Talari NetworksTM, Inc., a leading innovator in WAN reliability and performance quality network appliances, said that that Kool Smiles, a national provider of dental care, has deployed Talari's Mercury WAN appliances to use low-cost broadband links with MPLS capabilities.
The deployment has resulted in increased network availability, reliability and QoS, and a reduction of ongoing network spend by 30+ percent.

 With a mission to provide high-quality dental care for families in underserved communities, Kool Smiles' success depends on using technology to ensure excellent quality care and drive down the cost of service across its 130 remote office locations, centralized data center and administrative and call center locations nationwide.

Although the company had a carrier-class T1 MPLS network in place that was giving them 99.8 percent availability, Kool Smiles' office staff and patients were experiencing intermittent and chronic T1 outages (sometimes lasting for days), poor application performance, slow file sharing and dropped VoIP (Voice Over IP) calls. The company's internal SLAs were 99.9+ percent and they couldn't meet that without better technology that could provide much more granular QoS. Kool Smiles was faced with the challenges to spread the network across multiple carrier circuits with more robust QoS capability, the ability to aggregate bandwidth for bursting, and seamlessly and instantly move network traffic between circuits. By adding low-cost broadband connections to the existing MPLS links, along with Talari's quality and performance capabilities, Kool Smiles achieved many performance and reliability benefits and a more granular QoS than standard carrier-class QoS.

"The QoS capabilities of Talari's appliances are much more sophisticated and responsive than single-source MPLS," said Kool Smiles' Chief Technical Architect Mark Blomquist. "Our VoIP traffic is the most critical on our network since we process tens of thousands of calls daily. With Talari, even in the case of network failure, our VoIP calls never go down ensuring an 'always-on' high quality VoIP calling experience. In addition, the algorithms we can use to identify specific applications and user groups for performance tuning are far superior and in real-time. Our ability to aggregate inexpensive broadband from multiple carriers has driven our network availability to nearly 100 percent and allows bursting over T1 rates, which we have never seen on our network."

Blomquist added, "Talari is helping us meet our priority to be efficient, eliminate waste and strive for continuous improvement so that we can accomplish our mission to provide high-quality dental care in a fun, compassionate environment."

"As real-time applications, such as collaboration tools and VoIP, become more prevalent in the enterprise, managing QoS on a more granular level will be critical for business productivity and success. Our Mercury appliances can see what's consuming the bandwidth in real-time and take immediate mitigating action, while driving down on-going WAN costs and achieving greater network resiliency and application performance predictability," said Talari's Director of Marketing Donna Johnson. "Kool Smiles’ success makes the company an inspiration for other organizations that are seeking to cut costs in concert with adopting real-time applications that make the workforce more productive, but inherently demand more network resources."