The possibility of obtaining advanced WAN services using VPLS, Metro Ethernet, or MPLS VPN has been discussed throughout this chapter. A reliance on sales and marketing persons is not an effective approach to selecting these advanced services. Instead, it would be best to talk to the actual implementation team to get a deep understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of each technology and how they can meet the technical and business goals.
If redundancy and high availability are needed, the organization should consider connecting to two ISPs. One advantage to this configuration is that there is a large pool of technology options from which to choose. For example, if an organization was using a more traditional technology with their initial ISP, it could create a relationship with a new ISP and integrate new technology, such as Metro Ethernet or MPLS VPN solutions, along with a multitude of other services offered.
Advanced WAN services are part of agreements or different partnerships between multiple organizations that should be tied to solid risk assessment and an SLA that is closely related to various aspects, such as the following:
- Disaster recovery planning
- Business impact analysis
- Business continuity planning
It is very important to practice good security policy procedures and to consider the impact of the design decisions in the following areas:
- Dynamic routing protocols
- VLAN implementation (because many WAN services operate at Layer 2)
- QoS (covered by the ISP or by the customer)
- Multicast (what types of services are running)
- Security
- Management
- Reporting
In addition, it is important to analyze whether the advanced services are part of the standard agreement or are upgrades and what the future costs for any potential new technologies and new upgrades to these services would be.