magazine
12
Cover Story
Changing working practices and
greater scrutiny of business costs
are leading to a surge in demand for
Spitfire’s MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label
Switching) services for voice and data
connectivity between multiple sites
and branch offices.
Combining MPLS-enabled Ethernet
or Broadband circuits with centralised
Internet access and remote worker
integration, Spitfire’s MPLS solutions
provide simple, affordable, secure
connectivity for any size of business.
Because Spitfire uses dedicated
connections between a client’s sites
and its MPLS core network, traffic
doesn’t touch the public internet and is
therefore not subject to the same quality
and security issues as an IPsec VPN
solution. Nor does it incur large charges
from other carriers or datacenters. An
additional benefit is significantly simpler
installation and management.
To find out more,
Business Info
spoke
to Tom Fellowes, Sales Director of Spitfire
Network Services.
Business Info:
What is MPLS and why
is it preferable to a VPN solution, say?
Tom Fellowes:
MPLS is a way of creating
a private virtualised network across
multiple sites – a private wide area
network. It’s done at a carrier level rather
than a private circuit level, so we are not
creating point-to-point links between
sites. Instead, we are creating point-to-
point circuits between each individual
client site and the MPLS nodes at
Spitfire’s data centres.What this means
is that all of the configuration for the
MPLS is centralised at our datacentres as
one private ‘cloud’ , instead of having to
configure each inter-site link from every
single site.
The first thing this does is
significantly reduce the management
and support overhead. If we add another
site into the MPLS, we just create
another site and it is added in, rather
than having to go to every other site
and say ‘We have added on a new site
and here is your access restriction’.
So it is significantly simpler from a
WAN management perspective, which
makes IT people very happy. This also
makes problem-solving and security
management very straightforward.
The second advantage of MPLS
concerns internet consolidation. If
you have multiple sites that all inter-
communicate and also use the internet,
and if you provide an internet circuit
for each of those sites and connect by
traditional methods, i.e. VPN, you will
have to pay for the full data transit to
the internet for each of those sites,
even though 50% of the traffic may be
inter-site rather than to the internet.
MPLS allows you to consolidate all of
that internet bandwidth requirement
into a single point, which we call internet
break-out. This also has obvious security
and control benefits as you are managing
Internet breakout from a single point.We
can even provide a hosted or dedicated
firewall for you to manage all sites from
a single point.
For example, a five-site organisation
that requires a 100Mb circuit on each
site to inter-connect and provide internet
bandwidth might only require 50Mb
to inter-connect and a total of 50Mb
for all of the sites in terms of internet
bandwidth. Because you pay for two
aspects of the circuit – the rental of the
circuit (the fibre or the copper) and the
data transit across that circuit – you can
significantly reduce your costs per circuit.
In some cases, by consolidating and
reducing the total internet bandwidth
costs, plus the management savings, we
have reduced the total cost of ownership
of an MPLS-based solution by 10-25%
compared to a VPN-based solution.
Business Info:
What type of
organisation would achieve
the greatest savings with this
arrangement?
Tom Fellowes:
One with multiple sites
that connect into a single site or a
single private data centre, where most
of the data transit is inter-site rather
than internet. An organisation that has
Are you paying too much for your inter-site connectivity? Are you
spending too long managing connections? Does the quality of the
connection leave a lot to be desired? If so, have you considered
MPLS? As Spitfire reports a surge in demand for MPLS services that
facilitate the sharing of data and/or voice across multiple offices,
Business Info
spoke to Sales Director Tom Fellowes about why
Spitfire’s solutions are proving so popular.
Now is the
time for MPLS
Tom Fellowes, Sales Director, Spitfire
