Businesses are switching to MPLS WAN links because they remove the cost, complexity and routing challenges associated with maintaining dozens or hundreds of point-to-point leased lines or IP VPNs over the Internet. Carriers offering MPLS benefit from economies of scale, peak load balancing between customers and higher service margins from "outsourced" network management - allowing them to compete efficiently with the do-it yourself, direct to the Internet networking alternative. However, the any-to-any automatic networking offered by MPLS, while having distinct advantages to traditional connectivity, presents new challenges that ripple through higher-order services that depend on the packet delivery infrastructure. These include the intersection of other key IT priorities - such as server consolidation, storage networking and use of real-time multimedia - with the distributed nature of MPLS. To compensate for these challenges, carriers often provide differentiated service levels, either by application/port or between two endpoints.