CHALLENGE
One of the most prestigious multinational financial institutions in the U.K. needed to migrate to a new load balancer platform. With limited access to IT contractors for support and a lack of experience with network automation, the company faced years of manual migration efforts. It needed a more efficient means of discovering and migrating legacy systems to the new hardware platform.
SOLUTION
After engaging with Itential and Cisco, the bank is launching an automated discovery and migration strategy to reduce the total migration time from years to months. In the process, the company will reduce dependency on contract IT support with a new self-service portal to simplify the load balancer migration.
Taking the Plunge into Network Automation
After years of relying on a Cisco Global Site Selector (GSS) platform to balance traffic to its global servers, the financial institution has aspirations of migrating to a new F5 load balancer solution.
To achieve this transition, the bank has to discover and migrate more than 7,000 legacy services on a global scale, with limited support from remote, contract network engineers.
Migrations of this magnitude can negatively impact the flow of network traffic by increasing latency if load balancers are not functioning properly or blocking access altogether in extreme cases. This can have a direct impact on the service delivery and result in an abysmal customer experience. For example, the bank must ensure migrations integrate with its DNS systems for customers to reach the right destination when they click on existing URLs. A potential error, in this case, could send customers to broken websites.
Although a manual and error-prone process over several years was unattractive, the prospect of handing over the wheel to network automation seemed equally daunting for many inside the bank. They needed a team with a solution that could help them successfully automate discovery and migration efforts over several months with the peace of mind that operations would not be interrupted.
Itential, Cisco and World Wide Technology Tackle Migration
The bank turned to their technology service provider, World Wide Technology, who recommended using the Itential Intelligent Network Automation Platform (Pronghorn) and Cisco NSO to develop a proof of concept (POC) that discovers and automatically migrates the bank’s existing legacy services to the new F5 network of load balancers. The process also had to integrate with the bank’s DNS and allow their existing network engineers to manage this effort without impacting their current duties. Itential and Cisco delivered a prototype that impressed the entire team from the bank.
“We wrote a process as part of the POC that proved we could meet all of the bank’s requirements,” said Dafydd Hughes-Parry, Itential business development manager. “Not only that, we addressed their concerns regarding remote contractors by developing a self-service portal to help them create and manage new services, as well as providing troubleshooting and fault management capabilities.”
Months, Not Years to Migrate with Fewer Contractors
Before the migration POC, the bank estimated it would take their engineers several years to manually migrate all 7,000 services to the new F5 load balancer platform. With Itential’s network automation and Cisco NSO, engineers now predict the job will be completed in a few months with almost no contract engineering resources.
The self-service portals, combined with the ability to conduct real-time pre- and post-checks on servers for each migration, provide a level of simplicity and quality that is especially helpful for the bank’s engineers.
“It’s one thing to configure a network,” HughesParry said. “It’s entirely another thing and another level of quality to make sure their existing systems are automated correctly, so they’re not just pushing problems further down the road.”
Itential’s ability to take advantage of the service reconciliation capabilities of Cisco NSO was integral to the project’s success. Itential maximized the full potential of NSO by adding the necessary layer of automation to make projects of this magnitude possible.
“The fact that we can make the migration happen in a few months with less outside help is where Itential is providing immediate value,” HughesParry said. “For a while, the bank doubted whether or not our plans were technically feasible, but we were able to put in the work to prove that it wasn’t just smoke and mirrors.”
As a next step, Itential is working to enhance the financial institution’s lifecycle management of load balancing services by performing tasks such as site failover and automated patch updates. This capability is especially important because of extensive IT regulations that require financial institutions to keep services up and available at all times, even during maintenance periods for patch updates.
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