National Bank of Abu Dhabi With Silver Peak

One of the largest lender banks in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD), improved its DR strategy and enhanced application performance with Silver Peak Systems, Inc.‘s WAN optimization.

With Silver Peak instances in its offices, NBAD improved bandwidth utilization by 5x and reduced costs so that the bank realized a nearly immediate ROI.

NBAD is a global bank with 150 branch offices across 14 countries. The 5,000 users in those offices rely on custom banking applications, as well as Citrix virtual desktops, both provided from NBAD’s two data centers. An MPLS, IP-VPN network connects all the offices at various speeds and the two data centers at 400 Mbps. Data is replicated between data centers for DR purposes.

As the bank grew, so did its bandwidth requirements. Application performance began to suffer, particularly for its core banking application. DR efforts were also jeopardized as the company began missing its RPOs.

NBAD considered adding bandwidth to its MPLS network, but the upgrade proved too expensive. The additional bandwidth would not address the latency issues undermining data replication performance. Instead, Gulf IT Network Distribution Fz LLC, a hardware and software distributor, recommended WAN optimization, a solution that would maximize WAN throughput without the need for additional costly bandwidth.

“Silver Peak posted better deduplication performance, shortening replication between our data centers,” says Aymen Mohammed Ahmed, lead network architect, NBAD.

Silver Peak also resolves a larger number of the critical WAN problems, such as congestion and significant amounts of packet loss, and other latency challenges. Its simplified approach made deployment easy, fitting into NBAD’s existing IT infrastructure. Silver Peak’s long-standing partnership with EMC and integration with the company’s existing EMC and Brocade replication environment sealed the deal.

“As a high-speed financial organization and with many strict rules and regulations to follow, optimizing the network infrastructure became crucial to executing an effective DR strategy and coping with the growing amount of data being transferred across our network,” says Ahmed. “We have many remote offices and were constantly dealing with poor application performance, which is just not acceptable in this fast-moving industry. We needed a solution that would be easy to use and solve all of our network capacity, latency and quality issues, without the worry of escalating bandwidth costs.“

Since deploying Silver Peak across its global IT network, NBAD has recovered the cost of its MPLS network – registering a savings of $200,000 per month. Bandwidth consumption has been reduced by up to five times, allowing NBAD to replicate more data and meet its RPOs.

NBAD also gained in other ways. Security improved through Silver Peak’s accelerated encryption. NBAD has also enhanced load balancing between BT and Orange, the bank’s two global service providers.

“Silver Peak not only improved our application performance, but even paid for itself,” says Ahmed. “A Silver Peak-powered WAN means our business is no longer hampered by network limitations; we have been able to implement a sound DR strategy and maximize the performance of our home grown banking applications in a fast, easy, and efficient manner.“