It is hard to believe the Internet is over 25 years old.\u00a0 During this time the world witnessed exponential growth in the Internet and with it Wide Area Networks (WANs).\u00a0 Today business life would be unimaginable without WANs.\u00a0 Commerce, emails, data transfer, information searched all depends on WANs.\u00a0 Thus WANs are not only ubiquitous, they are vital.<\/p>\n
All of us have experiences WAN outages (if you have not you are lucky!).\u00a0 the moment this happens every employee is up in arms, productivity plunges, use of cuss words increase and in general the mood turns sour \u2013 and who gets blamed? \u2013 the network administration group.\u00a0 The only other thing that is bound to get people even more upset is if the paycheck is not deposited on time!<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, if a WAN is only connected by one data-line, and the line is cut or goes down, chaos results.\u00a0 Even though the ISP has an SLA with you, it is only a promise that the network with be up a certain percent of the time. If not they pay a penalty while you incur the wrath of employees.\u00a0 To avoid this, many network administrators introduce redundancy to WANs.\u00a0 Redundancy can be achieved in many ways.\u00a0 Multiple lines aggregated using BGP or FatPipe technology solves the problem.\u00a0 BGP is arcane and requires a great deal of expertise while FatPipe technology is \u201cset it and forget it\u201d.\u00a0 This paper will discuss discusses WAN redundancy and reliability and is a good starting point in ensuring you have a \u201chigh availability WAN\u201d<\/p>\n