Türkiye İş Bankası Strengthens Data Infrastructure Stability with Huawei OceanStor Pacific Data Storage

İşbank has always played a leading role in the banking sector in Türkiye. Offering Türkiye's first ATM and telephone banking services, the bank has also made many innovative breakthroughs in internet banking in recent years. In this period when the banking sector has entered the "Bank 4.0" era, İşbank continues to pioneer digital transformation with its advanced information and communication technologies and innovative approaches.

Data Is the Heart of the Finance Sector: What Kind of Data Platform Does İşbank Need?

A large part of Türkiye is located in a geography that is vulnerable to earthquakes. 96% of the land is located in earthquake zones. For this reason, İşbank and other similar institutions are investing more in data redundancy and disaster recovery solutions, placing more emphasis on data, which is the most important element of their operations. İşbank is also building a high-availability data exchange platform for the exchange and sharing of information such as credit research, transactions, assets, and e-banking data. This platform is intended to support upper-layer transaction analysis, statistics and reporting services.

Heavy Data Traffic: Hundreds of thousands of files are transferred over the platform every day and hundreds of millions of new files are created every year. This creates a challenge that constantly increases the volume of service data. In particular, the platform must have a structure that can handle traffic peaks at the end of every month and the year. These factors raise İşbank's storage infrastructure expectations for scalability and stability to a very high level.

High Reliability for Production Services: Multi-active DR will be required for uninterrupted core production services on the bank's data exchange platform. In addition, the platform will need to support the development of highly reliable and usable microservices by connecting to İşbank's upper-layer container platform. Furthermore, İşbank needs to provide more reliable and flexible solutions by supporting its container-based microservice infrastructure.

Increasing Performance and Reliability with All-Flash Scale-Out Storage

After detailed tests, İşbank selected the Huawei OceanStor Pacific all-flash scale-out object storage solution for its data exchange platform.

Active-active DR within 400 km: İşbank established an active-active pair of data centers in Istanbul and Ankara, using Huawei OceanStor Pacific. This architecture enables close access to services and seamless service transfer in the event of single-site failure. It also allows for the addition of more active sites in the future, in line with the bank's growth.

Low latency (＜ 50 ms): Huawei OceanStor Pacific does not compromise performance even when a bucket contains hundreds of billions of objects. Test results show that OceanStor Pacific provides twice the performance of its closest peer vendor. It also creates an ideal infrastructure for lightweight and agile containers, where hundreds of container pods can be launched in just one minute.

Easy access with S3 protocol: The OpenShift container platform provides services with a direct connection based on URL. This provides real-time access to data over Layer 2 and Layer 3 networks, eliminating the need for reconfiguration or additional plugins. In addition, if a pod fails, a new pod can be started immediately on another node, ensuring no interruption in upper-layer services.