Italian bank's multi-site data centre network modernisation success

Credito Valtellinese (Creval), an Italian banking institution, has completed deployment of a new multi-site data center network fabric using Dell EMC Powerswitch S5200-ON series switches running the Pluribus Netvisor® ONE operating system and Adaptive Cloud Fabric™ software. The fabric spans and enables two new active-active data centers which provide near-zero downtime for banking applications, ensuring a high-quality experience for Creval’s customers. The fabric was also extended to Creval’s two legacy data centers to support seamless migration of workloads to the new data centers with no service disruption to customers, eventually enabling Creval to decommission the legacy data centers after all workloads were migrated.

With expanding business operations that include more than 3,400 employees in 11 regions through a distribution network made up of 355 branches, Creval needed to modernize its data center network to meet its ever-increasing IT workloads and respond to evolving customer expectations. Its legacy network consisted of two data centers, located approximately 150 kms apart, with applications announced over a private MPLS WAN towards the 300+ bank branches. With its data center architecture based on older switches, Creval faced multiple issues related to disaster mitigation and recovery, siloed services between single data centers and outdated storage systems and firewalls among the switches.

The goal of the modernization project was to provide Creval with a highly scalable, agile and resilient data center architecture. An automated network fabric was critical to achieving these goals and, after investigating multiple networking solutions, Creval ultimately selected Pluribus Netvisor ONE running on high-performance open networking Dell 5200 series switches. Creval built two new modern data centers within 50 kms of each other and interconnected the new data centers with two 10G low latency DWDM links. Pluribus’ Adaptive Cloud Fabric solution, powered by Netvisor ONE,  enabled Creval to deploy an SDN-automated, overlay network fabric across the geographically separated data centers for operational simplicity, agility, ease of service migration and integrated analytics for visibility.

“Creval was committed to moving ahead with a solution that supported disaggregated networking and a vendor that had local support and could meet our stringent testing and service migration requirements,” said Bruno Franchetti, Chief Architect at Creval. “Among the key benefits of this network refresh with Pluribus, is a drastic streamlining of our disaster recovery procedures which has reduced Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) to minutes.”

“Creval’s application services can be distributed across both of our new data centers for resilience and there is complete flexibility in performing granular workload migration without impacting service performance,” said Iacopo Salacrist, Head of Technology Division at Creval. “The IT team now has the choice to control when to move an entire service or all services from one site to the other by just reconfiguring a pair of firewall interfaces and with a minimal impact to the service availability.”

“It continues to be our privilege to work with Creval as it experiences the technical and operational benefits of its move to disaggregated and next-generation software-defined networking,” said Kumar Srikanta, CEO Pluribus Networks “Creval is achieving significant cost savings and taking advantage of a deterministic and streamlined disaster recovery capability for smooth business functioning, enhanced visibility and analytics, as well as delivering operational efficiency with the fabric-wide automation of the Adaptive Cloud Fabric. Creval now has a world-class data center infrastructure to meet the growth needs of their business and customer expectations.”