Background
Powell Electrical Manufacturing Co. is looking to replace or enhance its current remote access server (RAS) solution for the central side of the corporate network. Currently the central office is running Winframe Citrix 1.7 configured for RAS and with Equinox modems for asynchronous dial-in. The remote access solution should be designed to be both fault tolerant for 99.9% uptime and secure to ensure unauthorized users are not allowed into the network. The solution should be centrally managed through a standard management package and should provide network managers with a full set of usage statistics.
Current Network and Applications
The current network is made up of a central office and 8 subsidiaries. The central office has Cabletron Ethernet switches (servers at 100MBps) with plans currently to add Cabletron's SmartSwitch Router migrating the switch uplinks to Gigabit. The corporate network officially uses only two protocols, IP and IPX with a pure IP migration currently being planned. There are three main categories of employees working remotely and they have similar application needs: telecommuters, the mobile sales force/technical field personnel and executives.
- The telecommuters access for e-mail & file transfers and standard business applications with the Engineering side utilizing AutoCAD applications with a heavy bandwidth requirement for engineering drawing file transfers. Access to Powell's Intranet web server is also a requirement. They generally need to access the corporate network twice a day for about 1-2 hours each time.
- The mobile sales force (which includes Sales Representative offices and technical field personnel throughout the world ) uses standard business applications and LAN access for e-mail and file transfers with occasional access to Powell's Intranet web server. Connect times to the central site vary from 6 times for 15 minutes each time everyday.
- The executives are located mainly at the corporate central site and need access to e-mail and Powell's Intranet web server. Executives are only working remotely part of the time and need to access the central site on average one time per day, but generally remain connected for almost an hour each time.
Central Office
There are 300 users in the central office that use the corporate network. Seventy of the users at the central office need be able to work remotely. The breakdown of the proposed remote users is as follows: 35 of the users are telecommuters, 25 are in the mobile sales force/technical field personnel and 10 of the remote users are executives.
Subsidiaries
There are 8 subsidiaries throughout the United States. The subsidiaries are nearly identical in terms of their structure and staffing characteristics. Each of the 8 subsidiaries has 10-50 employees that use the network. At this time, remote access to subsidiary LANs is not a requirement but future connectivity requirements, although on a smaller scale, would be identical to the corporate site.
Additional responses
Plus the original RFP and a sample RFP from The Gartner Group.
Review: VPNs
We test 15 products. Network World, 5/10/99.
Interactive VPN buyer's guide
Find a VPN that best matches your critieria.
