Powering banking excellence with storage designed for continuous availability and growth

Overview

Challenge

• Ensure the continued availability of mission-critical banking systems amid explosive data growth and increasing cyber threats.

Solution

• Deployed Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform 5000 Series systems to elevate availability, performance, and resilience for 32 PB of enterprise data.

Outcome

• Hitachi Vantara solutions deliver 30% greater energy efficiency, reduce storage utilization by 25%, and improve disaster recovery readiness. 

Challenge

Garanti BBVA is Türkiye’s second-largest private bank, with consolidated total assets of 4.8 trillion TL as of 31 March 2026. Active in all segments of the banking sector—including corporate, commercial, retail, private, and investment banking—Garanti BBVA helps more than 30 million customers meet their financial goals.

“Garanti BBVA’s strategic priorities are built on three fundamental pillars: trusted digital banking, uninterrupted operational continuity, and customer-centric innovation,” says Tuna Barış Özken, Executive Vice President – Corporate Security & CISO at Garanti BBVA Technology. “Managing such a vast volume of data securely, quickly and efficiently at a bank the size of Garanti BBVA truly requires highly robust and powerful systems.”

He adds: “When it comes to our storage infrastructure, our priorities are very clear. Performance comes first. It is critical for us that our customers experience the same speed and level of service with every transaction—because trust is measured by consistency.”

For a banking institution operating on this scale, any disruption to critical business systems could easily have a national-level impact. This makes it essential for Garanti BBVA to maintain continuous availability for critical systems, including mobile and internet banking, digital investment platforms, payments infrastructure, and analytics systems.

“Today, we operate more than 700 models powered by a wide range of algorithms,” says Özken. “They range from machine learning to deep learning, across areas such as marketing, sales, pricing, fraud detection, credit evaluation, and customer satisfaction.”

Deniz Armen, Cloud Data Storage Technologies Manager at Garanti BBVA Technology, says: “Any potential disruption in these systems carries the risk of immediate service interruptions, reputational damage, and financial penalties—particularly during peak transaction hours or active market days.”

For more than a decade, the bank has trusted Hitachi Vantara to achieve this high level of resilience. It relies on dozens of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) systems, deployed across a three-data-center configuration. Garanti BBVA uses active-active replication to synchronize data between storage arrays in its two primary centers, and asynchronous replication to a remote disaster recovery (DR) site.

The Hitachi Vantara architecture has proven highly effective at protecting data and maintaining continuous uptime, but the bank realized that it was time for an upgrade. Garanti BBVA was experiencing exponential data growth due to the expansion of its digital banking channels. At the same time, new regulatory compliance requirements from the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) placed a stronger focus on improving recovery time and recovery point objectives. This made it necessary for the bank to add more capacity while modernizing its storage technology and enhancing its DR processes.

Özken explains: "Rapid data growth and the increasing sophistication of cyber threats, especially ransomware, prompted us to re-evaluate our storage infrastructure. We needed to transition to a more resilient, scalable, and modern architecture that fully aligned with our DR, regulatory, and cybersecurity strategies."

Solution

Garanti BBVA evaluated multiple vendors before reaffirming its long-standing partnership with Hitachi Vantara. Hitachi Vantara offered the bank high performance and scalability for massive transaction volumes, coupled with comprehensive protection against evolving cybersecurity threats. It could also provide energy-efficient technologies to support the bank's sustainability commitments. And Garanti BBVA knew that it could count on Hitachi Vantara for exceptional reliability.

Armen recalls: "While we received some interesting proposals, we simply weren't convinced that other vendors could match Hitachi Vantara's performance and reliability. In the whole of last year, we logged just two support tickets with Hitachi Vantara, both of which were straightforward inquiries. That level of dependability is invaluable to us."

“Hitachi conducted architectural workshops and capacity analyses based on our workload models,” says Armen. “Together we designed a multi-location architecture that provides high availability tailored to our specific needs.”

The next step was to upgrade to new-generation Hitachi VSP storage systems. These include Hitachi VSP 5500 and VSP 5100 all-flash storage arrays, with NVMe technology enabling ultra-fast performance and low latency for critical mobile banking and digital trading systems.

A dedicated Hitachi Vantara team provided support throughout the project, from design to data migration and implementation. Together with the bank, Hitachi Vantara also shaped a comprehensive DR automation plan, which Garanti BBVA now tests weekly. This is complemented by immutable snapshots of key systems for ransomware protection.

Critically, all upgrades were executed live, without service interruption to the production environment. This ensured that the bank's systems continued serving millions of customers throughout the transition.

“The upgrade was completed fully in line with our planned schedule and budget,” says Armen. “We had very high expectations regarding availability, performance, and disaster recovery capabilities, and Hitachi Vantara delivered on these completely.”

Garanti BBVA now manages more than 32 PB of data across 39 Hitachi VSP arrays, taking advantage of Hitachi Ops Center Administrator for unified management of its storage systems. The bank also uses Hitachi Ops Center Protector for streamlined replication management, allowing teams to quickly and easily configure both synchronous replication with Hitachi Global active device (GAD) and asynchronous replication with Hitachi Universal Replicator (HUR).

Outcome

Together with Hitachi Vantara, Garanti BBVA has built a modern storage infrastructure that combines robust data protection and performance with greater efficiency and flexibility. Garanti BBVA has seen a clear increase in performance since introducing the new Hitachi VSP arrays, which have significantly reduced response times during peak operations.

The arrays are also helping Garanti BBVA improve its environmental performance. Hitachi Vantara’s Adaptive Data Reduction (ADR) feature delivers highly efficient data deduplication ratios that optimize storage costs while delivering the bank’s sustainability objectives.

"Hitachi Vantara’s compression and deduplication capabilities have reduced our resource requirements while improving energy efficiency," confirms Armen. “We estimate that Hitachi Vantara systems consume approximately 30% less energy than competing solutions, directly supporting our sustainability and operational efficiency goals.”

The Hitachi Vantara storage also directly supports Garanti BBVA’s goals to improve operational resilience, data security, and DR readiness.

“Hitachi’s solution directly supports our DORA objectives,” says Armen. “In particular, it helps us ensure DORA compliance in areas such as operational resilience, data integrity, and disaster recovery preparedness through DR automation, immutable backups, isolated recovery environments, and high availability features.”

Following the upgrade, storage utilization has been reduced from 70% to 45%, creating a much-needed headroom for continued data growth. With data volumes rising at a rate of 30% year-on-year, the additional capacity ensures the bank can support greater transaction volumes and rising workloads seamlessly.

Özken concludes: “This infrastructure is an invisible yet highly powerful backbone that supports Garanti BBVA’s sustainable growth vision. But I believe the most important thing is this: Hitachi Vantara speaks our language. They truly understand us, our needs, and our priorities.”