NBAD improves bandwidth utilization by 5x with Silver Peak WAN optimization   

The National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD), a leading lender bank in the UAE, has improved disaster recovery (DR) strategy and enhanced application performance using Silver Peak wide area network (WAN) optimization solutions.

With Silver Peak to optimize the network, NBAD improved bandwidth utilization by 5x and reduced costs so significantly that the bank realized a nearly immediate return-on-investment (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.

The bank relied on an MPLS, IP-VPN network to connect 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. Disaster recovery efforts were also jeopardized as the company began missing its recovery point objectives (RPOs).

NBAD considered adding bandwidth to its MPLS network, but the upgrade proved too expensive. Further the additional bandwidth would not address the latency issues undermining data replication performance. To address this dilemma, the company turned to WAN optimization.

Silver Peak delivered better deduplication performance, shortening replication between our data centers, said Aymen Mohammed Ahmed, lead network architect at NBAD.

Silver Peak was also successful in resolving a larger number of the critical WAN problems, such as congestion and significant amounts of packet loss, and other latency challenges.

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.

Additionally NBAD also found that 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.

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