Avoiding costly MPLS upgrades by using network emulation to deploy SD-WAN

The retailer, with large offices in Pennsylvania and Seattle, formerly had MPLS WAN. They switched to SD-WAN (Dual MPLS and Internet connectivity) saving $380k per year by down-grading their 1Gb/s MPLS link to 250Mb/s. A strategy that showed up well on the balance sheet.

However, the VoIP service degraded significantly after switchover due to suspected MPLS link congestion. Rather than spending $120k to upgrade the MPLS link service, they instead decided to invest in the Calnex Network Emulator.

By creating latency and loss scenarios, they tested the VoIP Quality thus establishing loss, latency and jitter limits at which VoIP degraded. The retailer then added these numbers into their SLA with their SD-WAN provider. The SD-WAN provider entered these numbers into their ‘MPLS link switchover limits’ so that if latency, loss or jitter came close to the limits, nonVoIP traffic was offloaded to the Internet.

The retailer was able to stick to the existing SD-WAN service saving them the $120k per year.