MPLS Migration


If you are planning an MPLS migration… You need Ipanema!


Heroic and loyal till the end, your ‘good old’ Frame Relay network is on its last legs: the contract has come to an end. Increasing demand means that you will have to increase your bandwidth; you’ll also want to guarantee the performance for the new rapidly approaching deployment while thinking of VoIP at some point in the near future.
Your telecom operator has suggested deploying its new MPLS network, for which they make the benefits very clear: “any-to-any” connectivity, VoIP compatible, Classes of Service (CoS), low cost….


You still ask yourself a few questions:

 

  •   How to manage your traffic matrix over a more open network?
  •   Is CoS necessary?
  •   If so, how will you define the parameters?
  •   Will voice and data flows be able to coexist on the network?
  •   How can you be sure of what will happen in reality and what kind of long-term financial gains can you expect?

 

The answers to these questions will determine how your applications and budget will be managed.
At Ipanema, we believe that hypotheses are not enough, you need hard facts. Application traffic is variable, and it is practically impossible to predict. The TCP/IP protocol’s intrinsic characteristics (to use all available bandwidth as fast as possible) create a mediocre end-user experience even once the bandwidth has increased. The operators commit themselves to the behavior of their infrastructures; however, at the end of the day you are responsible for application performances over the network.

Ipanema is a layer of automatic and permanent adaptation between your network - the old and the new and your current and future applications. By using the real-time full applications visibility provided by the Ipanema Solution, you will determine if Classes of Service are necessary, and if so, for which traffic. While CoS might be a step in the right direction there are far from enough CoS to provide the reactivity and guarantees you need for your critical applications. Their bandwidth allocation is inflexible, they require some guesswork in their sizing, they don’t automatically evolve over time to match your future traffic needs, and finally they do not provide application performance per user session. Thus, according to Dave Ettinger, Rhodia's Telecom Director, “Application performance management is really much easier and more flexible with the Ipanema Solution than with Classes of Service”.

Indeed, with Ipanema’s dynamic bandwidth allocation and compression, you can guarantee good performance for voice and critical applications and automatically adapt to any network condition and traffic evolution.
Ipanema allows an orderly migration toward MPLS while providing benefits that go beyond traditional Classes of Service.