Optical Networking Best Practices Handbook

A.1. CUSTOMER PROFILE

A Fortune 1000 enterprise located in the Southwest (representative of companies in market verticals such as technology, finance, or manufacturing) currently employs 8000 people located in five sites within a Tier 1 metropolitan area. The sites include a corporate headquarters housing 5800 employees, three other locations housing 90, 680, and 1040 employees, respectively, and a data center location that houses 590 employees; as well as Web servers, Internet firewalls, and mainframe computing facilities. The enterprise utilizes a computing network architecture that distributes application and data storage resources to each metro site to meet the needs of the employees at that location [1].

The enterprise recently came to realize the significant costs due to its decentralized computing network architecture. These costs include:

• Multiple instances of applications at each site

• Sophisticated management and reconciliation routines to keep data synchronized

• Large amounts of equipment deployed throughout the company that must be managed and maintained

• Significant resources needed to staff and support these distributed applications and equipment [1]

In addition, the IT organization's forecast for the additional application server and data storage systems necessary to support the projected growth of the enterprise will result in an IT budget that is racing out of control [1].

With the increasing geographic dispersion of its work teams, the enterprise also recognizes that ...