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Natural Candidates
A growing number of midmarket companies see MPLS, and its class-of-service feature, as an important element of long-term converged IP network strategies -- in particular, VoIP.
Byram Healthcare, a distributor of home medical supplies, wanted to deploy an interactive voice-response system that would provide quick, automated responses to common customer queries and direct other calls to the appropriate service representative. It adopted VoIP as the most cost-efficient and reliable way to route customer calls between its three call centers. This in turn led to the decision to migrate from frame relay to MPLS, reports Richard Entrup, the company's CIO. "We needed to make sure customer calls to service representatives got priority over email or Internet surfing -- or anything else," he says.
Indeed, any firm that that needs to guarantee bandwidth and response time between multiple sites is a natural candidate for MPLS. Arizona Tile sees MPLS as a means of ensuring that point-of-sale and ERP transactions travel quickly and reliably between a central host and some 27 facilities in seven states. Last year, when the tile manufacturer's network service contract was about to expire, it decided it was time to replace its frame relay service. The company had suffered several outages, some lasting as long as 20 minutes, during which retail outlets had to handle orders manually. This was simply unacceptable for a firm that emphasizes efficient customer service, Barnes says.
"Based on what we learned about packet speeds, quality of service, overall performance and failure rerouting around trunks, we decided that MPLS is a much stronger network environment that we can rely on for our remote locations," she says. The company is now considering request-for-proposal responses from several leading MPLS service providers.
Business continuity was the chief reason that $33-million Nicholas Financial moved to an MPLS network. A couple of years ago, "when hurricanes were ganging up on Florida," the Clearwater, Fla.-based firm decided that a disaster recovery site was necessary, says CIO Mike Marika. The company, which does business financing for cars and light trucks, has 44 full-service branch offices in 10 states, all linked to a central Unix server at headquarters. Branch managers need to access the server regularly to look up a customer's credit history, enter a loan in the books and so on. "So there's a lot of real-time back-and-forth" over the remote links, Marika says.
Nicholas Financial needed a backup facility that would ensure business continuance in the event that a storm or other disaster took out the main server. "But we didn't want it to be elaborate or expensive," Marika says. The firm's carrier, MCI (now Verizon), suggested MPLS: "It seemed ideal."
If a hurricane threatens, Nicholas Financial alerts Verizon to go into disaster recovery mode. That means doing a full update of the backup server, which resides at the carrier's hardened facility in Tampa. Verizon then reconfigures the MPLS network to route all branch-office traffic from the primary data center to the backup facility.
Verizon's MPLS service costs about the same as a regular VPN but offers additional services, such as 24/7 proactive monitoring of a customer's circuits, Marika says. Another plus: The carrier's private MPLS backbone is isolated from the Internet, which helps the firm comply with regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
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