Turkey's Kuveyt Türk Bank Manages Data with Ease with Huawei OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage
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Kuveyt Türk is a Turkish bank that offers tailor-made financial solutions with innovative products and services covering international, retail, mobile, Internet, gold products-based, and Small- and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) banking. It operates through 425 branch offices spread throughout Turkey, as well as a Bahrain branch office and its wholly owned subsidiary, KT Bank AG, which has a total of four branches in Germany.
Efficiently providing a large number of financial products and services to its customers with a unique product and service structure, Kuveyt Türk directly contributes to the country's economy. Indeed, it's the only bank that has three Research and Development (R&D) centers in Turkey.
The banking industry in Turkey is known to be dynamic. With competition increasing, banking and finance enterprises have invested in digital technologies for years, in an effort to strengthen their position in the market. So it's easy to understand why Kuveyt Türk always has its finger on the pulse of industry innovation, re-structuring all of its business processes as part of the digital transformation journey. As such, it has built its own core banking software and now also provides core banking software solutions to other banks.
Continuing its investment in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) solutions, the bank wanted to improve the performance of data access, availability, and security. Data is the centerpiece of any digital transformation strategy, of course, and the bank needed to ensure real-time data availability while also taking care to protect customer information. In addition, it wanted to improve its Disaster Recovery (DR) center's performance. Since the amount of replicated data the bank collects has grown significantly, it simply has to be equipped to handle it without any interruptions to services.
Kuveyt Türk first launched its digital transformation project back in 2009, adopting the motto "digital is our route, people are our focus." In this spirit, the bank's aim was — indeed, is — to offer its customers the widest possible range of banking transactions on mobile platforms, allowing them to quickly conduct a transaction from anywhere. With digital transformation ongoing, the bank also wanted to launch innovative products and services at ever increasing speed, growing its digital customer base and ensuring high-quality digitalized core banking software delivery for third-party customers.
While big data processing places heavy demands on any storage system, Kuveyt Türk also implemented strong DR scenarios to secure customer data and optimize business operations. These upgrades increased the performance requirements placed on its DR center. So the bank decided to invest in a storage system that would be ultra-reliable and resilient, supporting the center.
After technical workshops involving six data storage technology providers, the bank's Information technology (IT) team decided to move forward with an all-flash storage solution, which met all performance and high availability requirements. Huawei delivered the best performance and data reduction rates, as well as unmatched availability of features. "Huawei was the only company that met our requests in the Proof of Concept (PoC) process," commented Ali Yazıcı, IT Manager at Kuveyt Türk. "Huawei's team also responded very quickly to our requests for additional demonstration licenses for testing, providing excellent support."
Huawei provided the bank with an OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage solution that delivers best-in-class performance of up to 260,000 IOPS, with a 32 KB block size and under 1 ms latency, twice the performance of the industry's next best. It ensures End to End (E2E) reliability at every level, across components and architecture to products and solutions, and all the way to the cloud, supporting data consolidation scenarios with 99.99999% service availability. Delivery time took only five weeks, with Huawei performing installation and implementation in just two days.
The benefits of implementing OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage were soon evident. The storage system delivers the fast performance Kuveyt Türk needs to keep all applications and services running. For the bank, the reliability and resilience of OceanStor Dorado are key to streamlining its workflows and serving increasing numbers of digital customers. Indeed, the solution improves performance by a factor of three, compared to the legacy solution.
"Huawei was the only company that clearly demonstrated all of our requests in the PoC test. Additional requests were also quickly met during this process. So we successfully completed our acceptance tests and saw that they also met all of our requirements in the Request For Proposal (RFP). We then migrated from the legacy storage over a short period of time, with storage-based replications," Yazıcı said. "The new solution is easy to manage with a user-friendly interface, and we can make firmware updates without service interruptions. It does not require much maintenance and our team has no need to enter its interface for troubleshooting for months on end, unless there are disk operations. Now it's possible to get detailed graphics for performance analysis and create custom reports. We are very satisfied with the product and service."
With Huawei OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage, Kuveyt Türk is now equipped with a robust foundation that will foster future growth — that's something that can be banked on.