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.”

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