“We're able to generate reports, monitor growth in traffic, and forecast based on the trends of the traffic, when upgrades to the network may be required. It's a very valuable tool from the engineering perspective because we can look and see what the current traffic situations are, and then model what a new application's impact may be to the network and how to design that particular circuit appropriately. There is just a host of value that is there today that we didn't have at our disposal ... The biggest surprise to us was how quickly we could drill down to a problem on the desktop. Before we would have to put analyzers on the circuit and then try to determine what the problem was. Whereas with the nGenius Solution, in just a matter of a couple of clicks we had drilled down to where the real root cause of the discrepancy was located and got it quickly corrected.”-- AVP and Manager of Network Services, UMB Bank
“It is a great tool for making sure the type of bandwidth you are putting out there is being utilized, and if not, letting you go back and configure the right bandwidth, ultimately improving our WAN budgeting.”
-- Network Engineer, UMB Bank
Customer Profile - UMB Bank is a subsidiary and the lead bank of UMB Financial Corporation which is a multi-bank holding company headquartered in Kansas City, Mo., offering complete banking, asset management and related financial services to both individual and business customers nationwide. Its banking subsidiaries own and operate 139 banking centers throughout Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, Colorado, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Arizona. Besides UMB Bank, other subsidiaries of the holding company include an investment services group based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a trust management company in South Dakota and single-purpose companies that deal with brokerage services, consulting services and insurance.
Vendor Profile - NetScout Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTCT) has been an industry pacesetter for advanced network and service assurance solutions for over a decade, and counts the world's largest enterprises, government agencies, and service providers among its customers. Enterprise and government IT organizations deploy NetScout's nGenius(R) Performance Management System to increase service levels to their users by reducing or preventing service disruptions. Service providers depend on NetScout's proven IP performance management technology and expertise to protect the quality of their customers' experience with IP-based services. NetScout is headquartered in Westford, Massachusetts and has offices worldwide.
The nGenius® Solution Helps UMB Bank Assure Application Performance Throughout VoIP Implementation
nGenius® Performance Management Solution Provides UMB with Application Awareness for Network Troubleshooting, Forecasting and Planning
Problem
UMB Bank needed to execute a major network redesign to ensure that delivery of their business applications did not degrade during the gradual VoIP rollout throughout their enterprise network.
Challenge
To complete a major network redesign in preparation for a gradual transition to VoIP telephony services, they needed to know what applications were running in their network as well as the bandwidth consumption enterprisewide in order to make final recommendations and decisions on how to execute the network changes. They lacked this visibility in tools they were using currently.
Solution
The combination of nGenius® Performance Manager with strategically deployed nGenius® Probes provided detailed visibility into their current application activity and bandwidth capacity as well and the information needed for forecasting and planning for future changes.
Result
By implementing the nGenius® Performance Management System, UMB is successfully executing its long-term strategy of migrating its phone system onto a converged VoIP network as well as gaining the ongoing performance management visibility necessary to plan further changes and growth.
Introduction
UMB Bank, a multi-bank holding company, headquartered in Kansas City, offers complete banking and other related financial services to both individual and business consumers. They employ approximately 3,500 people located at more than 150 banking offices throughout six mid-western states. In order to keep operations running smoothly, UMB needs to protect the performance of Mosaic, their customized application for customer financial record keeping as well as assure the quality of their new VoIP services.
The IT team knew that to ensure the best user experience with the new IP telephony, as well as protect the performance of their business data applications, they needed to plan, plan, and plan some more. They began by auditing the existing network, both at the data center level and at the 150+ branch locations. nGenius® Gigabit Ethernet Probes monitored the data center core while nGenius® OC-3c ATM Probes monitored the WAN network that communicated with the branches. nGenius® Performance Manager displayed who the top users were and the bandwidth utilization for these key parts of the network, as well as which applications, such as HTTP, Citrix, and Mosiac where contributing to the utilization.
Where the nGenius Solution measured the actual activity in their network and displayed this information in automated daily, weekly, and monthly nGenius NewsPaper reports published over the web, the IT organization could see precisely what the utilization was and forecast where they would need to make adjustments to accommodate the traffic volume expected once VoIP was added.
Troubleshooting with the nGenius Solution
The IT organization had established processes in their department regarding maintenance work and network traffic to avoid interrupting critical customer-facing applications during business hours. One process established two servers for re-imaging new personal computers (PCs) when they came on-line for the first time. The server performed the re-image for the campus PCs immediately, while the one for the branch offices was done over the WAN at non-peak times. While deploying new PCs to a branch location, the branch staff noticed a dramatic slowdown in response time for their networked applications.
By using the nGenius Solution to troubleshoot the problem, the IT staff initially saw that the WAN circuit to the branch office was completely overutilized. Easy to execute drill-downs displayed the source and destination IP addresses letting them uncover that the PCs were being re-imaged in realtime and they were hitting the wrong server. When the IT staff interrupted the process and arranged for it to be rescheduled to later that night, the WAN segment to the branch office became available for regular banking transactions.
UMB Bank's ongoing use of the nGenius Performance Management Solution
UMB Bank chose the nGenius Solution because it provided detailed visibility into virtually all of their applications as well as graphical, historical reports of network performance.
The nGenius Solution offered UMB Bank a variety of capabilities that helped them gradually roll out their VoIP conversion. They produced customized reports that detailed the impact of their VoIP rollout, as well as additional network traffic caused by the build out of a critical new datacenter used for backup of financial databases. They also realized benefits from other key capabilities inherent in the nGenius Solution.
• Sophisticated application identification
The nGenius Solution can recognize custom applications running in the network, as well as complex applications, like Mosaic, which runs over a range of ports, helping to maintain the quality delivery of business applications during the migration to VoIP.
• Detailed network and application analysis
As UMB Bank was rolling out their VoIP initiative, they were also initiating a new QoS policy to give voice priority delivery, while customer facing and back office applications would be delivered in other QoS classes. The nGenius Solution can track the segments, virtual circuits and associated QoS levels for display and review in real-time or in NewsPaper reports as well as the applications within those QoS classes.
• Intuitive, customized reporting
Graphs can make large volumes of data much simpler to comprehend. The nGenius Solution can easily produce both prescheduled and automated daily, weekly, or monthly NewsPaper reports for separate executive and technical audiences, as well as create ad hoc reports directly from a particular screen for sharing with business stakeholders.
• In-depth, trend analysis
The nGenius Solution aggregates and analyzes collected statistics. It provides an automated analysis of the data for monitored segment baselines, trend calculations, and growth forecasts. In addition, nGenius Performance Manager Workspaces can display all relevant information on a single screen, facilitating the
human analytical process.
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