User Excellence: WAMU banks on MPLS

摘要

Bankers as a group tend to be risk-averse. So in June 2002 as Washington Mutual moved toward finalizing contracts for a huge Multi-protocol Label Switching-based network, CIO Jerry Gross was getting nervous. The nation's seventh-largest bank was poised to commit millions to the project, a gamble of sorts on a technology used more by big carriers than corporations. In fact, WaMu wanted MPLS for the same reasons a Tier 1 ISP does ― it scales readily; segments easily, with connections and teardowns handled automatically; and handily accommodates big surges in demand, says Nabil Badr, the company's resident protocol genius, who architected the network.