“... it [is] absolutely essential that our network always operates at peak efficiency. We chose NetScout's nGenius® Solution to assure the reliability and business-critical performance of our Gigabit Ethernet network.”-- Network Engineer, Commerzbank
Customer Profile - Commerzbank AG is the second-largest bank in Germany and headquartered in Frankfurt. Commerzbank is mainly active in commercial banking, retail banking and mortgaging, and holds a nationwide network of branch offices throughout Germany and numerous branch offices all over the EU and Europe (namely Luxembourg, Poland, Spain and Switzerland) and with a leading market share in online banking.
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.
P r o b l e m
One of the largest and most technically advanced investment banking companies in Europe needed to ensure the performance and availability of a new, high-speed network that supported its state-of-the-art trading floor and virtual traders in offices throughout Europe.
C h a l l e n g e
Ensure that traders do not experience any slowdowns or outages that could compromise trading activity.
S o l u t i o n
NetScout’s nGenius® Performance Manager and nGenius® Probes deployed within the Commerzbank network core for monitoring and troubleshooting the trading environment and associated European branch offices.
R e s u l t
Through the nGenius® Solution, Commerzbank efficiently rolled out a new trading floor in Frankfurt supported by a Gigabit Ethernet core network, realized cost savings on expensive WAN links, and ensured the delivery of critical networked applications. Commerzbank has been able to stay ahead of potential performance issues, understand the sources of abnormal data traffic, predict how traffic will impact critical business application performance, and improve the banking experience for both internal and external customers.
Commerzbank Turns to NetScout’s nGenius® Performance Management Solution To Assure the Performance of Trading Network
Real-Time Visibility into High Speed Network Ensures Reliability for One of Europe’s Largest Trading Floors Real-Time Network Visibility Solution
Ensuring Consistent Service
Commerzbank is one of Europe’s leading commercial and investment banks. Based in Frankfurt, Germany, Commerzbank has over fifty subsidiaries, 726 branches and 33,327 employees worldwide. The network core that supports the trading environment is critical to business success and high availability is a must. Commerzbank operates one of the largest trading floors in Europe. Its network supports the delivery of thousands of high-value transactions and serves the needs of the bank’s large geographically dispersed trading group and any degradation in network performance could immediately translate into lost revenue for the business.
When Commerzbank began planning for the installation of its new, state-of-the-art trading floor, they knew that the availability and performance of the supporting network would be instrumental to the floor's success. For managing performance, the bank already had traditional performance reporting tools, but those tools were not sufficient to prevent the huge revenue losses that could result from a poorly performing network. They needed a more proactive solution, one that would expose network and application performance anomalies, as well as problems related to the network’s overall architecture and how its bandwidth was being consumed. Additionally, Commerzbank needed a live, system-wide perspective to view all data that traversed the network infrastructure, ranging from the highest-level status summaries down to the very detailed protocol and packet level information.
Commerzbank chose NetScout’s nGenius® Performance Management Solution, which is comprised of nGenius® Performance Manager and nGenius® Probes. By strategically placing NetScout's application-aware probes throughout the network and deploying NetScout's unified performance management application, Commerzbank gained clear insight into the status of its infrastructure resources and the nature of network activity as it occurred. “It is critical to our business to maintain as close to perfect performance as possible,” said Zeljko Smetko, network support, IT Production of Commerzbank. “We selected NetScout’s nGenius solution to ensure the reliability and performance of our trading network because of its ability to expose which applications or activity are impacting mission-critical services. With this kind of visibility we can keep ahead of problems and ensure that our trading operations are running smoothly and incident-free.”
Within the Commerzbank network core, they deployed nGenius Gigabit Ethernet Probes in production and in back up as well as in DMZ links and environments. This enabled Commerzbank to monitor and manage trading application usage, business application usage and Internet connectivity which reduced unnecessary delays in trading, optimized key business processes and minimized the cost of unnecessary links.
Application Visibility – A Key to Success
Commerzbank uses proprietary applications that are regularly accessed by its traders. With nGenius, they could see who was using the applications, how much bandwidth was being consumed and how it affected the performance of the rest of the network. This information proved essential in gaining proactive control of the network and managing the integrity of traffic throughout the infrastructure. The monitoring of numerous applications at any one time, especially custom applications developed internally, was a particularly powerful benefit.
Preventing and Containing Costs – Tangible Results
The cost of additional and unnecessary external network links can be expensive, so cost containment is a very practical business policy. When branch offices request network services bandwidth increases, Commerzbank uses the nGenius Solution to analyze traffic patterns and consider alternative network routing. After deployment of the nGenius Solution, a branch office requested an Internet link. The nGenius Solution demonstrated that traffic could be rerouted through a different location, in this case, Frankfurt, helping the Bank to avoid the additional local connection charges.
Cost savings can also be substantial with the nGenius Solution deployed. When a major European office experienced data saturation on expensive WAN links, the network management team used the nGenius Solution to analyze the applications and their priority to the business. The information reported that 75% of the traffic was not business critical and the link was actually downsized with agreement from the business unit’s application team.
Improving Business Processes – Ensuring Network Service Delivery
Commerzbank has gained many business and IT process improvements from the deployment of the nGenius Solution, including the implementation of both a security policy and an application quality assurance policy within the Commerzbank System Integration Process. The Bank distinguishes between “certified” and “uncertified” applications. They can identify any uncertified applications that may abuse the network infrastructure by using the nGenius Solution to monitor applications and port usage. This is important because these uncertified applications may interfere with the smooth delivery of more critical certified ones and expose the network and systems to potential security infringements.
Not all applications are suited for or written to run optimally within the Commerzbank network infrastructure. By using the sophisticated application monitoring features of the nGenius Solution, the Bank can identify applications that must be rewritten before they degrade the network’s performance and impact critical business applications and processes. The nGenius Solution enables the network operations, applications and business representative team to review vast quantities of often-complex network performance data in easy to understand tables and graphs. All representatives share the common data and reporting built into nGenius Performance Manager allowing them to make quicker and better-informed decisions.
Post-deployment, the nGenius Solution has allowed Commerzbank to focus extra care on the performance of key business activity. For example, they now proactively set alarms on the response time of key revenue generating applications so that slowdowns are flagged before they affect users. Additionally, by using a combination of pro-active and reactive alarming when issues occur they can conduct root cause analysis and implement measures and policies to avoid the reoccurrence of the event. “The nGenius Solution helps us proactively identify network anomalies and resolve network problems faster than before,” said Mr. Smetko. “NetScout solutions provide in-depth views into network application performance, helping us better manage availability and application response time”.
Customer Satisfaction – The Most Important Consideration
Internationally, Commerzbank is very well respected. Customer satisfaction, a vital business driver within their highly competitive marketplace, needs to be constantly monitored and improved. Commerzbank has found additional business benefits from the nGenius Solution. The network and application teams can continuously assess application response times in order to improve application performance for both the business units and Commerzbank traders, thus improving the overall banking experience for everyone.
Conclusion
By aggressively embracing the power of the nGenius Performance Management System, Commerzbank has gained more visibility into the performance of their critical trading applications as well as the other applications that constitute their business. They are now successfully monitoring the high-speed, high-volume traffic on the Gigabit Ethernet core of their trading floor network, and most importantly maintain a high level of customer satisfaction, both internally and externally.
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