Optimising the network

When financial services group HBOS Australia’s retail banking arm, BankWest, decided the time was right to expand into the eastern states it quickly realised it had a problem. It didn’t want to build an east coast data centre but at the same time realised that running east coast branches off the West Australian data centre would lead to unacceptably slow application response times. In response, last year the group implemented what was at the time one of the most ambitious WAN optimisation deployments
in Australia.

HBOS Australia’s history dates back to 1995 when The Bank of Scotland (BOS) commenced a rapid expansion of its overseas activities and as part of that push acquired 100 percent of BankWest from the Western Australian state government and established the operations of BOS International and Capital Finance. In 1998, BOS saw a gap in the Australian market for credit insurance and established St Andrew’s Insurance (Australia) Pty Ltd. The company then merged with Halifax in 2001 to become a major force in banking in the United Kingdom and create the HBOS plc group.

WAN optimisation is a software and hardware technology play designed to accelerate the response of applications accessed by distributed users. Using software on dedicated appliances that sit between the office network and the WAN, the technology generally works by eliminating redundant transmissions, staging data in local caches, compressing and prioritising data and streamlining chatty protocols.

HBOS Australia had already done a test implementation of Riverbed’s Steelhead WAN optimisation appliances in its Perth data centre so the decision was made to roll it out across the company as part of the east coast expansion. “The big driver was application performance and consistency of performance, we wanted to get some consistent LAN-like performance from our applications,” said HBOS Australia networks and telecommunications manager, IT infrastructure, Adrian Cowman.

“At the time we were looking at expanding our branch network, [which meant] we were going to be putting more people on the system. We also had a number of applications which didn’t perform very well in a WAN environment so we wanted consistent application performance as well. We already had a very small investment in Riverbed technology at the time on two links and a pretty good idea as to how effective the technology was. So it was kind of an obvious choice to look at expanding our use of it.”

HBOS Australia certainly did expand its use of Riverbed appliances. Over a period of 45 days, the group deployed Steelhead units to 170 sites across Australia in concert with systems integrator Dimension Data and Riverbed technical services. “I’m long in the tooth and I’ve been burned by so many projects over the years I was concerned to start off with that I was being ambitious and aggressive about the rollout schedule,” Cowman said. “In hindsight it was realistic. It was run pretty well but we put a lot of work into planning for it, especially the technical lead from Dimension Data. The feedback was that it was very well planned at a technical level in terms of people and design. And most importantly the rollout didn’t cause any problems with the business.”

HBOS Australia multi protocol label switching (MPLS) network enables branch-to-branch communications but the bulk of the system is data centre-centric. “As a result we have some high end Riverbed boxes in the data centre and we have sized the rest of the Steelhead units for the branches based on the size of the branch and capacity of the link,” said Cowman.

“It’s down to how many TCP sessions each branch is expected to run and that comes down to a calculation based on the number of users. So we’ve got some big Steelhead 6020s in the data centres and then the branches range in size from a 3020 model in some of the very large offices to typically somewhere between a 520 and 1520 in the smaller branches.”
The benefits of the technology became apparent as each site was rolled out. “The first benefit we saw was that the appliances did what they were expected to do, which was providing good application performance,” said Cowman.

Another benefit which HBOS Australia wasn’t seeking with the deployment of the technology but it now values highly is the Riverbed appliances have reduced the amount of traffic on the network which allows for more effective use of the group’s WAN links. “If you’re cost conscious as an organisation it does mean you can reduce some of your WAN costs,” said Cowman.

“In our case one of the important things for us was to make sure these things were cost effective and they would pay for themselves – and they do. We had a formula we worked internally in terms of how do we justify putting a unit there based on WAN costs, we ran the formula, applied it and basically justified why we should put these boxes out there as opposed to getting more bandwidth and we’ve been quite successful doing that. “We now do regular capacity reviews and we look at each link and the Riverbeds definitely reduce the volume of traffic and provide a more acceptable performance to end users. We haven’t put it in any traffic shaping requirements. We’ve plugged the boxes in the middle of the network and they start caching traffic and optimising and by doing that they reduce the volume of traffic being transmitted.”

Another side benefit for HBOS Australia of the Riverbed implementation is the unprecedented visibility the technology gives into the group’s network said Riverbed’s technical lead on the project, Damien Murphy. “By putting the Steelheads out there HBOS actually found out a lot more about their network. We actually proved out other things such as one instance where there was a problem with a Lotus Notes backend which HBOS had connectivity problems with. Because the Steelheads have full monitoring capability they were able to see what was happening between the server and the client and analyse the problem.”

Cowman stresses, however, that HBOS Australia’s implementation was never about saving costs or improving network manageability. “Deploying the Riverbed technology was about performance, giving branch staff systems that would work the way we want them to work. If you have a fairly static environment, a fairly strong baseline it would be fairly easy to work out a really good ROI, dropping every WAN link by 25 to 30 percent etc but if you’re an organisation that is going through rapid growth, aggressive expansion and adding more and more systems and functionality on a regular basis then it’s very hard to do that. Additionally, if you got aggressive on carriage costs you might make the business suffer in other areas such as performance.”

Once such technology has been implemented it is usually just the start of things and HBOS Australia is no exception. The group is now testing the Riverbed Steelhead Mobile client software to support its large mobile workforce, as well as investigating the possibility of using high-end Steelhead appliance platforms to streamline disaster recovery in its data centres.

And that is just the start said Cowman. “Essentially, Riverbed boxes are a server that runs a proprietary operating system that does some very smart things and there are future product releases coming through that will leverage the fact that there is a server sitting in the network that can also be leveraged to do other things.

“We don’t do anything like that yet but there are opportunities to do things more cleverly. For example, if you have a large distributed network, authentication is always a challenge because you have multiple domain controllers in your environment. So if you open a new branch with 40 or 50 people you’re faced with the decision, do I put another server out in my network for them to authenticate against? The obvious question we would ask Riverbed is whether there is something clever we can do with the Riverbed server for authentication.”

Another possibility is print servers. “One of the functions Riverbed does do is a print server, so if printing was important enough to put a server out there just for print serving, using the Riverbed would be an opportunity to remove 170 servers from the network. We don’t use it for that and we don’t have 170 print servers but it is an example of what can be done.”

Ultimately, however, Cowman believes that WAN acceleration technology is a bread and butter component of modern IT infrastructure.

“From an infrastructure perspective you know when WAN acceleration is doing its job because you don’t hear anything about it. It’s one of those bread and butter things that sit in the background and end-users don’t know about it unless it goes wrong.

“Just recently we had a power failure and a Steelhead went off the air. We immediately got complaints of poor performance on the network but once it was restarted performance picked up again.
“It’s a bit like having a turbo on an engine, you know when it has kicked in and you know when it’s not working,” he added.