Case Study: Large Global Bank achieves secure, tape-free backups and faster global applications with Riverbed Steelhead appliances

Riverbed Steelhead appliances Solve the Lost Data Problem for One of the Worlds Largest Financial Services Companies

One of the world’s largest banks—with more than 200 million customer accounts, over 4,000 branches and 200,000 employees across 100+ countries—faced a critical “lost data” problem after several branch backup tapes went missing. The board demanded a fix that would also support a Standard Operating Environment (SOE), ensure consistent application performance everywhere, scale to thousands of offices, integrate into a complex asymmetrically routed WAN, and improve security and disaster recovery without adding branch servers or new regional data centers.

The bank deployed Riverbed Steelhead appliances in more than 2,500 branches to accelerate WAN-based backup, application traffic and SOE distribution. Results included elimination of branch tape backups, dramatic speedups (30–300x for SnapMirror and an effective 146x WAN capacity increase), much shorter transfer windows (e.g., Oracle transfers and nightly filer backups reduced from hours to minutes), avoidance of a multi‑million dollar data center, simplified SOE management via local Proxy File Services, improved disaster-recovery options including satellite links, and an immediate ROI.