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Credit Suisse First Boston
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Posted: Thursday, February 17, 2000
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With a truly global workforce, Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB) is implementing the Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Professional operating system on all its desktop and laptop computers to provide users with a secure, reliable platform that includes multilanguage support, multimonitor support, and Plug and Play compatibility. Native virtual private networking (VPN) support and roaming profiles can also provide easy, secure access to network resources for CSFB’s very mobile, international workforce. In addition, the integrated security, remote management, and the Active DirectoryTM service in Windows 2000 Server will help to reduce administrative costs throughout the enterprise.
Customer Profile
Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB), with approximately 15,000 employees located throughout more than 60 offices in more than 30 countries, is a leading global investment banking firm. It provides comprehensive financial advisory, capital raising, sales and trading, and financial products for users and suppliers of capital around the world.
With more than $6.7 billion in revenue and $291 billion in assets at the end of 1998, Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB) is one of the world’s largest securities firms in terms of financial resources. To hold that position CSFB needs to ensure that its 15,000 employees have secure access to systems and up-to-date information from anywhere, anytime. It also needs to be able to effectively manage and support those users remotely.
To help meet these requirements, CSFB chose to implement the Windows 2000 Professional and Server operating systems throughout its enterprise. Windows 2000 Professional provides several features that offer particular benefits for a multinational investment banking firm, including:
 | Multilanguage support |
| Multimonitor support |
| Native support for VPN and secure IP |
| Powerful offline features for laptops |
| The ability to create a single global standard client build for both laptop and desktop computers |
On the back end, Windows 2000 Server is expected to reduce deployment and support costs by up to 10 percent through features such as IntelliMirrorTM management technologies, Windows File Protection, and the Active Directory service. "Our main reasons for deploying Windows 2000 are to enjoy the benefits of increased reliability and resilience in a product that includes much additional functionality," explains Ian Saggers, Director of Engineering at CSFB. "The increased security, improved laptop support, and reduction in WAN replication traffic, along with the inherent multilanguage and multimonitor support will all contribute to a substantial technological advantage over our competitors."
Building a Global Solution
The Global Engineering Department at CSFB is responsible for defining global hardware configurations and providing standard server, desktop, and laptop builds for the company’s 15,000 staff in more than 60 offices on six continents. In defining global standards for its implementation of Windows 2000, the Global Engineering Department set up a pilot—with 45 servers running Windows 2000 Server, and more than 350 desktop and laptop clients running Windows 2000 Professional—at 10 sites, including London, New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney, Singapore, and Zurich.
The pilot team created a scripted image that enabled easy deployment of Windows 2000 Professional. This ensured a consistent configuration for all pilot users in each global office. Desktop and laptop computer users are testing the security, multilanguage and multimonitor support, Plug and Play compatibility, power management, and Routing and Remote Access capabilities of Windows 2000 Professional. For the back end, CSFB is creating a new Windows 2000 Active Directory service to run in parallel with the Windows NT® 4.0 domain environment and is testing infrastructure functionality, including file and print services, the global catalog, and throughput capabilities of Active Directory.
Unmatched Reliability and Flexibility at the Desktop
With many of its staff basing decisions and transactions on real-time information, reliability at the desktop is critical to CSFB’s success. The company chose Windows 2000 Professional for its stability and reliability in supporting those mission-critical applications. Some of the key features that informed CSFB’s choice include:
| Multilanguage support, which enables users to switch to any of 60 languages at the click of a button, while working in applications that also support this capability, such as Office 2000. This means that users can change language without having to log out, reboot their computers, or switch to a second machine. |
| Multimonitor support, which gives users the ability to connect multiple monitors to the same computer at a relatively low cost. This is particularly useful to CSFB traders who typically need to have three or four monitors on their desktops. |
| Native support for VPNs and secure IP, which enables users to access corporate and market data securely and efficiently. |
| Offline Files, which enable users to continue to work when disconnected from the network and sync up their changes when they reconnect. |
| One global standard client build that works on both laptop and desktop computers. "We produce a single standard client build which supports both desktop and laptop computers, rather than having different client standards that we had to maintain with a Windows NT 4.0-based desktop and laptops running Windows 95," says Steve Maytum, Windows 2000 project manager for CSFB. "That reduces our work substantially." |
CSFB operates a policy of global free seating, which means users can sit down at any computer and access all their resources, applications, and data as though they were sitting at their own computer. "Because IntelliMirror management technologies allow users’ profiles to follow them wherever they go, someone from London can fly to New York, sit at any desk in New York, log on, and get the same desktop setup as at his or her desk in London," Maytum explains.
"Technologies in Windows 2000 Professional—such as Offline Files and Windows File Protection—take a giant step forward in making global free seating more practical by enabling users to access their desktop applications and data from any desktop computer without running the risk of destroying anything on the borrowed computer," Maytum notes.
Strong Mobile Support
With 3,000 laptop users, laptop support is another key reason CSFB chose Windows 2000 Professional. Many of these users are investment bankers who visit corporate clients to present business and investment strategy recommendations. Others are equity sales people. Both count on reliability and connectivity between the laptop and corporate intranet.
"Windows 2000 Professional is the operating system that has a rich feature set to fully support laptops. It has the best features of Windows 98 along with the reliability and security of Windows NT 4.0," Maytum notes. The most important benefits for laptop users at CSFB include:
| Strong security through such features as the Encrypting File System, authentication enhancements such as Windows NT LAN Manager version 2 (NTLMv2) and public key infrastructure (PKI), plus the ability to lock the laptop after standby or hibernate states. "If a laptop is stolen, all data is encrypted, which reduces the security exposure," Maytum notes. In addition, native support for VPNs and Secure IP enables users to connect to the corporate intranet over a more secure connection. |
| Offline Files allow users to work offline as if they were still connected to the network so they can continue to work when they’re away from their network or if they lose network connectivity. When users reconnect to the network, the files on the server are updated automatically. "We don’t need to back up our laptops anymore because Offline Files automatically replicates data to the network servers," Maytum notes. |
| Power management enables users to quickly put their laptops in standby or hibernate modes to conserve power. In addition, Smart Battery monitors the battery status and enables users to extend battery power by reducing power to specific functions. |
| Plug and Play support gives users the ability to swap PC cards dynamically without rebooting the system, even in a locked-down environment. |
High Reliability and Increased Performance on the Server
Of the 45 servers involved in the Windows 2000 pilot, approximately 30 support the Active Directory service, including the Dynamic Domain Name System (DDNS) and the Global Catalog. The Global Catalog enables users to find any object in Active Directory without knowing what domain it’s in. The remaining servers are file and print servers and application servers running Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.0 (the Web server built into Windows 2000 Server), Microsoft SQL ServerTM 7.0; Microsoft Message Queuing, which is also part of Windows 2000 Server; and the Distributed file system (Dfs) in a testing environment.
Initial pilot tests have yielded both quantitative and qualitative results. CSFB has experienced significantly higher reliability and higher performance throughout the Windows 2000–based domain compared to the existing system. "Our tests have shown Windows 2000 to be very reliable and stable," explains Saggers "Because of that we are comfortable using it as part of our Internet strategy where, clearly, uptime is a premium requirement."
In addition, Windows 2000 helps to reduce demand on the wide area network (WAN) infrastructure. In the Windows NT 4.0–based environment, CSFB’s operation in the Pacific region would replicate data all the way from New York by way of Hong Kong. If Melbourne had two domain controllers, both would have to replicate data from New York. The two domain controllers in Sydney would have to do the same. Already those two small sites accounted for four streams of replication.
"In Windows 2000, only one domain controller in Melbourne would replicate data from Sydney because it’s closer than New York. The other Melbourne domain controller would replicate from the first one," explains Maytum. In turn, only one of the domain controllers in Sydney would go to the nearest hub site, which is in Hong Kong, to replicate data from there. "Already you’ve gone from four replication streams between Australia and New York to just one data stream between Sydney and Hong Kong and one between Melbourne and Sydney. And that is just a tiny part of our network," Maytum says.
"The benchmark tests we’ve done so far have shown some very encouraging results," Maytum says. "The results of one like-to-like replication test comparing Windows 2000 to Windows NT 4.0 showed a 97 percent decrease in WAN traffic for group replication."
While that may be an extreme example, CSFB expects the reduction in replication streams to save a significant amount of money. "The amount of bandwidth saved throughout our global infrastructure does have a direct effect on how much we’re paying for the network bandwidth," Maytum asserts. "We estimate that the savings could be in the millions of dollars."
A Competitive Edge with Reduced Administration Costs
One of the biggest challenges for CSFB’s global engineering department is to keep the company’s 1,400 applications up to date. It has more than 400 in-house developers who are constantly pushing the technology curve in order to stay ahead of competitors. Combined with third-party vendor product updates, their efforts produce approximately 100 application changes each week.
"With Windows 2000, we see ourselves as being six to eight months ahead of the technology curve in this particular area of the industry. That enables us to lead the way in creating products and services for our customers that give us a competitive edge," Maytum notes.
When those applications are migrated to Windows 2000, CSFB will use Terminal Services to deploy those changes each week and for remote administration of the servers. Each of its servers will have Terminal Services enabled by default for remote administration. Also, Terminal Services will be used in some small offices that have only a few laptop or desktop computers and no infrastructure. Users in those offices can dial into the nearest hub site, log into Terminal Services, and access all their applications from that hub site.
Future Plans
The next step for CSFB is to set up a full production pilot, which it plans to start around the end of the first quarter of 2000. It will include up to 1,000 users dispersed across all operational and geographical areas of the business. All clients and servers will be built from scratch into a new Windows 2000–based domain, and trusts will be set up between the company’s Windows 2000–based domain and its current production Windows NT 4.0–based domains.
In the early stages of the production pilot, users will test only core productivity, utility, development, and trading-related applications. More applications will be added to the test as the pilot progresses.
The final rollout of Windows 2000 is planned to start in the summer of 2000 and will be complete by the summer of 2001. Administrators will set up trusts between the new Windows 2000– and current Windows NT 4.0–based domains and then rebuild the servers into the new domain. The company’s small sites will deploy Windows 2000 across all divisions at the same time, which will help to minimize costs. Its medium and large sites will deploy Windows 2000 by business division to minimize interoperability issues within the division.
With its IIS 5.0, Extensible Markup Language (XML) Parser, Message Queuing, COM+, and PKI technologies, Windows 2000 will also play a major roll in CSFB’s evolving Internet strategy. The company is currently developing a solution to provide traders with fast, secure access to data and analytical modeling tools over the Internet. The built-in Internet functionality, NetMeeting® conferencing software, and VPN and security features in Windows 2000 will support easier research and collaboration, simplified data management, and ultimately faster, better decision-making.
Software and Services
Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional
Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server
Microsoft Office 2000
Microsoft Outlook® 2000
Microsoft Exchange 2000
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products or services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Resource Centre at (800) 563-9048. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information via the World Wide Web, go to:
http://www.microsoft.com/
http://www.csfb.com/
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Last Updated: Thursday, May 18, 2000
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