Most of United Federal Credit Union branch locations were connected to the corporate data center via two 1.544 Mbps T1 circuits running MPLS. Although the two circuits delivered a combined 3 Mbps, they also created a single point of failure. There was no redundancy and no provision for failure. If the MPLS connection to a branch went down, tellers were forced to operate in a down-time voucher mode, ATMs went offline, and member service advisors were unable to help members with their online tools.
UFCU faced a second challenge. While the 3 Mbps throughput was adequate at the moment, overall growth and anticipated new applications would soon outstrip available bandwidth.
The credit union contemplated adding a third T1 to each branch. Although expensive, that would offer the needed bandwidth to expand, but would do nothing to alleviate the single point of failure. If the MPLS went down, all service to that branch would be interrupted until the service provider corrected the problem. With Time-to-Repair often taking a day or more, the quality of services members received could be seriously impaired.
UFCU alternatively considered deploying a local router running Hot Standby Routing Protocol (HSRP) and an Internet connection at each branch. While this solution would provide automatic failover from the T1s to the Internet connection, the delay in completing the failover would cause any active phone conversations to drop. Furthermore, Internet bandwidth could only be utilized when a failover occurred.