DiData installs Riverbed technology for HBOS Australia

Steve Dixon, regional director, Australia/New Zealand at Riverbed said that Dimension Data bought and installed Riverbed’s Steelhead appliances in all of HBOS’ existing branches across Australia, the majority of its state offices and in its Perth data centres.

“As the bank opens new branches, the rollout will continue, providing LAN-like application performance between branches on the east coast of Australia and the bank’s west coast data centres. DiData will install up to three branches per night by the end of the project,” said Dixon.

HBOS Australia comprises of four diverse financial services companies – BankWest, Capital Finance, St Andrew’s and BOS International. Its parent company, HBOS plc, is one of the world’s largest financial services groups. The retail arm of HBOS Australia, BankWest, was originally a Western Australian operation and is now expanding on the east coast of Australia.

Adrian Cowman, networks and telecommunications manager, IT infrastructure at HBOS Australia, said the Riverbed Steelhead products are an important factor in the bank’s growth plans and have already allowed the company to accelerate the opening of new bank branches.

Although the new branch infrastructure standard includes Cisco ISR routers and Cisco Voice over IP (VoIP) products, HBOS Australia chose Riverbed for its WAN acceleration solution. “Installing the products at more than 170 sites across the country took around 45 working days to complete," said Cowman.

Although HBOS Australia is deploying new applications such as VoIP, which demand high network quality, the Steelhead appliances have reduced WAN traffic and application performance has improved. In some instances, bandwidth usage has been reduced in BankWest branches.

“The Riverbed RiOS Services Platform (RSP) gives HBOS Australia the potential to embed future services, such as print servers, unified threat management and video streaming server functionality, into the existing Steelhead appliances,” claimed Cowman.

HBOS Australia is also testing the Riverbed Steelhead Mobile client software to support its mobile workforce, as well as additional high-end Steelhead appliance platforms to assist with disaster recovery in its data centres, he said.