Different businesses clearly have different approaches to building and managing their wide area network. In general though they are either looking to control it from their in-house team or they are looking for a managed solution. VPLS solutions provide significant benefits in both situations. However they are particularly valuable where a business has complex networks or is working on a converged network strategy. A summary of the key benefits for each type of business is shown below:

In-house Strategy

• Control of IP routing.
• Transparent WAN so they can connect between their routers without needing to look at the service provider.
• Clear demarcation allows them to maintain good control of their network and service provider.

Outsourced Managed Strategy

• Sustainable lower cost of service because VPLS reduces the fault calls, the time to fix and the skill level of staff needed to carry out the work.
• Higher SLA targets possible in fault management and change management because it is so much simpler.

Converged or Complex Network Requirements

• True convergence of multiple networks and services on to a single pipe (Layer 3 MPLS can only have one instance per physical circuit).
• Lower cost with least possible number of access circuits.
• Wider range of options to configure network because you can separate different services or functions on to different VLANs - whether VPLS or ‘Martini tunnel’ style.

To show how this works in practice, below is an example of how the Layer 2 VPLS solution creates business value for a large financial company has the following requirements:

• Bank operations team has separate LAN and must connect securely and privately to BACS and international banks (Extranet) to support back office systems data traffic and private email traffic.
• Offices must have telephone services, video conferencing and data connections to support email, web browsing and access to mission critical services? between London and two branch offices
• HQ PBX must connect to PSTN service provider
• Public Internet for the Online banking servers must be kept separate from all other elements of the network.

Reduced administration and capital cost

The use of Ethernet throughout the WAN makes it easy for the business’s IT team to administer the solution and reduces the cost of hardware at the LAN gateways.

Reduced complexity and cost

The ability of the Layer 2 VPLS technology to create multiple separate, private networks on a single large capacity access connection reduces the cost of access circuits to a minimum.

Maximise existing assets and reducing telephony costs

The Next Generation Network provider emulates a traditional TDM circuit across the Ethernet VPLS network to directly connect the customer’s HQ PBX to one or, more likely, several Global PSTN Carriers at wholesale minute rates.

Security

A high capacity, resilient firewall is hosted ‘on-net’ with ‘clean’ connection to the Office VPN and ‘DMZ’ connection to the public facing web servers. This improves resilience because the Internet is not dependant on any single site’s availability and larger firewalls are built to higher availability levels. It also improves and simplifies security by having a single point of policy. enforcement. In practice it is likely that other security gateway devices would be used this way such as, Intruder Prevention Systems, content filtering and security proxy servers such as Microsoft ISA server.

Control, business agility and reduced administration

Each office location is connected with a layer 2 VPLS connection and the standard architecture would have a router at the gateway of each office – these routers appear to be as directly connected to each other allowing the business’s IT team to take full control of the routing between offices and achieve real improvement in business agility.

Security and privacy without the cost of multiple networks

The Extranet is a separate private network that is set up as if it were 2 traditional ATM/SDH WAN services being supplied by the same service provider. The Network Termination Equipment (NTE) at the HQ site provides the network with a physically separate port with no possibility of crossing from one VPLS to the other.

For more information about VPLS please email us or call us on: +44 (0) 845 470 4001