Heavyweight Indonesian Bank Chooses Huawei Storage to Power Indonesia's Financial Sector

PT Bank Central Asia Tbk, commonly known as Bank Central Asia (BCA), is one of the most important commercial banks in Indonesia. Founded in 1955, this storied company is today the largest privately-owned bank in the country and was named Best Indonesian Bank for 2022 by global media company Forbes. It was also announced as the Best Bank in Indonesia by Global Finance magazine.

With over 1200 branches nationwide, supported by 17,000 Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs), BCA offers a wide range of services to individuals and businesses alike, including savings and current accounts, loans and credit facilities, investment and insurance products, and online banking. It also has special programs tailored to specific customer segments such as students and small businesses.

Across the board, the bank is committed to providing excellent customer service and has, accordingly, long invested heavily in technology to improve efficiency, security, and convenience. So, as Indonesia's economy continues to grow, BCA is clearly well positioned to continue playing a key role in the country's financial system and wider economy.

BCA's vision is explicit in this regard — it aims "to be the bank of choice and a major pillar of the Indonesian economy" — and has defined its mission to match this ambition.

• To build centers of excellence in payment settlements and financial solutions for businesses and individuals.

• To understand diverse customer needs and provide the right financial services to optimize customer satisfaction.

• To enhance corporate franchise and stakeholder value.

High-performing storage unlocking the power of data

Data analytics has become an essential component for every bank. It involves the collection, processing, and analysis of data to provide valuable insights and support decision-making. To make sense of complex data sets, banks use visualization, predictive analytics, and reporting tools.

The banking analytic application so critical to making this a reality require powerful support in the back end, with fast, uninterrupted database access key to efficient operations. The faster data flows and the lower the latency, the quicker the real-time reaction in an application's front-end interface, significantly enhancing the overall working efficiency.

With all of this in mind, clearly understanding what it wanted to achieve, BCA chose Huawei OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage for modernize their storage. The solution provides 257,862 achievable Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) with latency as low as 1 ms, supporting a massive number of seamless real-time transactions.

After deploying its new solution, BCA's application response time has sensuously become faster, like-for-like, suggesting that it is better meeting the needs of users, enabling to interact with the application without experiencing any lag or delay, therefore, that this increase is solely attributable to improved storage performance.

Storage powers data analytics and delivers more actionable insights

With BCA's business growing, the bank also found itself needing additional storage capacity for its business analytics platform. This platform involves the use of data-driven tools and techniques to analyze various aspects of operations and performance, such as that user partials.

The algorithms that drive such sophisticated analytics require substantial computing power, also generating a huge amount of data. All of this must be stored. Again, it's Huawei's OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage series that is now providing BCA with 153 TB of usable capacity, meeting its needs over the next five year. Providing extremely high data availability and advanced data reduction capabilities, the OceanStor Dorado solution is supporting BCA's analytics work to deliver faster access to business analysis application helping them maintain business SLA into a better one.

Reliable storage is crucial for the smooth functioning of business operations

For any storage solution, reliability and Disaster Recovery (DR) capabilities are also critical to boosting efficiency and pushing up customer satisfaction. "We have to ensure our data center is always on and secure." Says Armand Wahyudi Hartono, the Vice President Director at PT Bank Central Asia Tbk.

With BCA's decision to choose two sets of OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage, the first set was installed at its main data center site, while the other was deployed as a DR center. BCA also deployed one OceanStor hybrid storage in each data center as a backup, with a capacity of 500 TB. This solution is designed to protect data in various scenarios, including virtualization, databases, file systems, and cloud. The solution supports multiple backup modes to meet different requirements, and dedicated resources in each location are designated specifically for backup. This architecture provides data-level failure protection for services and seamlessly integrates with the bank's preexisting backup application. It also provides system-level failure protection, meaning that when the main data center is down, the DR site takes over, ensuring zero interruption to services for users. This is a clear recipe for success.

To ensure a seamless transition from the previous storage system to the new one, it is crucial to properly configure all applications and services that rely on the storage system. BCA was able to achieve a smooth switchover with the Huawei Oceanstor Dorado solution, which guaranteed uninterrupted availability and accessibility of data throughout the upgrade process. This ensured that there was no disruption to the storage system during the transition to the new solution.

Hartono praised Huawei for the outstanding service thus far. BCA has been able to benefit greatly from Huawei's OceanStor Dorado solution, which has provided them with numerous advantages. It allows the bank to make better decisions — informed by real data insights — in turn enhancing the customer experience and improving operational efficiencies, in order to stay highly competitive in an increasingly data-driven marketplace. Furthermore, this project also marks the very first time all-flash storage has been deployed in the financial industry in Indonesia, surely a strong indicator of what direction the industry is now heading in and what the future holds.