mode or Router mode to accommodate existing ISP handoff scenarios, so you do not have to re-IP your network addresses.

3. 5G Cellular or Starlink Failover

   The Bumblebee CPE has an integrated cellular modem that provides a third failover option, eliminating the need to purchase and manage a separate cellular router.

4. Out-of-Band (OOB) Console Access

   The Bumblebee solution includes built-in out-of-band (OOB) console access that allows serial console or network-based access to firewalls and routers through the Bumblebee portal. You do not need to purchase and manage a separate remote console server.