Decided to move to its new data center two years ago, Garanti Teknoloji implemented two important projects with the support of NGN Bilgi İletişim Hizmetleri and EMC products.

Ferda Bek, Deputy General Manager, in Charge of Data, Platform Management and Operation of Garanti Teknoloji says that “We always have to buy new disk system because our data in open systems grows too fast. Buying a new disk system means that the data available on the existing disk system must be transferred to the new disk system. As this requirement causes interruption in the processes, it creates an unwanted picture for us.”

Garanti Teknoloji, as a result of long researches, decided to virtualize the disk systems to solve this problem. Bek states the difficulty of this decision for them as follows: “The platform for virtualizing the disk systems means that a new layer is formed between the server and disk systems. How to proceed and what kind of result we would obtain were question marks for us.” She states that they overcame these question marks with Vplex technology of EMC: “As Vplex technology does not store data on it, we do not lose any data even if there is an error on this layer. This was the reason why we chose Vplex. Now we have two Vplex systems and both of them operates with backup. We designed a structure which can continue to operate without any interruption even if we lose a layer completely.” Kenan Yılmaz, Data Storage Manager of Garanti Teknoloji, says that another benefit of virtualization for them is that they started to maintain double copies of the disk systems in the production area: “We maintain our data on two separate physical disk systems. As a result, we obtained a structure which do not affect the applications against the hardware losses which may be experienced in the disk system itself.”

Kenan Ağyel, Team Manager of Garanti Teknoloji, states that they will switch to a double data center structure different from the current structure when they move to a new data center at the beginning of 2016. He states that at the beginning they started to virtualize the disk systems in the existing data center through EMC Vplex Local and adds as follows: “We virtualized the disk systems in the existing data center through EMC Vplex Local solution however, this was not a campus solution. With our new data center project, we switched to EMC Vplex Metro solution and established an active-active structure between the disk systems in the multiple data centers in a campus environment.”

New period in replication

Garanti Teknoloji which owns an emergency center in Izmir, implemented its disaster recovery project with the support of NGN and EMC. The data replication was started to be made between Istanbul and Izmir with EMC RecoverPoint solution. Previously, Garanti Teknoloji had an application-based replication system in the emergency center. This causes the replication made in the disaster center to be a very painful procedure. Ferda Bek, who stated that they have decided to switch to the “disk-to-disk” replication solution to solve this problem, added that “Deciding on the “disk-to-disk” replication and our transition to virtualize our disk systems were the strategic decisions we made at the same time. With disk-to-disk replication, we had designed an infrastructure in which we can replicate whatever is on the disk systems and whichever we want to replicate by controlling them on a single point, regardless of the application. Therefore we solved our replications without a problem and with a very good response time like 2 ms. Ağyel states that another benefit of this conversion is at the security points. He says that “We do not only replicate the data in our emergency center without any problem, but also can turn back to various times which we call as “point in time” with the continuous data replication (Continuous Remote Replication –CRR) technology.”

Garanti Teknoloji states that they received the necessary support from NGN when all these projects were implemented. Bek summarizes their successful cooperation as follows: “Choosing NGN as a business partner was an important decision for us. We told EMC that we also wanted to work with NGN. NGN made important contributions for procurement and installation of products in all these purchasing processes. They are a business partner of us and we are in close cooperation with them for a long time and we are very happy with their contributions.”

Cem. M. Kotanoğlu, Sales Director of NGN in Charge of Finance Sector, says “We are happy to be in close cooperation with Garanti Bankası for a long time. We, as NGN, always make investment to new technologies and our main purpose is to be a leader system integrator that adds value to Turkish IT market. We aim to continue and improve this good cooperation with Garanti Teknoloji through our new solutions and our enhanced team.”