Many of the largest networks today employ Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) for a myriad of reasons. So what are some of the key motivators that would entice an organization to make the leap to MPLS? Protocol neutrality, extensibility, adaptability and scalability are among some of the many reasons. Additionally, because MPLS was designed to openly embrace so many protocols, it has evolved organically over time to offer a vast array of services. This largely explains why so many organizations have made the move to MPLS. In fact, according to Nemertes Research, 74% of companies today are using MPLS for their WANs. What is amazing about this statistic is that MPLS is a relatively new technology, which actually started in 1997 and has essentially achieved widespread adoption since. Thus, it makes sense why MPLS has achieved such adoption; however, what are some of the crucial business drivers that also influenced its prevalence in the marketplace?
As more technologies are developed and deployed onto the network, this increased demand can significantly tax the network – requiring immensely more resources to manage and maintain. This issue is certainly more of a concern now, considering that most providers host voice, video, and data services across several mediums (WiFi, Metro-Ethernet, Cable/DSL, etc.). Moreover, customers have also come to expect these on demand services to always be up and running whenever they need access. This is exactly why MPLS has come to the fore-front because of how it can scale to address the demands of more complex networks. With the advent of IPv6, MPLS is now becoming the preferred transport mechanism to handle mobile backhaul and many other services over IPv6. With all of these new technologies and applications coming to bear on the network at the same time, this will certainly require some extensive testing to ensure that the network can deliver all of these services reliably.
Case in point, this month at Shunra we finished an engagement with a large financial services company deploying a global MPLS network. They had many concerns about this deployment, the most significant of which is that some of their end-users in various locations would experience a significant increase in latency. Thus, this would cause disruptions in productivity and may even crash some of the applications – which are critical to the business. The Engineers also knew that MPLS was the way to go because they were deploying VoIP as well and they were concerned about capacity requirements for all of these applications. As such, we worked with them to develop a test strategy to ensure they can deploy MPLS with confidence. In their environment, we recreated part of their MPLS production network in a virtual test bed and ran all of their critical applications. After many test iterations and diligent analysis, we were able to derive a deliverable that gave them considerable insight as to what the problems were with the applications and how to best address them – from both a network and application perspective. Ultimately, this allowed the financial services company to make an informed decision about how to deploy MPLS across their network.
Will you be deploying MPLS across your network? If so, Shunra provides consulting services specifically for this type of testing.
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