Garanti BBVA is Turkey’s second-largest private bank. It has consolidated assets of more than $64.9 billion including nearly one-fifth of the lending market and 17.5 percent of the corporate banking market. In addition, it maintains nearly 20 million retail customers. With such a large and diverse customer base, the bank is hyper-focused on maintaining the reliability and availability of its services.
To protect against outages, Garanti BBVA built a resilient, distributed IT infrastructure with three data centers, supported by Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP). In its two primary data centers, the bank used active-active replication to synchronize data between storage arrays, and data was sent to a remote disaster recovery site via asynchronous replication.
The system was resilient but often difficult to manage. Even routine tasks, such as provisioning new storage volumes or updating replication configurations, required operators to execute complex scripts. Storage administrators were so bogged down by replication management, they didn’t have time to focus on more strategic projects. The Garanti BBVA IT team needed to simplify storage management processes.
Storage Simplified
When Hitachi Vantara introduced the Hitachi Ops Center, its next-generation storage management solution, Garanti BBVA’s IT team was drawn to its automation features. Already a Hitachi Vantara customer, the bank launched several successful proof-of-concept projects before adopting a full-scale solution. Hitachi Vantara’s professional services team helped Garanti BBVA’s IT team migrate existing scripts when possible and establish new workflows when needed.
The resulting solution uses Hitachi Ops Center Administrator to unify the management of all the bank’s VSP systems, including the new VSP 5500, VSP 5100, and VSP E590 systems along with the legacy VSP G1500 arrays. Through the Ops Center Administrator interface, the Garanti BBVA IT team can easily provision new storage volumes.
The Hitachi Ops Center Protector has streamlined Garanti BBVA’s replication management workflow and has expedited configuration. Synchronous replication is configured through Hitachi Global Active Device, and asynchronous replication is configured through the Hitachi Universal Replicator.
Using Hitachi Ops Center Analyzer, the IT team can monitor key performance indicators, such as recovery time objective, and receive real-time notifications when potential problems surface. Prior to the upgrade, the Garanti BBVA team had to manually calculate these metrics, and determine the root cause of problems through email and phone communications. The Hitachi Ops Center Analyzer immediately identifies and locates the source of any bottlenecks.
Better Living Through Automation
The Hitachi Ops Center solution has drastically simplified storage management for Garanti BBVA. Hand-coded scripts were replaced with automated systems, leading to faster deployment, easier troubleshooting, and improved reliability.
Automation has been a huge time saver. Daily replication processes previously required 3 hours of staff time, but now can be completed in only 15 minutes. Those processes can occur three times a day, so the Hitachi Ops Center solution results in a 92 percent time savings. That frees the storage team to work on more valuable tasks.
The Hitachi Ops Center Analyzer enables customized monitoring and alerts to further boost reliability with minimal staff intervention. The bank’s high-performing, highly resilient storage architecture has been operational for five years, and Garanti BBVA has never experienced an outage, securing its greatest need: reliability.
The Hitachi Ops Center solution has been such a game-changer that Garanti BBVA is investigating the use of automation to drive growth and simplify storage on demand services.
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