case study 187
Mr. Thompson is the CIO of Consulting Expert. Consulting Expert is a professional services company that provides programmers to enterprise clients. The company has a headquarters in New York and a regional training centers in Houston, Maryland and Denver. More than 40 small sales offices are sparsely dispersed throughout the United States and Europe. Field sales representatives, management, and Consultants use the network to access back office application, e mail, time and expense system, and other internal websites.
The Regional offices are connected in a hierarchical mesh using Frame Relay as a WAN technology. They are using EIGRP as a routing protocol. Mr. Thompson mentions that they are looking for ways to reduce local loop and Frame Relay permanent virtual circuit [PVC] WAN Costs. He wants a network design that uses a less cost WAN technology to the remote sales offices. Table 1 1 lists the remote Site requirements.
Table 1 1
Regional Office |
Bandwidth Requirements |
Denver |
1.2 Mbps |
Houston |
1.2 Mbps |
Maryland |
800 Kbps |
Use the table below to calculate cost of each technology and recommend the best cost effective WAN technology.The Denver and Houston sites would have large bandwidth speeds to accommodate the remote site bandwidth. The solution would also need to accommodate home office and Internet dial up users. The CIO mentioned that solution should be verified before implementation.
Table 2 2
Technology |
Speed |
Price per month |
Monthly Cost |
Leased Line |
T1 or T3 |
$600 for each T1, $8000 for the T3 |
|
Frame Relay T1 Frame Relay T3 |
T1 or T3 |
$450, for T1 $7000 for T3 Plus CIR |
Add $100 Extra cost for PVC in Frame Relay |
MPLS, VPN, T1 and T3 |
T1 or T3 |
$500, for T1 $8500 for T3 |
|
High speed business Internet Service T3 Internet |
6Mbps downstream, and 768 kbps upstream T3 |
$90 $4000 |
|
Please read Super Consulting case study and then respond and discuss the following topics.
- What remote access technology would you propose to Mr. Thompson that would enable users to seamlessly access the back office systems and reduce WAN coasts?
- What local access technology could you used to reduce access coasts at the remote offices for providing access to telecommuter?