N10-009 Question 123
Single answer1.8 Summarize evolving use cases for modern network environments.A manufacturing company is deploying hundreds of wireless temperature and vibration sensors across a warehouse to support predictive maintenance. The sensors send very small amounts of data at regular intervals, must operate for years on battery power, and need coverage in areas where running Ethernet is impractical. The network administrator must recommend the most appropriate modern network environment for this use case. Which solution BEST fits the requirement?
- A
Deploy an IoT network using low-power wireless sensors connected through gateway devices
- B
Implement a SAN so the sensors can write their data directly to centralized block storage
- C
Use a VPN concentrator so each sensor can establish an encrypted tunnel to headquarters
- D
Migrate the warehouse to a spine-and-leaf architecture to improve east-west sensor traffic
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
The best answer is an IoT network using low-power wireless sensors and gateway devices. CompTIA Network+ expects candidates to recognize evolving use cases for modern network environments, including IoT, data centers, cloud, SD-WAN, and hybrid networks. In this scenario, the requirements point directly to IoT: many distributed endpoints, small telemetry payloads, long battery life, and locations where traditional cabling is impractical. Industry best practices for IoT emphasize lightweight communications, constrained-device design, and the use of gateways to aggregate sensor traffic before forwarding it to analytics or monitoring platforms. By contrast, SANs focus on storage networking, VPN concentrators focus on secure remote access, and spine-and-leaf addresses data center switching fabrics rather than sensor deployments.
- A. Correct.
Correct. This is a classic Internet of Things (IoT) use case: many small, battery-powered devices transmitting limited telemetry data over low-power wireless links. IoT deployments commonly use sensors, gateways, and centralized management/analytics platforms. This approach aligns with modern network environments where large numbers of constrained devices need efficient connectivity, broad coverage, and minimal power consumption.
- B. Incorrect.
Incorrect. A storage area network (SAN) provides high-speed access to centralized storage, typically for servers and enterprise applications. Sensors do not normally connect directly to SAN infrastructure, and SANs do not solve the wireless, low-power, or battery-life requirements in the scenario. Someone might choose this because the data must be stored centrally, but storage architecture is not the primary networking need here.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. A VPN concentrator is designed to aggregate remote encrypted tunnels from users or sites, not from hundreds of low-power warehouse sensors. While encryption may be used in IoT environments, requiring each sensor to maintain a traditional VPN tunnel would add unnecessary complexity and overhead, and it would not address the battery and lightweight telemetry requirements effectively.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. Spine-and-leaf is a modern data center network architecture used to provide predictable low-latency connectivity and high bandwidth for server-to-server traffic. It is useful for virtualized workloads and east-west traffic inside data centers, but it does not address the specific problem of battery-powered wireless sensors in a warehouse. This option is plausible because it is a modern network design, but it is not the right use case.