HP ProCurve Networking - Customer stories

	HP ProCurve Networking boosts security and aids business growth at leading Swiss bank
	“The HP ProCurve Adaptive Network solution addresses our security concerns perfectly. It caters for current and future business growth, mitigates risk to the business and reduces costs. We no longer need to pay annual maintenance fees and the ProCurve Lifetime Warranty ensures Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) will be reduced. ” Daniel Albisser, head of IT and organisation, Privatbank IHAG Zürich AG

Privatbank IHAG Zürich AG (IHAG) – www.pbihag.ch – is an asset management bank serving international clients. The family-owned business primarily deals with the private financial affairs of wealthy clients and entrepreneurial families including their fiduciary, monetary and inheritance concerns. Services include private banking, securities, precious metal trading, foreign exchange, money market transactions, investments and lending. IHAG has its headquarters in Zurich as well as a regional branch in Lugano.

Objective
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.”

Approach
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.

IT Improvements
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. 10Gb Ethernet ports 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 Warrantyu 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.

Business benefits
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 offered more bandwidth than alternative solutions, creating additional capacity to safeguard future business growth.

“I am really pleased with our ProCurve 10Gb network. The price/performance ratio is excellent compared to other vendors who could only offer a 1Gb 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.