Meca Inox specializes in the design and manufacture of high-performance valves for demanding industrial environments.
Sector
Industry
Perimeter
WAN & MPLS
The starting point & challenges
Meca Inox faces several challenges with its SD-WAN infrastructure: insufficient transit capacity, high costs—including throughput-based licensing fees for termination equipment—and limited responsiveness from the existing solution.
The company therefore decided to launch a tender for telecommunications links across its various sites, including requirements for edge security.
The goal & the plan
After a thorough analysis, Mountain Men proposed a radical solution: replace the existing SD-WAN infrastructure with its MPLS solution.
At first glance, this might seem like a step backward, since SD-WAN is often seen as the successor to MPLS VPN, offering greater scalability and cost efficiency.
But when you focus on the actual requirements, MPLS emerges as the most logical choice to meet Meca Inox’s needs: increase bandwidth and simplify operations.
Simple and straightforward, like a single axe blow!
Build
What’s on the agenda? A lot on the IT Lumberjacks’ plate: migrating the existing ISP setup from SD-WAN to Mountain Men’s MPLS VPN solution, significantly increasing bandwidth and providing dual links through two different network operators at each site.
Bonus: Centralized security through a firewall cluster hosted in our datacenter, as part of our core network firewall service.
Cherry on the log?
Dual FTTO connections at each site, using BGP and BFD to enable near-instantaneous, seamless failover from the primary link to the backup—with no service disruption.
Run
A smooth migration that gave Meca Inox a solution better suited to its needs, while maintaining control over security through a core network firewall jointly managed by Mountain Men and Meca Inox.
Although this migration wasn’t Meca Inox’s first choice, the company certainly doesn’t regret following the IT Lumberjacks’ recommendation. As an added bonus, the new setup helped rationalize costs, increase bandwidth and network resilience, and improve operational agility.
MPLS VPN vs SD WAN : The Big Mix-Up
Often wrongly marketed as an “MPLS killer,” SD-WAN is increasingly becoming part of telecom operators’ offerings in response to demand from businesses. This perception is largely rooted in a long-standing marketing misconception.
MPLS has traditionally been associated with links offering guaranteed bandwidth and high service-level commitments, such as SDSL and FTTO fibre. Naturally, these links have historically been more expensive than connections offering no guaranteed bandwidth, asymmetric speeds, and lower service-level commitments, such as ADSL and FTTH.
However, this is a fundamental misconception: MPLS is a transport technology, so it can operate over virtually any type of connection —FTTO or FTTH fibre, microwave links, or even 4G/5G or satellite connections.
The Mountain Men team is responsive, efficient, and professional. Whether it was the migration, relocating our sites, or dealing with a few technical issues, they always found a fast and effective solution.
My management team and I are very satisfied with Mountain Men.”
