Absolut Bank Builds Efficient OA Platform with Huawei OceanStor Dorado

Background

Established in 1993, Absolut Bank is one of the most-active commercial banks in the Russian Federation. It has been active in Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) in recent years for quick market expansion. Absolut Bank is now among the top ten commercial banks in Russia.

Challenges

In recent years, Absolut Bank has engaged in M&A, and, as a result, its business has expanded rapidly. This helps it maintain a leading position in the commercial banking market. Rapid business expansion drives growth in the scale and staff numbers of headquarters and branches. This has put a great strain on the original office systems.

Desktop resources could not meet the business development needs. There was slow response to desktop startup as well as periodic virus scanning and killing requests. This was due to insufficient system performance and the result was poor user experience.

Due to frequent service disruptions and data loss risks, Absolut Bank was in urgent need of an IT system with high performance and reliability. The aim of the new system would be to improve operational efficiency and reliability. Plus the system must ensure efficient and stable operations.

The necessary performance for business expansion was not possible due to the lengthy storage latency at data centers.

Solution

Absolut Bank has approximately 3,700 employees. This causes heavy investment into equipment procurement and maintenance. Over the past few years, Absolut Bank has gradually adopted office desktop clouds throughout its entire body. It has also made plans to meet IT resource needs, optimize system structures, and reduce potential fault risks. Before selecting a solution, Absolut Bank proposed two requirements for its candidates.

Performance: To fulfill requirements at peak hours, Absolut Bank required 400,000 IOPS at a latency shorter than 1 millisecond.

Availability: Absolut Bank required high availability for some critical workloads. According to the regulatory requirements of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, banks must ensure high data reliability and have zero tolerance for any data loss.

Absolut Bank designed more than 20 service models for desktop clouds and banking service systems. This enabled them to obtain real-world product performance results.

Through in-depth communications with Absolut Bank, Huawei understood its business needs and future plans. Absolut Bank needed to upgrade its office systems. It must establish a highly available system environment for some critical workloads. The test results showed that a single set of Huawei’s OceanStor Dorado achieved a peak performance of 400,000 IOPS at a stable latency of 1 millisecond. The OceanStor Dorado delivered lightning-fast performance and rock-solid reliability. This remained true even with enabled deduplication and compression, and frequently created snapshots, if services failed over and back between active-active sites, and data reconstructed after three SSDs failed simultaneously. Huawei Dorado delivered a stable performance, 35 percent higher than that from vendor H’s flash product on the live network. Regarding availability: An active-active architecture was ideal for banks to lay a foundation to migrate more-critical workloads. Huawei’s Gateway-Free Active-Active Solution simplifies networking and slashes equipment procurement costs. It also eliminates the need to purchase gateways.

Huawei deployed two sets of OceanStor Dorado 6000 V3 all-flash arrays at Absolut Bank’s data centers. The OceanStor Dorado established a high-performance data platform for office desktop systems. This met office desktop usage requirements from more than 70 branches. Plus, the HyperMetro Gateway-Free Active-Active Solution deployed on the two all-flash arrays ensures always-on services. Huawei’s migration tool quickly migrated banking services from legacy systems to new ones. This significantly improved user experiences and took pressure off the original systems. Huawei configured the deduplication and compression function to reduce duplicate data such as operating system images in desktop systems. This ensures cost-effective construction. The up to 5 to 1 data reduction ratio enhances resource usage and satisfies Absolut Bank’s business expansion needs over the next five years.

Benefits

Absolut Bank ultimately chose Huawei as the equipment vendor for IT upgrades at the headquarters and branches.

3,000 office desktops are available for 76 branches, to improve end-to-end performance response 4-fold.

Some critical workloads were effortlessly migrated to the new system platform. This migration relieved system performance.

The active-active solution ensures stable office and banking services 24/7.

Huawei’s OceanStor Dorado leverages inline deduplication and compression to deliver outstanding performance and improve its space utilization 3-fold. This solution also reduces footprints, power consumption, and cooling costs. It greatly decreases construction and O&M expenses to lower its TCO by 50 percent over the next five years.