how to guide: case study
Application delivery in action
How a website outage prompted a financial services organisation to deploy F5’s application delivery network infrastructure
IN 2009, an IT manager’s nightmare scenario came true for a Fortune 100 financial services organisation. A load-balancing machine in one of the
company’s data centres suffered a technical fault, causing a severe degradation in the performance of the company’s public website. That meant that thousands of customers were unable to access their account statements. This episode prompted the company to
rethink its application delivery architecture. Consulting partner IBM advised the company to consider application delivery networking technology from F5. “After consulting with IBM, we understood that an F5 solution would enhance our ability to deliver excellent customer service,” the company’s IT manager explains. The company already had some experience with F5. When a decade-old traffic management device from F5 suffered an outage, F5 had leapt to replace it even though it was long overdue replacement, the IT manager says. “We
WWW.INFORMATION-AGE.COM
had already been won over by their service,” the IT manager says. IBM and F5 collaborated to design an
application delivery network infrastructure for the company, to replace its previous appliances and third-party application security technology.
The full monty The company chose F5’s BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) appliance to handle traffic between the web and application servers. These servers support the full suite of the financial organisation’s online investment services, provide access to mutual fund research, connect customers with financial advisers and enable customer account transactions – essentially its entire business. The LTM system allows IT operations staff to monitor the performance of the internal networks, spot bottlenecks and address issues as they arise. The BIG-IP Application Security
Manager (ASM), meanwhile, allows the
WWW.F5.COM 17
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20