Largest Kansas-chartered Credit Union Credits Talari for Improving Network Performance Across its 15 Locations and Call Center
SAN JOSE, Calif. – June 27, 2013 – Talari NetworksTM Inc., a leading innovator in WAN reliability and application quality, today announced Meritrust Credit Union, the largest Kansas-chartered credit union, has gained more bandwidth, network reliability and resiliency by deploying Talari’s Mercury APN (Adaptive Private Networking) WAN appliances across its 14 branch locations, corporate office and call center, which serves its more than 75,000 members.
Prior to installing Talari’s WAN appliances, the basic structure of Meritrust’s Wide Area Network (WAN) left it vulnerable to outages negatively affecting customer experience, as well as employee productivity. Each of Meritrust’s branch offices were connected to the data center over a single 1.544 Mbps T1 circuit. If a link went down, that branch would lose connectivity to both applications and data hosted at the central site. Even the branch’s ATM machine would be affected, leaving customers unable to complete transactions. The credit union needed a more reliable network to handle the uninterrupted, quality delivery of business-critical, real-time applications, such as VoIP calls to the data center, member banking transactions and video security feeds at each location ― even during network outages, link failures and nightly data center backups.
After considering a switch to a Metro Ethernet system and other similar solutions that could provide increased bandwidth, but could not ensure more network reliability, Meritrust turned to Talari to gain both capabilities through one solution.
The benefits to Meritrust using Talari include:
- Seamless failover – Talari senses the failure of a network link and reroutes traffic instantly, preventing dropped sessions and maximizing WAN availability. Outages are transparent to users and demand little or no involvement by IT staff.
- Full link utilization – Talari allows Meritrust to utilize DSL/cable bandwidth all the time, not just when a T1 link goes down. The solution provides the added bandwidth Meritrust wanted. Without Talari, it was not cost-justified having an underutilized link.
- Lower cost – By retaining the existing T1 circuits, Meritrust avoided the higher cost of migrating to Metro Ethernet. Additionally, the credit union was able to increase its bandwidth to fully support all banking functions by augmenting those T1s with the use of lower cost bandwidth sources.
- Built-in security – Compliance with security requirements is an ongoing issue for organizations in the financial services industry. Talari provided Meritrust with a built-in capability to securely encrypt communications over the credit union’s private T1 DSL lines.
“The installation and ease of use was phenomenal,” said Meritrust’s SVP-CIO Wade Bruendl. “Within one day, Talari’s WAN appliances were installed in our test center, which ran over the weekend with no issues. Other locations were up and running within a week. In fact, during the first week of having Talari installed at all locations, we had a failure at one of our sites and because Talari was there, no one at the branch even noticed. Most importantly, our employees and our customers were not affected by the failure and we were able to conduct business as usual. Talari’s appliances dynamically aggregate multiple broadband links and take real-time mitigating action to redirect packets on a per-packet basis to the best performing path with the least packet loss and lowest jitter, which gives us the network reliability we need ― it’s rock solid!”
“Meritrust has received national recognition for the value it delivers to its members and ranked in the top 20 of best performing credit unions in the nation by SNL Financial. This recognition is due to a sophisticated IT operation on the cutting-edge of innovative technology trends, such as Talari’s WAN appliances,” said Talari’s Director of Product Marketing Donna Johnson. “With Talari, Meritrust has gained more bandwidth, network reliability and resiliency, and real-time, business-critical application performance predictability across all its sites.”
At the heart of Talari’s Mercury WAN appliances is its patented APNware operating software, which aggregates broadband, leased-line and other links to achieve greater reliability. APNware performs sub-second analysis and builds a real-time map of the quality of those links to determine where to send each packet, then applies a Quality of Service (QoS) engine to prioritize which applications use the best links at any given time. The end result is a highly resilient WAN seamlessly adapting to changing conditions in the underlying network and ensures applications operate without disruption and at a high level of quality.
More at www.talari.com