Alfa-Bank was replaced by the balancer of load of Cisco of a system from F5 Networks

On October 8, 2014 the press service of Alfa-Bank announced completion of updating in banking institution of the IT equipment of ensuring work of key information services. In a project deliverable the obsolete equipment of Cisco Systems was replaced with the technological solution Local Traffic Manager from F5 Networks.

Project Tasks

Within an implementation project of the equipment F5 there was a need of the solution of a number of tasks for the organization of reliable work of the mnogokomponenty systems of important information services of bank.

The technical tasks priority for administration of service:

• Ensuring balancing of a network load
• Organization of reliable access to services
• The accelerated disaster recovery and disaster tolerance of a system
• Consolidation, possibility of support of separate functional parts in one application for work of separate development teams and administrators.

To the processing center providing financial transaction processing in real time are important: clear predictable architecture when planning and reliability in operation.

Tasks for this service:

• Provide reliability of a system under a high load
• Provide predictability of machine output with a growth of amount of requests
• Implement the intuitive interface for administrators of IT infrastructure

Project Progress

Alfa-Bank selected F5 Networks Local Traffic Manager (LTM) as the new platform for delivery of applications and balancing of a network load from IT infrastructure.

The decision on change of the platform was made in connection with an output from production and support of the solution ACE of Cisco Systems what the vendor announced in 2013. Again selected system from F5 Networks makes available to bank of a push technology of applications, helping to solve operating-technical and business challenges.

It was important to Alfa-Bank - to lower downtime rate of the equipment and to protect clients from potential failure of systems. Use of the hardware solution of traffic management of Local Traffic Manager helped bank to segment risks of each component of IT systems and to optimize work by means of the accelerated deployment of applications and more effective use of resources.

"In the project progress, in laboratory of Alfa-Bank the stand for testing of solutions of balancing of loading of world leading manufacturers was deployed. The specific objective was set - to transfer a configuration with Cisco ACE on the balancer. Further specialists of Bank had to hold functional and stress testing of the solution. As a result, despite fierce competition, F5 command - only who coped with an assigned task, having shown high professionalism and excellent level of technical support", – Anton Nastasyuk, the head of department network infrastructure of Alfa-Bank noted.

Project Results

Implementation of F5 Local Traffic Manager solved a problem of scheduling of requests of users to the system of information services of Alfa-Bank and created a uniform point of delivery of service with granular load sharing to all its components.

Except complete replacement of functions of the balancer of a network load, the equipment F5 enriched the main information service with the opportunities which provided additional flexibility.

"Intellectual push technologies of the F5 Local Traffic Manager applications allow bank to complement service with new opportunities without involvement of programmers. In particular it is about gain of authentication using capcha and sending static contents directly from the controller, without participation of application servers", – Alexander Serebryakov, the F5 Networks system engineer emphasized.