The Client
Allied Irish Banks, p.l.c. is one of the ‘Big Four’ commercial banks in Ireland. AIB offers a full range of personal and corporate banking services. The bank also offers a range of general insurance products such as home, travel, and health insurance. It offers life assurance and pensions through its tied agency with Irish Life Assurance plc.
Business Requirements
Digital transformation is key to becoming the bank of choice for both individuals and business owners by providing a modern, intuitive interface that makes banking easy. AIB required a development environment for their growing Dev Ops teams. The business required an automated IaaS facility that would scale, could deliver cost reduction, and that was manageable by a small central team. Ergo consultants worked with AIB IT team to scope and design the required architecture, and ultimately to deliver it for AIB.
The Solutions
Ergo proposed a Software Defined Datacentre. Ergo SDDC Engineering experts deployed VMware VxRack Implementation and Customization, Training and IP Transfer and follow on Support and Managed Services.
What Did We Do?
2 x Dell EMC 9-Node VxRack hyper-converged infrastructure solution (powered by VMWare VSAN) provides AIB with a modular “pay as you grow”, scalable architecture that enabled the customer to rapidly scale, adding additional capacity in minutes. Upgrades are automated for the entire software and firmware stack, keeping operational overhead low and increasing speed and agility. VMware NSX Enterprise provides AIB with the ability to automate the delivery of Layer 2 to 7 network and security services, driven by vRealize Automation. The solution integrates with Firewall, Anti-virus and load-balancing solutions, as well as physical switches and routers, and helps AIB to deliver all services rapidly and flexibly in software based on compliant and secure pre-approved policies. VRealize Automation provides a self-service application catalog that is central to the AIB IaaS platform. This tool helps AIB to provide developers and application owners with automated blueprints that can be multi-machine and integrate with various 3rd party tools such as Puppet, Centrify and IPAM technology. Approval workflows ensure that short-term rental of infrastructure for developers can be provisioned within minutes, whereas longer living, larger environments require approvals before deployment. VRealize Network insight enables AIB to monitor physical and virtual network traffic within their IaaS platform and reduce meantime to resolution, with rapid troubleshooting capabilities. It helps mitigate risk of downtime during migrations is very useful for auditing security and network changes within the SDDC environment. Finally, it enables AIB to fine tune the networking environment to identify bottlenecks and ensure adequate performance. Ergo Managed Services provided Technical Account Management services for ongoing Day 2 operations support and implemented VMware software components to provide AIB staff with the ability to test environments before moving to production.
Core Technologies
- VxRack
- VMware VSAN
- VRealize Network insight
- VRealize Automation
Client Testimonial
We’ve worked with Ergo now for a number of years and it’s been hugely beneficial to our organization. The level of expertise and know-how they bring with them is unparalleled and they really did find a solution perfectly tailored to suit our own needs I couldn’t recommend them highly enough… Need to get a real testimonial obviously.” - Joe Bloggs | Manager, AIB
Client Benefits
Time savings as design and provisioning of infrastructure was reduced from approximately 90 days to mere minutes.
By providing automated policies and having security and compliance approve these blueprints, we improved consistency, security and compliance and created a better user experience for business units and developers/app owners in the bank.
Pay as you grow”, scalable architecture that enabled the customer to rapidly scale, adding additional capacity in minutes.
Upgrades are automated for the entire software and firmware stack, keeping operational overheads low and increasing speed and agility.
Provides developers and application owners with automated blueprints that can be multi-machine and integrate with various 3rd party tools such as Puppet, Centrfy and IPAM technology.
Can monitor physical and virtual network traffic within their IaaS platform and reduce meantime to resolution, with rapid troubleshooting capabilities. Mitigating the risk of downtime during migrations for auditing security and network changes within the SDDC environment.
Cost savings of €30M over 5 years by doing this with traditional infrastructure solutions
