Major Card Services Provider Optimizes Network Performance with Entuity

Overview
As one of the largest high street banks and mortgage companies in Britain, this major company provides a range of classic Gold and Platinum credit cards, as well as affinity and lifestyle cards for a wide range of organizations.

Since card processing occurs across several distributed locations, this Card Services Provider needed a solution to optimize its network to improve efficiencies and quickly and easily incorporate new functionality. Entuity was chosen to re-allocate equipment, improve MTTR, and receive early warning of problems to prevent impact to service delivery.

Network Performance Optimization
With credit card processing handled in several distributed locations across the UK, a major Card Services Provider needed a network management solution that could not only improve processing efficiency by optimizing their current network, but also allow the company to incorporate new network functionality easily and fast. The chosen solution had to be able to handle very aggressive deadlines, provide fully integrated and comprehensive functionality and permit minimal network slowdown during deployment.

“We implemented Entuity within hours. And because it required very little maintenance or training, it meant that almost from the get-go we could utilize junior staff for troubleshooting tasks,” said a Network Services Manager for the company. “Before Entuity, these tasks had required much more senior attention before. The product showed a return almost immediately: it identified a server issue where incorrect network interface settings were causing many batch processing jobs to take up to eight hours to complete. After identification, processing time was trimmed to a mere 30 minutes.”

Spare Ports
Another clear immediate benefit was in switched port management. The team can easily auto-discover all of the switched ports already deployed within the network and not yet being used. This enables management either quickly and accurately to reallocate ports (saving the manual effort traditionally associated with port identification) or put back unnecessary (and costly) equipment purchases.

The network team knows that it will always face aggressive deadlines in which to implement new network projects, particularly those that have a direct impact on network performance. A recent example of this was the requirement to serve video across the corporate LAN. “Entuity optimizes our network in performance and capacity terms, automatically identifying errors and providing early warning of any over utilization that will impact service delivery.”

Reporting Benefits
The network operations team also benefits from the product’s reporting functionality that provides a real understanding of network performance, including network utilization and availability. Entuity identifies where faults and bottlenecks occur and how well each is managed. The product provides a simple and automated method to generate these reports, and provides the service level information they require.

Final Results
The Discovery IT team now has an all-in-one integrated network management solution. The key improvement using Entuity has been in end-user satisfaction levels. Since installing Entuity, the team is able to respond more proactively, which has led to much lower time to event resolution, consistent up-time and in turn, happier customers.

The ability to quickly track the root cause of an outage creates less stress for the IT department and improves their own engineer time management, it also makes an obvious difference in the network’s performance. Using Entuity, the IT Operations team estimates it has decreased Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) of problems involving PCs, servers and switches by two-thirds, freeing up valuable resources and increasing productivity.

“We implemented Entuity within hours. And because it required very little maintenance or training, it meant that almost from the get-go we could utilize junior staff for troubleshooting tasks.”
– Network Services Manager

About Entuity
Embracing the digital worldview, Entuity provides digital network analytics for the changing enterprise. Our highly automated, unified, enterprise-class solution puts deep network insight at your fingertips, frees IT staff to focus on strategic projects, and easily integrates with major framework environments. Entuity’s support and services teams are frequently praised for their rapid response, networking expertise and involvement in special engagements.