Delivering Banking Services to Millions of Customers with Sustainable, Cost-Efficient Infrastructure

Overview

Challenge

• Ensure the availability of mission-critical banking systems by building a rock-solid infrastructure.

Solution

• Replace aging hybrid storage with more powerful, scalable all-flash arrays to run Oracle systems.

Outcome

• Improved performance and availability boosted energy efficiency and environmental sustainability and cut power consumption and infrastructure costs.

Challenge

Yapı Kredi plays a central role in the Turkish economy, providing consumer and business banking, pensions, and investment services to more than 16M customers. One of the first Turkish banks to operate nationwide, Yapı Kredi operates more than 780 branches and manages assets worth TL 2.1 trillion ($58B).

Mustafa Çetin, Infrastructure Planning and Platform Director at Yapı Kredi Technology, explains: “The Turkish banking sector is increasingly competitive. Customers expect more personalized offerings and faster transactions. To strengthen our status as a market leader, we focus on providing innovative, reliable financial services via digital and traditional delivery channels that help to build trust and brand loyalty.”

To ensure its banking operations run smoothly day to day, Yapı Kredi puts great emphasis on the resiliency of its mission-critical systems. For example, to ensure the availability of core banking applications, it keeps a second Oracle database platform on standby to enable rapid failover in the event of an outage. Similarly, the bank runs an Oracle archive platform to manage historical transaction data for compliance purposes and trend analysis to help optimize customer services.

For several years, Yapı Kredi relied on hybrid storage arrays to support these Oracle systems. However, the storage lacked the performance and scalability required to manage rapidly increasing volumes of transaction data efficiently. With the arrays approaching end of service life, Yapı Kredi decided to build a new infrastructure better suited to handle the pressures of modern banking.

Serkan Kantarcıoğlu, Storage & Backup System Manager at Yapı Kredi Technology, adds: “Higher performance and availability were essential to process transactions faster and ensure non-stop access to our applications. We also wanted to implement advanced data management capabilities, which would enable us to minimize our data center footprint and operate more cost-efficiently and sustainably.”

Solution

To modernize the infrastructure supporting its Oracle standby database and archive, Yapı Kredi decided to replace the hybrid arrays with all-flash Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) 5600 and VSP E1090 systems. “Few vendors could meet all of our requirements,” explains Kantarcıoğlu. “Hitachi Vantara is a trusted partner to Yapı Kredi, and offered a solution with exceptional performance, reliability and resilience.”

To deploy the new arrays, Yapı Kredi worked closely with Hitachi Professional Services. After installing the hardware, the project team migrated data from the old systems, completing the process in two months. “We achieved a smooth transition and finalized the project on schedule” adds Çetin. “Having local support available from Hitachi is very valuable, ensuring we have immediate assistance whenever we face challenges.”

Yapı Kredi, implemented the infrastructure across two data centers, with one Hitachi VSP 5600 and one VSP E1090 array at its production site, and the same setup at its disaster recovery location 400 kilometers away. To maintain high availability, the bank uses Oracle tools to replicate data between the two sites.

The Hitachi solutions provide much improved scalability, along with adaptive data reduction (ADR) functionality, including compression and deduplication. These capabilities will enable Yapı Kredi to optimize storage efficiency, managing expanding data volumes within a more compact hardware footprint.

Furthermore, the bank is harnessing Hitachi Ops Center Administrator and Ops Center Analyzer to manage the infrastructure. Kantarcıoğlu explains: “Hitachi Ops Center is very useful, especially the pre-configured workflows, which streamline repetitive storage management tasks. The customized reporting in Ops Center Analyzer also makes it much easier to identify bottlenecks, saving time for our storage administrators.”

Outcome

With the Hitachi VSP 5600 and VSP E1090 arrays, Yapı Kredi has successfully built a modern, robust storage infrastructure to underpin its critical Oracle systems. The new environment provides the resilience and flexibility needed to support innovative banking services and handle growing transaction volumes seamlessly.

“The Hitachi arrays have significantly improved the availability of our mission-critical Oracle applications,” comments Çetin. “The solutions have delivered outstanding reliability, stability, and scalability.”

Furthermore, Yapı Kredi has seen a major increase in storage performance with the all-flash arrays, with reduced latency and shorter application response times. “Performance is crucial because it directly impacts how quickly we can process transactions” notes Çetin. “With the latest Hitachi Oracle solutions, the improvement has been clear.”

In addition, the new Hitachi arrays are helping Yapı Kredi to improve its environmental performance. “The all-flash arrays are much more energy efficient than the previous hybrid storage, reducing our power consumption and cooling requirements significantly” explains Kantarcıoğlu. “The move to the Hitachi VSP 5600 and VSP E1090 solutions has enabled us to cut our carbon footprint and operate more sustainably.”

Within the two data centers, the switch from hybrid to all-flash storage and the use of compression and deduplication functionalities has generated valuable savings on rack space. The combination of more efficient data management policies and reduced energy consumption has also helped to reduce overall infrastructure costs, and the bank has achieved a strong return on its investment with Hitachi.

Çetin concludes: “We have also improved our data security and compliance with the Hitachi solutions, so the whole engagement has been very positive. It is always easy to do business with Hitachi, and we look forward to exploring their latest storage innovations to further enhance our service delivery.”