Cisco Systems OL-4344-01 manual Customer’s and Provider’s View of the Network

Chapter 1 About Cisco IP Solution Center

The Customer’s and Provider’s View of the Network

The Customer’s and Provider’s View of the Network

From the customer’s point of view, they see their internal routers communicating with their customer edge routers (CEs) from one site to another through a VPN managed by the service provider (see Figure 1-5).

Figure 1-5 The Customer’s View of the Network

CE

Gadgets, Inc.

Seattle

Service provider

network

Gadgets, Inc's VPN

CE

28554

Gadgets, Inc.

Chicago

CE

Gadgets, Inc.

New York City

This simple view of the customer’s network is the advantage of employing VPNs: the customer experiences direct communication to their sites as though they had their own private network, even though their traffic is traversing a public network infrastructure and they are sharing that infrastructure with other businesses.

The service provider’s view of the network is naturally very different, as shown in Figure 1-6. This illustration shows two different customers, with each customer having a single VPN. A customer can, however, have multiple VPNs.

Cisco IP Solution Center, 3.0: MPLS VPN Management User Guide, 3.0

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