XYZ Corporation employs 40,000 people with, their own IP addresses, and operates over 400 servers including e-mail (SMTP and POP), FZTP, Web and SHCP at two locations: one in Muncie, Indiana, the other about 20 miles away in Hartford City. Dual T1 lines, for total aggregate bandwidth of 3,088 Mbps, link the two sites, and each site contains roughly half of the employees and servers. Perforce, each site operates on multiple, separate subnets inside a single Class B address that the company owns. Make a case for setting up a single, separate DNS server at each location, explaining how each might back up the other, and what benefits this might provide for XYZ Corporation users. Explain how the relative speed of the 100BaseT LANs used at each location compares to accessing the WAN link between the two sites.

Question

XYZ Corporation employs 40,000 people with, their own IP addresses, and operates over 400 servers including e-mail (SMTP and POP), FZTP, Web and SHCP at two locations: one in Muncie, Indiana, the other about 20 miles away in Hartford City. Dual T1 lines, for total aggregate bandwidth of 3,088 Mbps, link the two sites, and each site contains roughly half of the employees and servers. Perforce, each site operates on multiple, separate subnets inside a single Class B address that the company owns. Make a case for setting up a single, separate DNS server at each location, explaining how each might back up the other, and what benefits this might provide for XYZ Corporation users. Explain how the relative speed of the 100BaseT LANs used at each location compares to accessing the WAN link between the two sites.

Answer 1

Setting up a single, separate DNS server at each location for XYZ Corporation would provide several benefits and help enhance the overall network efficiency and reliability.

Firstly, having a DNS server at each location would ensure redundancy and fault tolerance. In case one DNS server goes down or experiences any issues, the other server can seamlessly take over the DNS resolution tasks, ensuring uninterrupted network connectivity and services for XYZ Corporation users.

Additionally, local DNS servers can help reduce the network latency by providing faster DNS resolution. Whenever an employee at a specific location needs to resolve a domain name, their local DNS server can quickly respond with the IP address since it has cached or stored the frequently accessed domain information. This saves time compared to a scenario where the DNS request has to travel over the WAN link to the other location's DNS server for resolution.

Moreover, local DNS servers can help reduce the network traffic on the WAN link. Without local DNS servers, every DNS request from one location would need to traverse the WAN to reach the DNS server in the other location. This increases the load on the WAN link and can potentially slow down other network activities. By having separate DNS servers at each location, the DNS traffic is localized, resulting in reduced congestion on the WAN link and improved performance for other network applications.

As for the relative speed of the 100BaseT LANs used at each location compared to accessing the WAN link between the two sites, the LAN speed would be significantly faster. 100BaseT refers to Fast Ethernet, which provides a maximum data transfer rate of 100 Mbps. In contrast, the WAN link between the two sites is a dual T1 connection, which aggregates to a total bandwidth of 3,088 Mbps. Therefore, the LAN speed is much slower compared to the WAN link.

It's important to note that these are general considerations, and the actual performance may depend on various factors like network configuration, utilization, and hardware capabilities. Nonetheless, having local DNS servers at each location can optimize the network efficiency and provide a more reliable and faster experience for XYZ Corporation users.