Network Design Question

[bberryca]

Hello,

we are in the planning process of over hauling our network, and i was wondering if i could get some feed back on the design.

9 call centers, 2 admin sites. currently all running vpn tunnels over the internet to tie the sites together. (this is a huge issue) note: i inherited it this way, lol i know i know.

so the idea is we are going to tie our main sites together with point to point 10mb LAN extension's in a ring layout. 2 of the 9 call centers will also have WAN access (10mb). the 2 admin sites will stay on VPN tunnels.

layout would be A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-A With admin sites A-J-E and A-K-E

Sites A and E will have the WAN connection.

we are going to buy Cisco 1841's and have them setup with HSRP.

we would like half of the sites to go though one WAN connection and the other half to go through the other WAN connection. and then converge as necessary (if there is an outage)

should this be all area 0? or should it be split up? also note that the sites are not big enough to have multiple routers so the 1841 will be handling the inter site traffic as well.only 200-300 seats per site.

 

[VinceWhirlwind]

You would be much better off getting an MPLS WAN. I've recently migrated a few organisations away from point-to-point links and onto MPLS clouds and quite apart from the management (less links) and resilience (no site/site dependencies) benefits, the performance is a vast improvement (latency reduced by more than 50%, jitter eliminated).