Cisco Systems(R) (NASDAQ:CSCO) today announced that Garanti Bank,
the leading Turkish retail, commercial and corporate bank, has
selected Cisco to provide a new backbone network infrastructure for
its datacentre operations comprising storage area networking, data
centre switching and integrated security. The new data centre
infrastructure will help the bank support the data security
requirements of its mainframe applications.
Garanti Bank's data centre houses all its banking data. The new
data centre network infrastructure will also help allow the company to
take advantage of improved capacity to handle expanding requirements
stemming from areas such as multi-channel banking and the need to
comply with banking regulations.
"We have been very impressed by Cisco's Data Centre Network
Architecture and the integrated systems approach to providing
interoperability between data centre components," said Mrs. Eser Unal,
Business Unit Manager, Network Services for Garanti Teknoloji. "As we
develop our strategy, we are looking to achieve further cost
efficiencies by deploying Cisco SAN technologies and Cisco's
virtualized Firewall Services Modules (FWSM) to help support high
levels of reliability and security within our data centre environment.
One key advantage of the Cisco technology is that there is a
consistent integrated networking approach across its data centre
switching and storage networking portfolios."
The new storage area network infrastructure is based around Cisco
MDS 9509 Multilayer SAN directors, with Cisco MDS Multiprotocol
Services Modules. In addition to redundant Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series
switches with the Cisco Supervisor Engine 720, Garanti Bank's network
upgrade features a number of other Cisco network components, including
integrated security with Cisco Firewall Services Modules. The Catalyst
6500 Series switches will also help allow Garanti Bank to boost
switching rates in the data centre from 140 Gbps to 720 Gbps, and
interconnect to Cisco Catalyst 4510R series switches at the network
edge.
"The Cisco Data Centre Network Architecture represents the
practical realization of our intelligent networking vision for the
data centre. An important benefit of Cisco's data centre strategy lies
in helping enterprises to plan for future growth through a tight
integration of intelligent architectures including switching, optical,
storage area networking, integrated security and server load
balancing," commented Kaan Terzioglu, VP for Central and Eastern
Europe for Cisco Systems. "We are working to provide the building
blocks for a phased evolution of our data centre strategy as
organizations move to consolidate, virtualize and ultimately build
automation into their data centre environments."
The approach to using Firewall Service Modules in the data centre
is to help give fully controlled access to host systems from different
regions on the Garanti Bank network. FWSM modules operate in multiple
context modes using a stateful failover approach. Using different
contexts for each segment, the traffic from all parties can also be
isolated. Contexts can be used either in routed or transparent mode;
by using a context in transparent mode Garanti Bank is able to pass
Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) traffic through the context,
eliminating the need for static routes. The advantage is that this
approach is more reliable, more secure and more practical.
About Garanti Bank
Garanti Bank is one of the top banks in the Turkish finance
sector, with 467 branches in September 2006 and US$29,8 billion in
assets at the end of June 2006.
About Cisco Systems
Cisco, (NASDAQ:CSCO), is the worldwide leader in networking that
transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate.
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