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Risk Factor: Management
Whether MPLS proves to be a viable solution for your company will also depend on choosing the right type of service and configuration. One critical question that needs to be answered up front: How much management responsibility do you want your in-house staff to take?
MPLS comes in two flavors: managed and transport-centric. In the former, the carrier takes over the entire management and provisioning of a customer's WAN infrastructure, including on-site MPLS edge routers. In the latter case, the service provider is responsible for providing site-to-site MPLS connectivity across its backbone, but the customer maintains on-site MPLS edge routers and is responsible for end-to-end network performance.
Midrange companies typically go with transport-centric networks because they are cheaper, says Pierce. The downside: "Risk of performance and security problems can be high," especially when a firm has a limited IT staff and a bare-bones network management infrastructure. "The more applications are riding on top of MPLS links, the more management you need," Pierce notes. In such cases, decision makers should consider turning management over to a third-party service.
Byram Healthcare and Nicholas Financial both went with a managed MPLS service: "We don't have three or four network engineers," Marika says. Managing in-house might work with only 10 branches, "but when you're getting close to 50, it becomes tough and expensive." Arizona Tile, by contrast, "might go to a managed network down the road, but right now we own and manage our edge routers," Barnes says. A future deployment of a disaster recovery site might motivate the company to go with a managed solution, she adds.
Another important choice with tradeoffs is whether to migrate gradually or all at once. As Forrester's Pierce says, "It's harder to move your entire network to a new service than to just change out the core and keep your edge frame relay or ATM [router]." But in order to have end-to-end class of service for VoIP or video over IP, you need end-to-end MPLS.
Byram Healthcare is making a onetime transition from frame relay to MPLS so that it can implement class of service for a business-critical voice over IP application. Arizona Tile plans a gradual move from frame relay to MPLS, with a significant period of coexistence. "Let's say we have four stores on one remote frame relay link," says Barnes. "We can move one store at a time, honing quality of service and reliability as we go. And if something goes wrong, we can point traffic back to the old frame relay circuit." Having that failsafe extra line is important for Barnes' peace of mind, particularly given that "MPLS is a new technology for us."
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