Challenges deploying PTPv2 in a global financial company

This paper describes the challenges encountered when deploying PTPv2 on the worldwide network of a financial company, by upgrading nearly all servers in all data-centers over a period of two years, to achieve global microsecond level accuracy between any pair. Acknowledging that PTP was initially designed as a LAN protocol and that all current time-keeping industry efforts are focused on PTP, the issues can be broadly divided into a) issues on the PTPv2 standard itself, b) issues that have to be addressed when PTP is expanded to work over WANs, and c) issues that caused the biggest operational impact on the (tested) implementations. In all, this paper contributes concrete examples where PTP's byzantine robustness, scalability and efficiency characteristics range between absent to poor - and attempts to raise awareness on the steps needed to build PTP solutions with the characteristics that global users want.