3 minutes
Meritrust CU mitigates T1 outage issues with Talari solution
In the past, if the single 1.544 Mbps T1 circuit into one of Meritrust Credit Union’s 14 branches went down, members trying to use that branch were completely out of luck. Outages averaged a minimum of two times a month, and created not only confusion and frustration for members, but also needless work for employees.
A branch affected by loss of a T1 line would lose connectivity to both the applications and data hosted at the CU’s central site. Current account information would become unavailable to members visiting or calling in. Not even the ATM would be online to serve members. On the staff workload side of things, tellers would have to prepare handwritten receipts and then manually post transactions after the circuit was restored.
The IT group at $900 million Meritrust CU, Wichita, Kan., considered deploying a wireless card at each branch as a backup circuit for the T1. But the cost of supporting this failover infrastructure network-wide was significant. The IT team also considered replacing the T1s with a metropolitan area Ethernet network, but this also would have added significant costs without the benefit of a backup.
After searching the market, Meritrust chose Talari’s Mercury APN (Adaptive Private Networking) WAN appliances, which delivered a cost-effective failover solution; full-time bandwidth utilization of DSL or cable backup circuits; and encryption to meet compliance requirements per Meritrust CU’s internal policy that WAN links be encrypted.
In the new setup, Meritrust CU retained its existing T1 circuits, expanded its overall bandwidth by adding DSL/cable, and added the ability to switch all traffic to either T1 or DSL/cable if the other went down.
In all, network “outages” now are transparent to customers, don’t create extra work for branch staff, and require little or no involvement from IT staff.
The new WAN appliances were installed in a branch office of Meritrust CU as a test site, which ran over a weekend with no issues. Additional locations were up and running within a week.
During the first week of deploying Talari across the network, one of Meritrust CU's T1 links went down. The credit union’s employees and customers were not affected by the failure, and there was no interruption of business because the network switched over to DSL/cable.
Meritrust CU handles ongoing maintenance and expansion of the setup on its own. IT staff learned to install a new Talari appliance remotely. As a hardware device the settings are pre-configured and pushed to the appliance in minimal time once it is installed. It no longer requires days or weeks to get up and running in the event of failure. Talari offers training and remote support accessible via the Talari Customer Support Portal for customers.
Meritrust CU achieved a number of goals by deploying Talari across its network. The occasional failure of a T1 line no longer leads to business interruptions at branches, effectively raising the level of service provided to members and accomplishing Meritrust CU's goal of putting members first.
Donna Johnson is director of product marketing at Talari Networks.
