The first attempt at capacity planning for those branches saw the company install tools. "While that made the pipes wider, they didn't address uptime," Fourness says.

Adding a second MPLS link to each office for redundancy was going to cost $1,000/location/month and add management complexity, which was enough of an incentive for Fourness to look for alternatives. Hydrite found that in Talari.

After piloting Talari's appliances in a few locations, the company decided to roll them out to all branches so they could use the additional broadband capacity and benefit from the increased reliability.

At one of the two larger locations, the one housing the company's newly consolidated customer service function, Fourness found a cost-effective fiber alternative to broadband.

"We're paying $800 month for T-1/MPLS to that location and we added a symmetric 5Mbps fiber link for $450/month," Fourness says. "Talari lets me use that direct-to-Internet access line to get back to headquarters, and I get the reliability of fiber, symmetric bandwidth (which I wasn't getting with DSL), and it is significantly less expensive than if I had doubled up on MPLS. Instead of 1.5Mbps, I now have 6.5Mbps and only pay 50% more."