Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 48 | Page 63

Case

STUDY

The move to open networking and next-generation software-defined networking has offered a leading Italian banking institution , Creval , significant technical and operational benefits . The organisation has upgraded its data centre infrastructure , with greater capacity for improved performance . Bruno Franchetti , Chief Network Architect , Creval Group , discusses how the organisation worked with Pluribus Networks and tells us how Creval now has world-class data centre infrastructure which meets the growth needs of its business and customer expectations .

Credito Valtellinese modernises its network to improve operational resilience and agility

Creval is a medium-sized banking institution with more than 3,400 employees , present in 11 Italian regions through a distribution network made up of 355 branches .

Network challenges
Over the years , Creval has expanded its business operations across Italy , added new services , staff and branch offices . In order to meet the needs of a growing business , the IT team realised that its network needed to be modernised to meet the ever-increasing IT workloads and respond to the changing customer expectations .
The legacy network consisted of two data centres located approximately 150 kms apart . The applications hosted by these data centres were announced over a private MPLS WAN towards 300 + bank branches . The legacy data centre architecture was based on older switches and created the following challenges :
• Disaster Recovery : The ability to migrate services from one data centre to another was not deterministic . The Recovery Time Objective ( RTO ) for a full Disaster Recovery was four days , which was unacceptable from a business perspective .
• Localised services independently managed : From a load distribution perspective , all services were localised to a single data centre independently managed from the other one .
• Legacy systems : All networking switches , majority of the storage systems and firewalls were old and required modernisation to meet emerging requirements of the business .
Based on the network challenges , the Creval IT team came up with the following objectives for the network redesign :
Bruno Franchetti , Chief Network Architect , Creval Group
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