Business at IHAG has grown steadily over recent years as more and more clients entrust their pecuniary matters to this renowned financial institution. Whilst it had not encountered any particular security problems with its old network, to aid future business growth, the bank decided to enhance security further and increase the capacity of its networking infrastructure.

“We wanted to address the lack of redundancy at the core, introduce additional security across our Local Area Network (LAN), establish extra capacity to handle the ever-increasing volume of financial data and, in the event of a switch failure, institute a better alternative to our current four-hour standby arrangement. The latter had been potentially jeopardising the business,” explains Daniel Albisser, head of IT and organisation, Privatbank IHAG Zürich AG. “We also needed to incorporate a Power over Ethernet (PoE) capability to unify future communications needs via Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and provide a data recovery facility.”

After due consideration, IHAG decided to invest in a new network infrastructure as well as to build a back-up data centre, remote from its headquarters. The bank approached achermann consulting ag, a local HP ProCurve Networking partner, for advice.

During subsequent planning, and at no extra cost, HP ProCurve’s European Network Design Centre (ENDC) in Boeblingen, Germany worked with IHAG and achermann consulting to design a fully appropriate Adaptive Network solution. Backed by considerable expertise within the financial services sector, the ENDC produced an extensive selection of design diagrams, a parts list and a comprehensive explanation of how each solution component satisfied IHAG’s specific requirements.

The ProCurve Adaptive Network solution provides IHAG with a secure, scalable, high-performance LAN infrastructure. It comprises highly reliable, award-winning ProCurve 5412zl switches in a redundant configuration, ProCurve 5406zl switches as well as ProCurve 3500yl series switches. Ethernet ports with 10 Gb capability enhance connectivity, provide additional redundancy and increased network capacity.

With their security and convergence capabilities, these ProCurve PoE switches are ideally suited to IHAG’s current working environments and, in the unlikely event of network failure, ProCurve’s Lifetime Warranty♦ covers the solution’s components, providing next-business-day advance replacement.

Additionally, ProCurve Manager Plus (PCM+) has been implemented onsite, to aid network management by allowing administrators to configure, update, monitor and troubleshoot the switches centrally and remotely with ease. Flexible software licensing and free software updates will provide IHAG with scalability as its network grows.

This solution typifies ProCurve’s Adaptive Network approach to helping financial service organisations like IHAG to evolve and respond to changing business and technological needs. Based on open standards, ProCurve switching solutions are versatile, less complex, more adaptive and offer a better price/performance ratio than comparable proprietary products.

“Several factors made the ProCurve Adaptive Network solution especially attractive,” comments Albisser. “Its security and redundancy features satisfy our business requirements exactly by mitigating risk to the business. Moreover, the ProCurve solution offers more bandwidth than alternative solutions, creating additional capacity to safeguard future business growth.

“I am really pleased with our ProCurve 10 Gb network. The price/performance ratio is excellent compared to other vendors who could only offer a 1 Gb solution. Recently, we extended the ProCurve Adaptive Network solution to our new back-up data centre by introducing ProCurve 5406zl and 3500yl intelligent edge switches,” concludes Albisser.

Company: achermann consulting ag
Headquarters: Luzern, Switzerland
Telephone: +41 41 417 1111
Contact: Gregor R. Naef
URL: www.achermann.ch
Business: Systems integration, implementation, project management, ICT consulting, managed security and network services
Products: Primary core infrastucture for network, security and server virtualisation

HP ProCurve is the Network of Choice for best-in-class solutions, products and services for wired and wireless networks. ProCurve's Adaptive Networks vision enables customers to implement an open, standards-based network infrastructure that adapts to the changing needs of users, applications and organizations. ProCurve was positioned in the Leaders quadrant in research and advisory firm Gartner Inc.'s 2008 Magic Quadrant Report for Global Campus LANs and is No. 2 worldwide in Ethernet switch market revenue and ports according to Dell'Oro Group.

Further information on ProCurve networking solutions and products is available at www.procurve.com.