I was asked the other day during one of our webinars, whether an internet VPN ( Cisco, Watchguard, Sonicwall, etc.) can be used to provide redundancy for an MPLS network. The answer is yes. This provides a very cost effective backup for your wide area network. With very temporary usage, it becomes viable to utilize low cost broadband as a source of internet access.
Assuming that you have configured your hardware internet VPN and your MPLS network, you will have two routes, one through the MPLS network and the other through the hardware VPN, each with different metrics. The route with the lower metric will be the preferred route (MPLS) and used as the primary link. The route with the higher metric will serve as the backup. Cisco has some sample configurations here: http://tiny.cc/cisco_config .
You will need to configure primary and backup routes on the HQ MPLS router.
What I just described looks easy if you know what you are doing. But, as with most matters related to router configuration and networking, if you don’t know what you are doing, you will probably save money hiring someone to do the configuration for you. Remember, your time is money.
