No Down-time for Orange County Teachers Federal Union Online Banking Services with Radware’s Application Front End Solution
Customer Company Size
Mid-size Company
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Radware’s Application Front End (AFE) solution
- Radware’s Web Server Director (WSD)
- CertainT100s (CT-100)
Tech Stack
- Load Balancing
- SSL Offloading
- Automatic Failover
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Customer Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
Applicable Industries
- Finance & Insurance
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Fleet Management
- Cybersecurity
Services
- System Integration
- Testing & Certification
About The Customer
The Orange County Teachers Federal Credit Union (OCTFCU), based in Tustin, CA, is a not-for-profit financial cooperative that performs banking services for its 350,000 school employee members. It offers retail banking services online, at ATMs and in 24 branches spread across the southern-California county. While formed for mutual support and not-for-profit, the credit union is still subject to the strict regulations and fierce competition of any consumer bank, and held to the same online response and reliability standards. OCTFCU offers standard financial institution applications like checking, savings, check requests, and money transfers between accounts. Online bill paying was added in 2007. OCTFCU started its online banking service in 2001. Today it runs its banking self-service and its public Website out of four front-end servers and two back-end servers at its corporate site in Tustin and a back-up site in Irvine. Branches are linked to both sites across an MPLS, hub-andspoke network.
The Challenge
The Orange County Teachers Federal Credit Union (OCTFCU) offers retail banking services online, at ATMs and in 24 branches spread across the southern-California county. With concurrent sessions as high as 6,000 users per day with $150,000 changing hands every hour, the credit union’s online portal had to be fast, secure, reliable and available around the clock. Simple load balancing between its Web servers became inadequate to this task; seamless failover was needed. The credit union’s server farm had needed load balancers for its backend servers and initially, it had used Cisco’s Local Director and Content Services Switches. That went some way toward keeping applications responsive, but when its banking services went online to the public, the credit union needed something far more reliable: It needed to be able to detect a server’s imminent failure and divert traffic to another server while the faulty server was taken out of the farm for scrutiny. All this had to be done without interruption to its online service, and without customers feeling any “glitch.”
The Solution
After onsite testing with load balancing and application delivery products from F5 and Radware, the credit union decided to migrate to Radware’s Web Server Director (WSD). The system administrators in charge of front-end Web servers were also sold on Radware’s WSD for its easy-to-use and intuitive user interface. While Doublet’s network team uses a command-line interface, application server programmers and administrators prefer a GUI, and liked Radware’s in particular. The credit union data center deployed two WSDs for load balancing and application optimization and four CertainT100s (CT-100) for exclusive SSL offloading, which free up the servers for maximum performance. If customers are on an application screen when a server starts to malfunction, WSD takes that server out of the loop. It re-directs traffic to another front-end server and refreshes the customer session to the log-in screen. Doublet was also impressed by Radware’s support in the installation and deployment of its products. A Radware engineer was onsite for three weeks for installation and deployment.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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