Network World — Chicago-based real-estate management company Equity Office ran all its voice and data traffic over an MPLS WAN, but when poor peak-time performance drew complaints from end users, it switched to technology that delivers more bandwidth at half the cost.

There's a tradeoff in that the company has to deal with more service providers than before, but the performance and savings make up for that, says Chavdar Momchev, Equity Office's director of voice-data communications. "I expect a return on investment in about 10 months," he says, and complaints about response times have disappeared in offices that have the new connections.

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The new WAN is fashioned by blending DSL, cable, fiber and Ethernet over copper into a single logical network. When one link fails, remaining links pick up the slack under the direction of intelligent hardware from Talari Networks.

Once it is switched over, the new WAN will cost about half the $400,000 per year he was spending on the MPLS service, Momchev says. When he factors in the capital cost of the Talari boxes, he projects a 10-month return on investment.

Momchev's biggest fear was that it would degrade the quality of VoIP traffic running over the network, but there have been no problems even when one of the circuits feeding each office has failed. "We've been having outages, but there has been no impact on end users," he says.

Equity Office has a headquarters in Chicago and about 40 remote offices. Headquarters contains the main data center, with an active disaster-recovery data center in Madison, Wis. Each remote office is connected as a spoke to both headquarters and the backup data center as hubs. The data centers also act as hubs for the Cisco VoIP system.

Until the change to the Talari gear, each office was connected to a Verizon Business MPLS service by at least a T-1, with a few larger offices having two or three T-1s.

The MPLS service was put in about seven years ago, and shortly afterwards the company underwent server consolidation, pulling virtually all servers out of remote offices and centralizing them in the data center.

The only way the Equity Office could do that was by installing WAN optimization gear from Riverbed at all sites, effectively reducing WAN traffic enough so branch workers could get seemingly local performance from central data center servers. "They were the missing piece that made it possible," Momchev says.

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