MPLS Fail-Over Solutions

A lot of IT people ask me about redundancy for their MPLS network. When companies roll out MPLS, it’s often the life line of their business- i.e. site to site calling, data transfer, video conferencing, virtualized business applications shared across the network etc.

Companies today can’t afford circuits to go down, especially when another location is relying on that connection also. Often times, companies look into getting a redundant circuit to fail over to in case their primary goes down. We run into two major problems. The first is the complicated and expensive solution of internally automatically failing over to a circuit from a different provider.

This is a nightmare trying to manage two different routers with a very expensive fail over device. Most providers won’t let their managed MPLS circuit touch a device not on their network. The second and largest problem is ordering and paying for a circuit that is brought into the building by the same local exchange carrier. If the last mile of the LEC goes down, it’s a good chance that both of your circuits will be also

Providers are now tackling this very important issue with fixed wireless options that provide a secure VPN back to your MPLS network. This automatically fails-over to a secondary wireless card connection and fails back when the primary is restored.

Although you wont have the same speeds than with the primary circuit, it allows you to buy an extra hour or two while the provider gets the circuit up and running again. It’s good to see providers coming out with an in-house solution to take on this problem. It’s a very inexpensive way of having a stable/reliable backup solution.