Creval deploys Pluribus for Data Centre Network modernisation

Author: Beatrice

Pluribus Networks has announced that Credito Valtellinese (Creval), has completed deployment of a new multi-site data centre network fabric using Dell EMC Powerswitch S5200-ON series switches running the Pluribus Netvisor ONE operating system and Adaptive Cloud Fabric software. The fabric spans and enables two new active-active data centres which provide near-zero downtime for banking applications, ensuring a high-quality experience for Creval’s customers. The fabric was also extended to Creval’s two legacy data centres to support seamless migration of workloads to the new data centres with no service disruption to customers, eventually enabling Creval to decommission the legacy data centres after all workloads were migrated.

With expanding business operations that include more than 3,400 employees in 11 regions through a distribution network made up of 355 branches, Creval needed to modernize its data center network to meet its ever-increasing IT workloads and respond to evolving customer expectations. Its legacy network consisted of two data centers, located approximately 150 kms apart, with applications announced over a private MPLS WAN towards the 300+ bank branches. With its data center architecture based on older switches, Creval faced multiple issues related to disaster mitigation and recovery, siloed services between single data centers and outdated storage systems and firewalls among the switches.

The goal of the modernization project was to provide Creval with a highly scalable, agile and resilient data center architecture. An automated network fabric was critical to achieving these goals and, after investigating multiple networking solutions, Creval ultimately selected Pluribus Netvisor ONE running on high-performance open networking Dell 5200 series switches. Creval built two new modern data centers within 50 kms of each other and interconnected the new data centers with two 10G low latency DWDM links. Pluribus’ Adaptive Cloud Fabric solution, powered by Netvisor ONE,  enabled Creval to deploy an SDN-automated, overlay network fabric across the geographically separated data centers for operational simplicity, agility, ease of service migration and integrated analytics for visibility.

“Creval was committed to moving ahead with a solution that supported disaggregated networking and a vendor that had local support and could meet our stringent testing and service migration requirements,” says Bruno Franchetti, Chief Architect at Creval. “Among the key benefits of this network refresh with Pluribus, is a drastic streamlining of our disaster recovery procedures which has reduced Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) to minutes.”

“Creval’s application services can be distributed across both of our new data centres for resilience and there is complete flexibility in performing granular workload migration without impacting service performance,” comments Iacopo Salacrist, Head of Technology Division at Creval. “The IT team now has the choice to control when to move an entire service or all services from one site to the other by just reconfiguring a pair of firewall interfaces and with a minimal impact to the service availability.”

Creval joins a growing number of enterprises deploying an active-active data centre with a virtualized network overlay. In the recent State of the Data Centre Networking 2021 Annual Report based on a survey of over 260 enterprises, Pluribus and Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) found that broad deployment of active-active data centre architectures to support private cloud will nearly double over the next two years from 44 percent to 81 percent. The survey also identified networking complexity as the biggest impediment to achieving this architectural goal.