Intelligent Data Centres Issue 35 | Page 47

END USER INSIGHT
Bruno Franchetti , Chief Network Architect , Creval Group

CREVAL MODERNISES ITS NETWORK TO IMPROVE OPERATIONAL RESILIENCE AND AGILITY

The move to open networking and next-generation software-defined networking has offered a leading Italian banking intitution , Credito Valtellinese ( 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 worldclass data centre infrastructure which meets the growth needs of its business and customer expectations . reval is a medium-sized

C 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 are localised www . intelligentdatacentres . com
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