CASE STUDY
1 . Streamline Disaster Recovery procedures : The key requirement for the network re-design was the need for a deterministic and streamlined Disaster Recovery strategy .
2 . Evolve to a scalable and flexible data centre architecture : Build two new data centres with an option to expand to a third or even more sites without having to re-architect the network .
3 . Operational agility : Have a unified overlay network fabric across the geographically separated data centres to enable simplified operations and workload mobility .
4 . Business Continuity : Continuity of business operations during the entire network re-design and migration process was a very important consideration for the team .
5 . Migration : Seamless migration of services from the old data centres to the new data centres was a key requirement of this project .
Dell-Pluribus solution
The Creval team undertook a detailed analysis of the solutions and technologies available in the market that could meet its requirements . After an extensive evaluation process , the team selected Pluribus Netvisor ONE , running on high-performance open networking Dell 5200 series switches .
The key to choosing Pluribus was based on its ability to meet all of the programme objectives and selection criteria , which included the ability to unify the data centres into a seamless multi-site fabric for operational simplicity , agility , ease of service migration , integrated analytics for visibility and the ability of the solution to scale .
Creval built two new modern data centres within a 50 km distance of each other . The two new data centres are interconnected with two 10G low latency DWDM links . To make service migration seamless , a pair of Dell-Pluribus switches interface with the existing Cisco Nexus 5500 switch . The Pluribus Adaptive Cloud Fabric ( ACF ) was able to extend the fabric from the new data centre to the old one and seamlessly connect to migrate services .
The workload migration was completed smoothly within the allocated time and after extensive testing . This solution was certified from a bank regulation compliance at the end of 2020 .
– leading to longer and mostly undeterministic RTO ,” said Bruno Franchetti , Chief Architect at Creval .
Application services can be distributed across both new data centres for resilience and there is complete flexibility in performing granular workload migration without impacting service performance . The IT team now has the choice to control when to move an entire service or all services from one site to the other , just by reconfiguring a pair of firewall interfaces and with minimal impact to the service availability .
Here , Bruno Franchetti , Chief Network Architect , Creval , discusses the solution implementation and its benefits .
Can you explain your role and the scope of your responsibility at Creval ?
I am the Chief Network Architect at Creval . I am responsible for the design and management of the corporate network , both in the data centres and the branch offices spread across Italy .
What were the driving factors behind the need to modernise your network infrastructure ?
We decided to completely redesign our data centres and our main goals were to :
• Increase reliability and scalability of our IT infrastructure with a focus on our data centre architecture .
• Improve the Disaster Recovery procedure to achieve a near to zero Recovery Point Objective ( RPO ) and a reduced and deterministic Recovery Time Objective ( RTO ) where all apps are recovered in less than five minutes .
• Reduce capital costs by leveraging disaggregated networking using white box switches and also reduce OpEx by deploying a fully-automated networking solution .
To achieve these goals , we decided to migrate our two legacy data centres to two new data centre sites and replace all computing , networking and storage gear . The biggest change for us was a much more elegant and cost-effective network design that supports an active-active architecture across the two new sites .
What changing customer expectations did you need to address ?
“ The key benefit of this network refresh with Pluribus is to have drastically streamlined the Disaster Recovery procedures and brought down the RTO to minutes for the most critical applications , and a few hours for the entire infrastructure , when before , they were complex
Creval has seen increasing usage of online banking applications by our consumer and business customers – they expect applications to be available 24 / 7 . We worked to improve the overall reliability of the data centre infrastructure and designed the new data
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