Meritrust Credit Union turns to Talari's Mercury APN WAN appliances

SAN JOSE, USA: Talari Networks Inc., a leading innovator in WAN reliability and application quality, 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.