Garanti BBVA Harnesses Automation To Make Storage Management Easy

Challenge

Part of the BBVA financial services group, Garanti BBVA is Turkey’s second-largest private bank, with consolidated assets of nearly US$64.9 billion. It has a 19.2% share of the Turkish lending market and a 17.5% share of the corporate banking market, while also serving nearly 20 million retail customers.

Operating in a highly regulated market, Garanti BBVA puts huge emphasis on the reliability and availability of its services. From an IT perspective, this means that outages are not an option. Over several years, the bank has built an IT architecture designed to maximize availability and provide extremely high levels of resilience against disaster.

In its distributed systems environment, this resilience is built on a three-data-center storage strategy. The bank uses active-active replication to synchronize data between storage arrays in its two primary centers, and asynchronous replication to a remote disaster recovery site.

This architecture has been highly successful in protecting data and maintaining continuous uptime but was not always easy to manage. Storage administrators had to maintain and execute complex scripts to perform routine tasks, such as provisioning new storage volumes and updating replication configurations. The storage team spent considerable time on replication management, diverting their attention from more valuable and strategic projects.

Outcome

The adoption of Hitachi Ops Center has enabled Garanti BBVA’s storage team to make major improvements in their storage management processes. “Using Hitachi Ops Center to automate our day-to-day tasks has been key to streamlining our operations,” explains Deniz Armen, the bank’s Cloud Data Storage Technologies Manager.

By empowering the team to manage automated processes via a user-friendly user interface, the solution has eliminated the use of hand-coded scripts for many day-to-day tasks, boosting reliability. In many cases, the benefits can be measured in hard numbers. “Hitachi Ops Center Protector has cut replication configuration from 3 hours to 15 minutes,” says Armen. This makes a huge difference to productivity, because the storage team often needs to complete this process up to three times a day.

The solution also contributes to Garanti BBVA’s admirable record on systems reliability and availability, as Armen notes: “With Ops Center Analyzer, we can set custom alerts to monitor KPIs and maximize uptime with minimal human intervention.” These improved monitoring capabilities add an extra layer of resilience on top of the highly reliable Hitachi VSP arrays and the ultra-resilient active-active data center architecture. This has been a major factor in one of the team’s key achievements: zero unplanned downtime in the distributed systems landscape over the past five years.

Based on its success with using Ops Center Administrator and Ops Center Protector to accelerate its routine provisioning and configuration processes, the Garanti BBVA team is now looking to expand its use of automation. For example, the team is currently exploring the use of Ops Center Automator to develop a new automated provisioning capability for one of its in-house applications, which would allow the system to grow its storage on demand, without any need for human intervention.

“Thanks to Hitachi Ops Center, our storage landscape has become one of the easiest parts of our infrastructure to manage,” says Armen. “We’re excited to continue our trusted partnership with Hitachi Vantara and drive automation to unlock even more efficiencies in the future,” she concludes.