Data center automation shines at SunTrust

At SunTrust, a major bank with $182 billion in assets, network executives had the blues. Although mergers and acquisitions had boosted the bank's branch and ATM presence across the Southeast, they had created a network-management morass. 

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By late 2004, the bank had thousands of branches and ATMs, which meant an increasingly heterogeneous collection of legacy switches and routers. The network was getting more difficult to monitor and maintain. Tedious, manual processes for making configuration changes were bumping up against the need to whittle the change window from eight hours a week down to four. And confidence in the bank's overall compliance stance was withering. "Answering simple questions, like whether baseline configurations were still valid, became increasingly difficult," says Tim Baker, manager of network-management and support at SunTrust, in Atlanta.

SunTrust's network managers considered hiring three staff members to fight fires while tenured team members devoted time to getting a handle on the environment. Such an approach would have cost $300,000 in salaries and training alone, Baker says. Automating network-management functions seemed a likely alternative.

Last year, after conducting six-week, in-depth pilots of several tool sets, the team rolled out a proactive network- and configuration-management system that has eliminated faulty configurations across more than 6,700 devices, increased service levels and streamlined the compliance process. This network-management initiative earns SunTrust a 2007 Enterprise All-Star Award.