Phones are critical for a doctor’s office. Their business relies on patients calling to schedule appointments and clinicians being able to call patients about medications or lab results, for example. Without a highly available telephone system, such as the SD-WAN – MPLS mesh network featured here, the office cannot function optimally.
For a multi-location physician practice in the Pacific Northwest with an MPLS design, several unplanned outages, concerns over missed SLAs and issues with uptime signified that it was time for an upgrade. With more than a dozen offices and roughly 1,600 endpoints, this was no small task.
MicroAge solutions expert JP Patchett and the MicroAge Collaboration team partnered with the client’s IT operations manager and director of IT to develop a strategy that would address the company’s telecom challenges.
“The IT leaders were tired of having to explain to the physicians why the phones were down,” JP says.
A Better Approach to Networking
At the beginning of the process, JP engaged in a discovery process, including whiteboard sessions, to understand the architecture of the client’s current MPLS and to strategize a new approach to the network.
The outages they were experiencing meant a loss of revenue and because this network serves mission-critical functions, downtime was a detriment. MicroAge’s focus is on helping clients with business continuity and a better approach to network services.
JP saw an opportunity to dramatically change the client’s network.
With an MPLS, you have to be within a single carrier, and when the costs go up, there’s no recourse to negotiate pricing.
This led JP and team to introducing SD-WAN into the equation. For some companies, it might make sense for an SD-WAN solution to replace an MPLS system, but in this case, JP advised using SD-WAN to augment the private network rather than replacing the MPLS.
SD-WAN is changing the way the industry approaches networks, so JP recommended a hybrid SD-WAN – MPLS mesh network architecture, resulting in two completely engaged networks so there would not be a single point of failure.
The SD-WAN – MPLS Mesh Network
As the client’s various telecom provider contracts came up for renewal over the course of many months, MicroAge worked to implement a new layer 2 private network.
The client was looking for a way to provide a highly available and reliable network solution, so to provide resiliency and security as well, JP and team delivered a private network with diverse internet connections out of the building managed by an SD-WAN solution from Ecessa.
The private network is provided by Zayo, and the diverse internet connection is provided by Comcast.
It’s a mesh network, enabling all the sites to talk to one another. If the internet goes down at a site, each location has a second connection managed by the SD-WAN device offering redundancy and resiliency.
The result is a redundant and resilient network — providing a private network and a public network managed by the SD-WAN appliance, which aggregates the public and private connections, load balancing both connections. It also provides intelligent routing based on applications, basically virtualizing the network.
Every clinic location, the data center and back-up location all have an SD-WAN appliance with two diverse connections going into the box— important because that’s the only way to have true resiliency.
The Results of Adding SD-WAN
With telecom’s inherent complexity, the client found value in MicroAge’s support in implementing this solution — overseeing fiber circuit installations, managing the project and acting as a liaison between multiple vendors.
Voice is sensitive to latency, so a well-built network is critical to deliver enterprise-level voice. One of the reasons the network was built was to deliver voice as a mission-critical application; and with this solution, JP notes, the client has future-proofed their infrastructure and resolved their issues for future cloud deployments.
“They’re very happy,” JP says. “There have been no outages, and they’re getting a 400 percent increase in bandwidth for a small monthly increase—it’s a huge value. The IT director can sleep at night.”
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Need a highly available network for your organization? Learn how MicroAge can support you in creating your own SW-WAN – MPLS mesh network. Call 800-544-8877 to talk to an expert today.
