WAN INSTALLATION

Solution 1:

This Venture Capital funded company; and the industry’s first applications-enabled SoftSwitch firm, like many Silicon Valley startups, needs to have a reliable, scalable and high performance Local Area Network (LAN) and Wide Area Network (WAN) to enable them to meet the fast growing, multi-media, customer support and product development needs based on the TCP/IP standard.

At that time, their WAN was comprised of 4 firewalls, 2 separate Internet Service Providers (ISPs), 2 remote offices connecting to the Headquarters using VPN via Internet.  There were 9 subnets in their Headquarters hosting over 200 IP based devices with many Microsoft Windows NT servers, SUN Solaris hosts and various flavors of UNIX hosts running different functions; from Agile document management servers, Exchange email server, file & print servers, DNS, DHCP, WINS to backup servers.  UNIX is used mostly for hosting software development, version control and so on.  The heart of this busy LAN/WAN is a 3Com’s CoreBuilder Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) switch router.  The router connects over 50 switches and hubs running all over the place in their busy and increasingly crowded Headquarters.  As the LAN has been growing over time, no one is sure as to exactly how everything was connected.  Eventually, the systems users started experiencing performance slow-downs, especially during peak hours.

The company realized the importance of this IT related performance issue and decided to do something about it.  They first assign their internal IT group to try and solve this issue.  As time went by, more IT issues emerged.  Beside the performance issue, they also had a need to quickly implement IP-Phone, connect the two remote offices via T1 instead of VPN to increase the performance and have a system that can monitor everything.  In order to implement the IP-Phone, a larger block of IP addresses was required for the main subnet where the majority of the systems users were located.  The LAN that was built over 2 years ago was not designed with supporting more than 254 IP addresses per subnet.  Because of the urgency of these issues and the absolute importance of having a reliable, scalable and high performance LAN/WAN, Triware Networld Systems (TNS) was called in to help.

TNS is no stranger to this company.  Just about 2 years ago, TNS was brought in by the IT director, who had known TNS from her previous company.  Within less than a week TNS helped to build their first LAN when the company had just started with only a few users.  TNS also provided the first year or so of IT outsourcing service and helped move the firm to their new location as this successful company continued to grow.  Since then TNS has been retained as the firm that provides continued IT support and maintenance on high-end issues.

To obtain information for a careful study of their current IT situation, the engineers from TNS painstakingly traced every single cable to each device that was linked together on the physical level from port to port, and meticulously calculated each device’s capacity.  Then from the data gathered, TNS developed 3 options as possible going forward solutions.  The client picked the one that they felt best suited their needs.

From their selection, TNS then developed a project plan with a detailed timetable to implement their option to meet the deadline set by the client.  The client was informed as to each stages of the implementation process.  The plan was implemented with relatively nominal hardware, software and installation costs; considering the scope of the work.  A Cisco Catalyst 4006 switch router was introduced to replace the old 3Com CoreBuilder to provide 24GB of the backplane speed with 18 GBIC ports and 80 10/100 MB switch ports.  All the main subnets now have at least 1GB of path to all the NT servers, UNIX hosts and to each other.  Certain mission critical UNIX hosts were also set up with 1GB path to the backbone.  A larger new subnet was created to allow hundreds of new IP addresses so that the IP-Phone roll-out could go forward.   A DHCP server was also set up to handle IP address distribution among all subnets.  Other Cisco routers were also set up to provide T1 routing between the two remote offices and their Headquarters.

The project was started on Feb 14^th, 2001 and was totally completed by March 31^st, 2001.  To complete this project in a timely and efficient manner in one month, TNS had just spent one day per week for four weeks along with some weekends using only TNS internal resource, to avoid downtime, to get the job done.  All of the client’s issues were successfully addressed in a rapid fashion.  The performance, IP, remote access and scalability issues were taken care of in a manner that was completely satisfactory to the client.  Finally, to help the client monitor the LAN/WAN and other computer and network devices in the future, TNS had set up WAN management software using the WhatsUp Gold product made by IpSwitch.  Cisco Works was also installed as an added benefit to help manage the Cisco equipment.  Between these two pieces of software, the client will know immediately if there is anything going on in their network; and this also gives them an important early warning system on server and network issues.

Solution 2:

This client began using TNS service with a local Microsoft NT server based LAN and electronic mail system. As information system requirements grew, TNS was called in to design and implement a global WAN solution connecting the US, UK, Holland, Sweden, France, Italy, Malaysia and Japan.

This WAN construction was designed on an NT platform using a combination of leading technologies consisting of Frame Relay services and a Virtual Private Network (VPN) that is part of the Raptor firewall software. Local office operating system support included NT Server, NT Workstation, Windows 95 and Windows 98. RAS local services were implemented along with Raptor Mobile VPN software for traveling users to save long distance telephone call costs. Worldwide messaging services were accomplished with the installation of MS Exchange servers and Intranet Web servers.

The successful utilization of these global WAN requirements, as designed and implemented by TNS, was of great solace and convenience to this client. Prior satisfactory client relations and the cost savings by using TNS talent were major factors in assigning TNS to this project.