* One company shares its experience, advice
Editor’s Note: On Nov. 9, the ISP News Report newsletter will change its name to Service Provider News Report. In the newsletter each week, Carolyn Duffy Marsan will continue to bring you news, views and analysis of IP services from carriers and ISPs, but with a new newsletter name. Thanks for reading!
Policy Studies, Inc., a Denver-based government contractor, recently replaced its frame relay network with a managed private IP service from MCI. I interviewed Catherine Watterson, vice president of enterprise engineering services at PSI, about why the company chose this service from MCI. Here’s what she had to say:
PSI has 1,700 employees located in 70 sites spread across 29 states. The technology consulting firm has used MCI’s frame relay service for more than 5 years. PSI’s legacy network connected its remote sites to headquarters and provided e-mail, intranet and other business applications.
A year ago, PSI decided to move off frame relay and to look for a new IP-based solution.
“Having any-to-any connectivity was a very big driver for us,” Watterson says. “We wanted to simplify our network in comparison to what we had with frame relay, where everything came in to our headquarters location. We also were interested in lowering our costs.’’
PSI considered running IP over frame-relay as well as IP over Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS). “We also considered IP VPNs because that had any-to-any connectivity, but we had concerns about security,” Watterson explains. “We have a lot of valuable data on individuals, and security is definitely important with regard to that data.”
After running a competitive procurement, PSI chose MCI’s managed Private IP Service, which runs over MPLS.
“We had been using MCI for frame relay, and we were pleased with their services,” Watterson says. “But when it came to MCI’s costs and its innovation with MPLS – what we considered to be a step between frame relay and a public VPN – it was a perfect fit for us.’’
PSI selected MCI’s managed Private IP Service in March. It began migrating sites to the new service in June and finished the migration in October. Watterson says the migration has gone well.
“The performance so far has been great,” Watterson says. “We had more outages on our frame relay network than on the IP side. We’ve seen an increase in the stability of our network as compared to our frame relay services.”
Now PSI is moving to voice-over-IP services over its new IP-based backbone. The company also is developing a decentralized business application that takes advantage of the network’s any-to-any connectivity.
“The quality of service available with MPLS allows us to take that application and make it a higher priority than Internet or e-mail, and route it appropriately for us,” Watterson explains. “We could not have done that on frame relay.’’
So far, PSI sees no downside to its migration to IP. “We have better availability and lower costs,” Watterson says. “I don’t see any negatives.’’
Watterson offers the following advice to other network managers planning to replace frame relay services with IP:
1. Require your ISP to provide a single point of contact during your transition. “It’s key to have a project manager assigned who is the focal point of the project,” Watterson says. “Ours was dedicated to us for the entire project.’’
2. Take your time during the transition process. “We have very critical sites that can’t afford an outage, so we didn’t want to do a hot cutover,” Watterson says. “We ran both frame and IP during the cutover.’’
3. Consider migrating your voice services to IP, too. “We were able to take advantage of the cost savings of migrating voice to MCI at the same time as the data conversion,” Watterson says.
To read more about PSI’s new three-year contract with MCI, visit: https://global.mci.com/about/news/releases/2005.xml?newsid=17071&mode=long&lang=en&width=530&root=/about/news/releases/&subroot=2005.xml
