WAN Protocols for connecting sites

[mandeep62]

Hello,

I would like to know what are the latest WAN technologies that companies use for connecting their sites both a large network or their small networks.

I know, technologies from service provider's point of view like frame relay, ATM & MPLS. Do we still use them? I know it really depends upon the requirements. But I just wanted to get an idea.

I'm just a student. I just wanted to know what is really working in real world.

[Pawan Raut]

Depend on requirement and availability but mostly MPLS and internet hybrid used now days. You can run DMVPN over the MPLS and internet for secure private virtual network. 

Kindly rate for helpful post

[mandeep62]

Thank you for your reply. Could you explain about DMVPN over MPLS? What are the benefits of it? As far as I know, DMVPN is used at the customer side to connect their branches over the internet securely by creating tunnels. Now, why run DMVPN over the MPLS?

[Pawan Raut]

Where we have internet WAN or Hybrid WAN (MPLS+Internet) the DMVPN is most proven technology.

Using DMVPN in Hybrid WAN (MPLS+Internet) or Dual MPLS you can surely increase throughput plus security as it use secure IPsec tunnel.

Lets say you can Hybrid WAN (MPLS+Internet) at your branch office you have MPLS BGP with ISP as primary and IPsec GRE or another tunnel with HUB DC as backup and you have to reach certain application at your HUB DC. But if your MPLS link get saturated and you still have Internet link available with decent amount of free Bandwidth you cant used it as its backup path. But if you go DMVPN on both you can do the load balancing and that can shift the MPLS load to internet and vice-versa during traffic congestion.

Also in case of 2 MPLS ISP ckt one can stay ideal depend on BGP attribute from or towards ISP. But using DMVPN over this we can do the loadbalacing. Same case for Dual Internet ISP scenario.

In this way we can reduce MPLS BW and that can save our cost.  Also having DMVPN over both ckt dual MPLS ISP ckt or Hybrid (MPLS+internet) or dual internet scenario the failover is smooth as route convergence will not impact as we already have another DMVPN path running.

Also all communication over DMVPN is using secure IPsec (IKEv1 or IKEv2) so any security compromise in ISP domain can't impact our Data traffic as it is encrypted for them.

All above are my opinion and you may get better option than this. Kindly rate for helpful post

[Dennis Mink]

the days of FR and ATM are well gone. mostly MPLS nowadays.

one other thing you need to factor in is if you need a Layer 2 or 3 connection, particularly between DCs if you need to stretch VLANs you need a layer 2 WAN link. other wise no. typically you would not care to much what sort of layer 3 wan link you have. mostly you point to a service provider route IP address and it does the rest. ask about QoS as well.

[Joseph W. Doherty]

Also WAN hand-offs might use Ethernet. The latter is probably running on-top of MPLS, but you don't "see" the MPLS.