Technology Reseller v07

01732 759725 MPLS 16 MPLS – the practical solution for interconnecting sites, data centres and cloud services datacentre or a Cloud Service Provider platform such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services. There are solutions available but the key is to identify a solution that not only consistently addresses your client’s technical performance and support requirements but also meets their budget. Traditionally IPsec VPN (IP security Virtual Private Networks) “logical tunnels” would be created between sites that encrypt the data as it passes over the unsecured Internet. Whilst a quick ad-hoc solution for connecting two sites together a fully meshed IPsec VPN network requires (n-1)*n / 2 individual tunnels, meaning 8 sites requires 28 tunnels to be configured, 16 sites 120 tunnels and so on. That is a lot of configuration and a lot that can go wrong. Possible solutions to the meshing problem such as VPN concentrators introduce points of failure and additional expense. IPsec VPNs typically require specialised routers or add additional licensing costs and encryption is a CPU intensive activity possibly leading to router performance issues. As if those issues were not bad enough using Internet based circuits offers no performance guarantees on packet loss or latency. At the other end of the technology scale are dedicated Point to Point leased lines. These are generally a good solution for short distances and when only two or three sites require inter-connectivity but do not scale well when either the number of sites or the distances between sites increases. Cost and complexity both increasing exponentially as either of these factors rise. MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching) as a technology is nothing new but the MPLS solution Spitfire offers is. Quite simply, Spitfire’s core network is “MPLS ready”. What this means to your clients is that any Spitfire internet circuit can be reassigned as an MPLS access circuit without complex configuration or prohibitive costs. By having a Spitfire circuit at each site the MPLS network interconnects each of these sites into a private multi-site LAN. As the data travels between sites it does not traverse the public internet at any point therefore offering consistently high, SLA backed network performance without the encryption overhead or the risks of the internet. MPLS is therefore not just suitable for typical data traffic but with the correct circuits has low latency, packet loss and jitter characteristics, and can be ideal for applications like voice and video. Spitfire’s approach to MPLS is simple; your clients receive all of the technical benefits of the MPLS solution without the large hardware, license and management costs incurred with other solutions. Spitfire MPLS is therefore ideal for any sized business which wants to share data and/or voice connectivity across multiple offices. Spitfire’s core network provides a wide range of circuits to suit your clients’ needs and budgets, including: n Fibre Ethernet n Copper Ethernet n SDSL M n VDSL (Fibre Broadband) n ADSL2+ / ADSL Max As application complexity increases what is the best solution for cohesive, easy to manage, effective connectivity to support the application and business requirements for your clients? The ongoing trend for adoption of hosted, colocated and cloud services continues to drive the need for effective multisite networking. Added to this there are disruptive changes to conventional working practises, such as the explosion in home or mobile working and ever tightening compliance regulations. While the emphasis has historically been placed on ensuring available bandwidth, as increasing business demands drive more intense demands on your LAN and WAN connections network performance and security become paramount. So for your clients you must now deliver applications with high network performance requirements but which are no longer safely deployed on a local area network (LAN). So the challenge now becomes how to deliver consistent application performance and network security for applications that operate across multiple sites or indeed from a by Harry Bowlby, Joint Managing Director of Spitfire Network Services Ltd