Enabling Growth with Fast, Reliable, Scalable Storage for Mission-Critical Applications

Overview

Challenge

• Prepare for expansion into Türkiye’s retail banking market by ensuring that DestekBank’s infrastructure could scale reliably to support rapid growth.

Solution

• Improve performance, availability and disaster recovery by migrating to a three-data-center architecture built on Hitachi VSP One Block 26.

Outcome

• Increase capacity 40% and boost application performance 35%, while delivering 99.999% system uptime and reducing total cost of ownership 20%.

Challenge

As one of Türkiye’s youngest and most dynamic banks, DestekBank focuses on delivering a wide range of innovative financial products and services. Within its first year of operations, the bank established a strong market presence in the corporate banking sector, launching digital services including corporate cash and non-cash loans, EXIM loans, foreign trade financing, private banking products, treasury transactions, investment services, instant foreign exchange trading, TL bonds, Eurobonds, repo and cash management products.

The next phase of its evolution will see DestekBank expand into Türkiye’s retail banking market. This will require the bank to launch a whole new set of digital banking services, onboard thousands of new customers, and process much higher volumes of transactions every day.

To prepare for this upcoming period of explosive growth, DestekBank knew that its IT infrastructure would need to be capable of scaling rapidly to support the business. The IT team recognized that storage was a weak point; their existing storage systems were reaching end-of-life, and as operational complexity increased, managing multiple arrays was becoming increasingly time-consuming.

“To simplify operations, enhance performance and ensure business continuity, we decided to refresh and consolidate our storage environment,” says Kemal Ozcan, Deputy CEO and CTO at DestekBank.

Solution

Kemal Ozcan recalls, “Our primary requirement was to implement a system capable of supporting our mission-critical applications. Based on our needs, Hitachi Vantara positioned the VSP One Block 26 system in a three-data-center [3DC] mode, ensuring high availability and seamless failover.”

The bank was impressed by the robustness of the Hitachi Vantara solution, and its ability to offer a 100% data availability guarantee. “After a thorough analysis, Hitachi Vantara's 3DC offering stood out as the most mature and comprehensive solution, providing superior resilience, scalability, and efficiency,” says Ozcan. “The 3DC approach with active-active replication makes it easy not only to meet our recovery time and recovery point objectives for each of our mission-critical systems, but also to test our disaster recovery capabilities regularly.”

In addition, the VSP One array’s NVMe drives deliver a significant performance advantage, increasing data throughput and reducing latency to help maintain excellent application performance as DestekBank’s user-base and data volumes increase.

Moving to VSP One has also enabled the bank to replace multiple existing arrays with a single centralized storage solution, with a single point of management through Hitachi Ops Center. By combining a compact, high-density form factor with Hitachi’s adaptive data reduction (ADR) capabilities, the new array has increased total storage capacity while reducing space and energy requirements in the data center.

“Compression and deduplication with ADR give us a 4:1 data reduction ratio compared to our old storage,” says Ozcan. “This makes storage much more cost-effective and gives us plenty of headroom to scale up our business. VSP One also makes capacity upgrades simpler and cheaper, as we can now add one drive at a time instead of purchasing an entire new RAID group.”

The bank worked with Hitachi Professional Services to install the VSP One arrays at its three data centers and migrate data from its old storage systems. “The collaboration with Hitachi Professional Services has been seamless. Their team provided expert guidance throughout the project,” says Ozcan. “The migration process has been progressing smoothly, ensuring minimal disruption to our operations.”

Outcome

With the Hitachi VSP One solution running in production at its three data centers, DestekBank estimates that it will reduce the total cost of ownership of its storage environment by approximately 20% and achieve a full return on investment within 18 months.

From an operational perspective, the energy efficiency of the new arrays will deliver a 25% reduction in data center power consumption and costs, while simplified storage management with Hitachi Ops Center will cut storage management workload by 30%, freeing the IT team to focus on higher-value, more strategic work.

Above all, the new solution will meet the performance, scalability and availability requirements that are crucial for the next stage of DestekBank’s evolution as it enters Türkiye’s retail banking market. Total storage capacity has increased 40% and application performance has improved 35%, providing a more responsive experience for users. Moreover, with the 3DC architecture providing active-active replication, system uptime has increased to 99.999%, and DestekBank can recover mission-critical applications within minutes to meet tight RTO and RPO constraints.

Kemal Ozcan concludes, “I would like to extend our sincere gratitude to the Hitachi Vantara Türkiye team. From the initial product order to delivery, and throughout the entire installation and professional support process, their expertise and dedication have been truly commendable. Their collaborative approach ensured a smooth and efficient implementation, reinforcing our confidence in both the solution and the team behind it.”