Customer Success Story
Network automation helps Raiffeisen Informatik accelerate digital banking
Raiffeisen Informatik (R-IT) has been providing professional IT services for more than 50 years - with a focus on servicing IT competence for financial and insurance service providers. Highest quality and security standards are crucial for digital transformation and the use of innovative solutions. The broad portfolio of Raiffeisen Informatik successfully meets the growing business demands. The highest possible availability of services, fail-safe infrastructures and a solution-oriented and agile corporate culture are crucial for success as an experienced data center operator.
Data center network automation helps Austrian IT service provider Raiffeisen Informatik do more for its banking and insurance clients.
Raiffeisen Informatik continues to advance digital innovation and sustainable finance practices to improve the customer experience and speed-up operations.
To increase business agility, Raiffeisen Informatik, the full-service IT service provider for banking and insurance clients, modernized its data center network with Juniper.
Overview
| Company | Raiffeisen Informatik |
| Industry | Technology |
| Products used | Juniper Apstra, QFX5120, QFX5210 |
| Region | EMEA |
Faster to deploy data center fabrics
Maintain team size while increasing service footprint
Tackle complexity and avoid human errors
Gain insight and information as never experienced before
Think differently about data center fabric management
Raiffeisen Informatik recognized that a software-defined data center would provide a strong foundation to support the dynamic needs of its banking clients. That agility goes hand in hand with automation, which simplifies operations at scale.
Automation also alleviates pressures from the IT talent shortage.
“The main driver for network automation was people,” says Ernest Altbart, IT architect at Raiffeisen Informatik. “There are fewer and fewer experienced network engineers, and the obvious way to mitigate the scarcity is to deploy automation to the highest extent possible.”
Shifting to intent-based network design and operations—and continuously validating those outcomes—would allow Raiffeisen Informatik to scale its customers’ digital banking and insurance solutions.
Shift to intent-based networking to scale services
Juniper Apstra allowed Raiffeisen Informatik to shift to intent-based network design and operations.
Juniper Apstra automates the design, deployment, and operations of the Raiffeisen Informatik data center network to increase agility and efficiency. The IT team started with the outcomes it wanted and let the Apstra software set up the fabric. Raiffeisen Informatik chose Juniper QFX Series Switches for the underlay network, delivering high throughput, scalability, and the open programmability of Junos OS.
“At first, our seasoned network administrators were a bit skeptical about automation,” says Altbart. “But when they saw the number of parameters to achieve the resiliency and scalability of EVPN/VXLAN fabrics, they knew management needed to be fully automated.”
Apstra continuously assures that the fabric is running as intended, even as conditions change. Apstra alerts the operations team to brownouts or deviations from expected outcomes, which speeds time to resolution and raises operational efficiency.
Increase agility and efficiency to meet client needs
Raiffeisen Informatik views digital transformation to improve the customer experience, drive operational efficiencies, and support sustainable finance initiatives.
With Juniper, Raiffeisen Informatik can continuously change and optimize its data center fabric to deliver network infrastructure services faster and with greater agility to support its clients’ non-stop operations and business growth.
Automating management of the data center fabric not only frees up IT staff from time-consuming manual work, but also allows more focus on strategic work, which is key to attracting and retaining technical talent in a fiercely competitive market.
As a multivendor solution, Apstra fits with Raiffeisen Informatik’s preference for the flexibility of open architectures.
“One objective of the data center refresh was to become vendor-independent,” says Altbart. “However, we found that adding Apstra to Juniper switching was a perfect match, which changed our strategy.”
The Products
Juniper Apstra
Intent-based networking software automates the entire network lifecycle, from design through everyday operations, across multivendor data centers with continuous validation, powerful analytics, and root-cause identification to assure reliability.
QFX network switches deliver industry-leading throughput and scalability, a comprehensive routing stack, the open programmability of Junos OS, and the broadest set of EVPN-VXLAN and IP fabric capabilities. Juniper offers a wide range of switches for data center spine and leaf switches, campus distribution and core, or data center gateway and interconnect.
QFX5120
The QFX5120 line offers 1/10/25/40/100GbE switches designed for data center, data center edge, data center interconnect and campus deployments with requirements for low-latency Layer 2/Layer 3 features and advanced EVPN-VXLAN capabilities.
QFX5210
The QFX5210 line offers line-rate, low-latency 10/25/40/100GbE switches for building large, standards-based fabrics. QFX5210 Switches are an optimal choice for spine-and-leaf data center fabric deployments as well as metro use cases.
Published March 2022