Network Assignment: Select a WAN solution for business.

Suppose you work for a medium-sized corporation with three offices, one in California, one in Florida, and one in New Jersey. For several years, the company has been using VPNs to connect the offices. As the company has grown, so has the need to share data among the offices, and you have been assigned the task of recommending a more robust WAN solution for transmitting data among offices.

The first task is to identify the applications that will use the WANs:

· Email, voice, and video transmissions happen during office hours. The company makes heavy use of videoconferencing among the offices.

· A centralized database resides in the data center at the New Jersey headquarters, interactivity with the database originates from all the offices.

· For catastrophic disaster recovery, the company wants to back up the New Jersey database to the Florida data center.

· Several employees telecommute, and customer service reps access company resources from various off-site locations.

The carrier your company has selected offers private lines, frame relay, ATM, Metro Ethernet, IP VPNs, and L2 MPLS WAN solutions. Answer the following questions about these solutions:

1.Which WAN solution is best suited for customer service reps working at a customer site?

2.Which WAN solution does not allow QoS specification so that voice and video take precedence over email messaging when competing for bandwidth?

3- Which WAN solution can tunnel frame relay, ATM, and Ethernet traffic, allowing the company to have consistent backbone service with a variety of WAN solutions?

4- Which WAN solution offers continuous and consistent bandwidth at all times of day and nights?

5- Which WAN solution is similar to and has largely replaced frame relay?

6- If you recommend private lines, how many private lines must be installed?

7- Other than the current VPN solution, which WAN solution is likely to required the least amount of hardware changes?

8- List five question that you need to answer before you can recommend a new WAN solution?