Customer Profiles
Halifax optimises network performance

Halifax Card Services (HCS) is a subsidiary of Halifax Plc., one of the largest high street banks and mortgage companies in Britain. It provides a range of classic Gold and Platinum credit cards, as well as affinity and lifestyle cards for a wide range of organizations.

Network performance optimisation
Credit card processing is handled in several distributed locations across the UK and HCS looked for a network management solution that could both optimize their current network to improve processing efficiency and 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.

Mike Higgins, Network Services Manager for the group said that HCS wanted a full-functioned solution covering fault management, inventory management and performance management that could be effective in as short a time possible.

Freeing up senior technical resources
"We implemented Entuity Eye of the Storm 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."

"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. Higgins' team can easily auto-discover all of the switched ports already deployed within the HCS network and not yet being utilized. This enables Halifax either quickly and accurately to reallocate ports (saving the manual effort traditionally associated with port identification) or to put back unnecessary (and costly) equipment purchases.

Higgins' 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 Eye of the Storm optimises 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. Eye of the Storm 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 HCS requires.

Read the Full Halifax Customer Profile >>