Banorte Builds a Future-Ready Platform for Digital Banking Innovation

Overview

Challenge

• Lay the foundation for hyper-personalized digital banking services and mitigate the risk of natural disasters by moving to a brand-new data center.

Solution

• Migrated 450 TB of data to a new environment comprising two IBM z16 servers connected to three high-performance Hitachi VSP 5600 storage arrays.

Outcome

• Banorte has cut transaction response times in half, shrunk nightly batches by 30%, and created headroom for digital service innovation and growth.

Challenge

Founded in 1899, Grupo Financiero Banorte is the second largest commercial bank in Mexico, offering services in-branch, online and on mobile.

Jorge Ortega, Senior Specialist – Managed IT Services at Banorte, says, “Our strategic goal is to forge closer connections with our customers by being present where and when they need us and building meaningful connections in a digital world. Our digital capabilities are crucial to drive this strategy, as they will allow us to deliver hyper-personalized customer experiences and ultimately achieve the top customer satisfaction scores for our sector.”

At Banorte, the mainframe is vital for service delivery, and the bank uses the latest-generation IBM z16 servers to underpin its offerings. For many years, the company’s primary data center was in Mexico City. However, a 2017 earthquake triggered an urgent search for a new site.

Banorte’s customer-facing services depend on the mainframe—and the company’s mainframe platform depends on storage solutions from Hitachi. For more than 30 years, Banorte has partnered with Hitachi Vantara to provide secure, reliable and high-performance storage for the mainframe. As it embarked on a major data center migration, the bank saw an opportunity to upgrade its Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) G1500 solutions: helping to strengthen its market-leading position by delivering increased performance and scalability for ever-growing banking workloads.

Solution

With Hitachi VSP 5600 arrays, the bank has slashed disk-level response times from 1 millisecond to just 500 microseconds per transaction, delivering a much-needed performance boost as the bank expands its digital services.

The new solution also enables greater utilization of mainframe cache memory, helping to ensure that 100% of operations with read and write access requirements can do so in memory rather than on disk. Ultimately, these improvements will enable the bank to grow its mainframe workloads without compromising on response times or processing speed.

Ortega comments, “With Hitachi, we have shrunk our nightly processing window by almost an hour, an 30% reduction. All batch operations complete well before the beginning of the new business day, slashing the risk of interruption to key customer-facing services.”

In Hitachi Vantara, Banorte has found a partner that is truly invested in its long-term success. The move to the new data center not only reduces the bank’s exposure to risk, it also helps the organization meet and exceed customer expectations around service quality.

Delfin Ruiz Favela, Infrastructure Manager – Financial Group at Banorte, says, “Hitachi has been by our side for decades and their technology hosts many of the most critical applications for our organization. Hitachi Vantara is a strategic partner to Banorte and the relationship continues to go from strength to strength.”

Ortega concludes, “Hitachi Vantara is constantly evolving and improving their solutions, which in turn supports the growth of our own digital capabilities. We trust Hitachi’s technology and people to deliver for Banorte for years to come.”

Outcome

Working with Hitachi Vantara and a local technology partner, the company migrated its data to the new VSP One Block solution, which now supports the company’s mission-critical retail operations across its core markets.

“Hitachi Vantara delivered on schedule and within our agreed budget, and the migration project has been smooth,” says the spokesperson. “Other vendors were only able to offer remote assistance, but Hitachi gives us on-site support to help with technical issues, firmware updates, and other tasks.”

The VSP One Block solution will boost the company’s storage capacity by over 20% and eliminate performance bottlenecks, helping the company to ensure its retail operations run smoothly for years to come. The new solution also takes up 50% less rack space than the previous storage environment, reducing operational costs and complexity.

“VSP One Block helps us to support our high-speed retail environments and protect our data,” concludes the spokesperson. “Backed by a robust storage infrastructure from Hitachi, we can meet the beauty values and needs of our customers.”