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Investec Achieves WAN Data Acceleration With Bridgeworks

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Investec Achieves WAN Data Acceleration With Bridgeworks

November 11
18:50 2019

London – 11th Nov, 2019 – Investec Bank Limited, with the help of value-added distributor StratIT and Datacentrix, both from South Africa, aims to deliver a shared value proposition to clients across its Private Bank and its Wealth & Investment  businesses, as well as across geographies. The Bank offers Specialist Banking and Wealth & Investment services and it is achieving its ambitions through continued investment in digital capabilities.

  • An MPLS WAN link with a handover from one SP to another between continents.
  • A Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Operating systems on Dell commodity kit.
  • An Oracle Enterprise Database, SQL Enterprise Database.


Tackling challenges

To comply with data protection legislation Investec must ensure critical system data is not older than a few hours to meet regulatory requirements. EU data sovereignty regulations mean the servers will need to be hosted in the EU. As such, the data cannot be older than a few hours to achieve compliance with the regulations.

Investec Wealth & Investment require access to servers located in the UK so as to be able to provide clients with offshore investment capability. The Bank is partnered with Swiss Bank, and it uses its Swiss brokering licence.

The issue is that geographic latency between South Africa and the UK meant less than 20% utilisation of WAN links for the replication of RRP data. MPLS latency between the two counties is +-180ms. The time for these data sets to be moved across South Africa and the UK link is currently between 14-15 hours, which can cause challenges in keeping RRP databases in synchronicity. 

The need to achieve the following led Investec to Bridgeworks:

  • Reduce data replication times and keeping DBs in sync;
  • Reduce non-productive transfer windows;
  • Ability to fully utilise all available WAN bandwidth i.e. WAN infrastructure investment is right sized to the transfer task;
  • Ability to reduce application visible latency i.e. deliver content quicker to customers and collaborators.
  • Minimal impact and footprint to existing WAN/LAN infrastructure
  • Solution available as virtual machine
  • Software/Routing changes required for acceleration no need to deploy additional physical hardware to the environment.

The introduction of Bridgeworks WAN Data Acceleration solutions should allow Investec to fully utilise the available bandwidth between the sites – helping to resolve the core business problems faced by Investec – such as the replication of SQL and Oracle enterprise databases.

Application response times for users accessing applications hosted in different hemispheres have been vastly improved too. The choice around hosting of digital capabilities no longer becomes a question of latency, which is aided by the fact the Bridgeworks offers a tailor-made solution.

Some well-known alternatives were considered, but, after a POC, PORTrockIT was found to meet all of Investec’s requirements. This POC was carried out after StratIT introduced Investec to Bridgeworks.

POC: No Acceleration

The baseline for the POC began with no acceleration, and with host-to-host traffic with accelerator in-path. The total traffic transferred between 1st February and 1st April 2018 was 9.3TB. The average rate of transfer was 3-5MB/s, and all of the databases were out of sync.

POC: With Acceleration

The next step was to add accelerator to accelerator traffic in-path of servers. The total traffic transferred between 1st February and 1st April 2019 equalled 55TB. This amounted to a 424% increase in total traffic, with an average rate of transfer 11-15MB/s. Unlike when there was no WAN data acceleration, all of the Oracle and SQL databases were in sync.

Delivering results

Although Investec Wealth & Investment joined the project later, they still achieved round trip application response times reducing from over 800ms to to 320-350ms.

Francois Steyl, CTO at StratIT says: “Bridgeworks is unique in what it does, and addresses the latency, packet loss and ingress and egress rates which is the culprit for poor throughput rates across the WAN. The ease of the Virtual appliance deployment and the adjusting of routing rules makes Bridgeworks the clear solution to accelerate data across a customer’s WAN. The implementation of Bridgeworks’ solutions at Investec, has realised a 424% increase in total traffic sent across the WAN”.

David Trossell adds: “We all read about ROI and game changing solutions, but for me there are two aspects that stand out with this solution which makes me proud of our involvement. Firstly, the enthusiasm and delight of the customer with the solution the teams delivered and, secondly, the way in which the technical and sales teams from each company worked closely together to deliver the solution as one.”

Venesia Oxford, Senior Account Manager at Datacentrix stated: “Through the utilisation of the Bridgeworks technology, I believe Investec can finally utilise more of their actual Bandwidth investment, compared to what was possible in the past. The improved application response times means quicker turnaround times enabling faster decision making which impacts customer satisfaction and internal business collaborations. The Bridgeworks technology is one of the data management principles available to customers from the all-encompassing data management portfolio offered from Datacentrix.”

About Datacentrix

Datacentrix provides leading ICT integration services and solutions to South African organisations, ensuring their success and sustainability into the digital age. The company’s approach is to partner with its customers, equipping them with valuable insight and helping to align their ICT undertakings with their business strategy.

Datacentrix offers a deeply specialised skills component and is endorsed by the world’s foremost technology partners. The company is recognised for its agility, in-depth industry knowledge, proven capability and strong overall performance. 

Datacentrix is a Level One (AAA) B-BBEE Contributor, with 135 percent procurement recognition.

For more information, please visit www.datacentrix.co.za

About Bridgeworks

Bridgeworks’ expertise in high  performance data solutions  stretches back over 35 years. Bridgeworks industry defining Data Acceleration technology is re-defining the use of Wide Area Networks enabling organisations to reach transfer speeds up to 200x faster, whether large volumes, encrypted or media files. Using Automated, AI technology Bridgeworks dramatically alleviates the effects of latency and packet loss, meaning that data can get to where it needs to be quicker and maximising business performance with dramatic ROI.

About StratIT

StratIT is a value-added distributor of a very specific and focused selected bouquet of leading Information Technology solutions. We extract business value and intelligence from Enterprise environments for business continuity, compliance and risk mitigation by means of data indexing, storage and acceleration.

StratIT delivers creative new technology solutions, offers expert advice and guidance coupled with outstanding service delivery. Our mission is to provide our customers with a complete integrated solution at competitive pricing.

For more information please visit www.stratit.co.za

Media Contact
Company Name: Trudy Darwin Consulting
Contact Person: Amanda Hayward
Email: Send Email
Phone: +44 (0) 808 155 1938
Country: United Kingdom
Website: www.4bridgeworks.com