Monitoring to the Edge with Smart Visibility in Data Center Operations
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- nGeniusONE® Service Assurance platform
- InfiniStreamNG® appliances
- nGenius® 5010 packet flow switches
- nGenius Packet Flow Extender (PFX) Software
Tech Stack
- 10gigE links
- 10G & 40G network speeds
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Customer Satisfaction
Technology Category
- Networks & Connectivity - Ethernet
- Networks & Connectivity - Network Management & Analysis Software
Applicable Industries
- Finance & Insurance
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Services
- System Integration
- Training
About The Customer
This large, long established Credit Union has all the customer facing performance and security challenges of any retail bank. Although all of their branches are in one geographical region of North America, their territory includes a major metropolitan area and the surrounding suburbs as well as beyond to some very rural locations. They offer their members a wide portfolio of services that includes investments, deposits, loans, credit card services, and wealth management options. The Credit Union has the same goals as other financial institutions when it comes to providing their customers with ways to do their banking as flexibly and conveniently as possible. This has led to the introduction of applications for smart devices, web portals, and enhanced customer experience with call centers. Their business is growing both organically and through acquisition, and the organization is constructing a new data center to better support their members throughout the region.
The Challenge
The Credit Union was experiencing growth in business operations and needed to review their existing data center, network, and application monitoring investments. They concluded that the Network Security and the Network Operations team did not have the required visibility into all their traffic in all locations. Their requirements include visibility into their many network protocols and business applications, performance analysis of customer facing applications, trending of overall traffic utilization, utilization by application, alongside network bandwidth and capacity. They needed a solution that would support their operations today, as well as in the future, as they implemented their digital transformation strategies for the credit union. They needed to deploy a monitoring solution that had visibility from their core network at the new Data Center location to the edge where customer transactions take place.
The Solution
The IT team addressed these long- and short-term challenges by implementing nGenius 5010 packet flow switches (PFS) to monitor many 10G network links at the company’s data center locations, while providing the abilities to aggregate, replicate, and manage the flows of traffic throughout the network. The PFS then delivers specific network traffic to downstream monitoring systems, such as the InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) 9700 series used here, often over even higher speed links such as 40G. The nGenius 5010 contributes to the future proofing goal by being flexible with available 10G and 40G ports able to be quickly configured to monitor new network segments or feed new tools as the network grows. By selecting the software model of the PFS, the credit union gained significant cost advantages as well. By installing the nGenius PFX Software, the advanced aggregation, distribution, and packet de-duplication features they needed today were provided. Further, both the PFS and the PFX met the future-proof goal because of the platforms’ flexibility to be upgraded to support enhanced security or capacity requirements at a later date.
Operational Impact
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