Getting the most out of broadband to back up MPLS

18.09.2012
The problem with using broadband to back up branch office links is 1) you spend all that money on the pipes and most of the time they simply lie fallow, and 2) when MPLS does go down the failover process often takes so long it kills active sessions.

Greenbrier Companies and Hydrite Chemical Co. separately went looking for an answer to this common problem and found , a vendor that sells appliances that can amalgamate the capacity of MPLS and broadband links and share the capacity as necessary.

ANOTHER CASE STUDY:

Steve Eaton, senior network engineer at Greenbrier, says he is using Talari's Mercury appliances to increase reliability and add bandwidth.

Greenbrier is a $1.8 billion supplier of transportation equipment and services to the railroad industry. It makes different types of railroad cars (from tank cars to boxcars, flatbeds, etc.), and has a number of related business, including a rail car repair/maintenance business, and businesses for parts, hydraulics and wheels. It even has a railroad car leasing business.

The company, which employs about 5,000 people, has 45 sites on its MPLS backbone that is used to support a centralized system and different types of data traffic -- email, access to centralized databases and other back office .