First National Bank (FNB) is the oldest bank in South Africa and one of the country\u2019s \u2018big four\u2019 financial institutions. It is a division of FirstRand Limited, a large financial services conglomerate, which trades on the Johannesburg Securities Exchange under the symbol FSR. FNB is also listed on the Botswana Stock Exchange under the symbol FNBB and is a constituent of the BSE Domestic Company Index.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Challenge: Accelerate problem resolution in the data centre<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Eugene Pretorius was tired of the blame game. Every time FNB experienced a service disruption or dip in application performance, fingers would point at the networking team.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe network doesn\u2019t discriminate. It\u2019s either working or everything is down. It\u2019s not going to pick and choose things to disrupt,\u201d says Pretorius, CIO of Infrastruture and Security Services at FNB. \u201cBut whenever something went wrong, the network was always blamed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In these circumstances, representatives from FNB\u2019s network, data centre and server teams would gather in a \u2018war room\u2019 to troubleshoot the issue. It would take hours – sometimes days – to find a solution. And many times, a root cause was never identified, leaving the distinct possibility of problem recurrence and the blind troubleshooting that followed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt was clear we needed better visibility in the data centre,\u201d Pretorius recalls. \u201cWe needed the ability to see exactly what was happening, where it was happening and why.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n To improve data centre visibility, troubleshooting and security, FNB deployed Cisco Tetration platform, which provides a detailed view – both real time and historical-of application connectivity, dependencies and data flows across a hybrid IT environment. \u2018The game changer\u2019, as Pretorius calls Cisco Tetration, has indeed altered the playing field on which FNB competes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From blindness to 20\/20 vision<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n FNB was the first company in the world to adopt Cisco Tetration, which is now installed on half of the bank\u2019s servers, including its DNS and Active Directory systems. Pretorius, a self-described \u2018nerdy, hands-on CIO,\u2019 has become a power user and says Tetration is his favoured tool whenever problems occur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIf something goes down, we immediately use Tetration to see what\u2019s happening,\u201d he says. \u201cWe have very large, very complex applications that have been around for decades and Tetration shows us things we\u2019ve never seen before. If an IoT device is misconfigured or if a server is in distress or if an endpoint is causing issues, we can immediately see it and isolate the problem.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anomalies and outages that used to take a roomful of specialists and tens of hours to troubleshoot are now characterised in minutes using Cisco Tetration, which is integrated with Cisco Nexus 9000 Series switches.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Pretorius has long asserted, the network has rarely been the culprit of such problems. In one case, a DNS issue was quickly exposed. In another, a failing front-end web server was easily detected. And in a situation that would have otherwise proven baffling to FNB\u2019s IT staff, Cisco Tetration pinpointed a user-generated query that had been running for 197 hours inside a data warehouse, slowing down the entire environment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe never would have been able to see or understand these problems without Tetration. It\u2019s the only tool in the world that can show what is happening across the network, application and server planes all on one screen,\u201d Pretorius claims. \u201cTetration gives me 20\/20 vision in the data centre.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n