ANB goes with F5's ADCs for network performance

Arab National Bank has deployed F5's BIG-IP application delivery controllers (ADC) to improve network performance of its core banking system.

The bank, which has 168 branches across the Middle East, has integrated the ADCs to maintain network performance to support its Infosys financial applications.

Jamil Barakat, Head of IT and Telecommunications at ANB commented: "Poor performance would be a nightmare for us. The emergence of Application Delivery Controllers has really changed the whole concept of what we thought of as load balancing. We opted for F5 specifically after a competitive evaluation, with parameters set around speed, security, and application control. F5 delivers on the ADC concept in full."

The ANB deployment includes two BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager devices at the web layer, facing customers, and two BIG-IP 8400 units at the application layer, facing the core banking system. These devices have also allowed enabled ANB to offload SSL traffic from its servers, resulting in a 20-30% reduction in load, which in turn has freed up the IT team to reallocate servers in its infrastructure.

"ANB also found that F5's iRules scripting language had a number of benefits," said Paul Sherry, Regional Director, Middle East at F5. "They developed iRules to encrypt unencrypted traffic and vice versa, and also to change application content in real time.  ANB estimated that the latter iRule alone- which took only 30 minutes to create, saved up to three months of application developer time."