Garanti Bank Achieves Extreme Data Warehouse Performance
 
 

Garanti Bank Achieves Extreme Data Warehouse Performance

  • Oracle Customer:  Garanti Bank
    Location:  Istanbul, Turkey
    Industry:  Financial Services
    Employees:  18,000
    Annual Revenue:  $1 to $5 Billion

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Garanti Bank, founded 63 years ago, is Turkey’s second largest private bank, holding US$78 billion in assets. Doğuş Holding in Turkey and Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) in Spain are equal partners in the bank.

Garanti is an integrated financial services company with its nine subsidiaries that serve the corporate, private, commercial, midsize enterprise, retail, and investment banking markets. It provides payment systems, pension, leasing, factoring, brokerage, and asset management in addition to standard banking services. Garanti serves customers through a strong, extensive distribution network of 880 branches, nearly 3,000 ATMs, an award-winning call center, and mobile and online banking facilities built on a cutting-edge IT infrastructure.

To support its branch network and maintain its leadership position, Garanti Bank requires centralized operations management, superior data warehousing, reliable management reporting systems, and effective alternative delivery channels. It enhances its operational efficiency and profitability by continuously investing in alternative delivery channels, such as internet banking, mobile banking, and Garanti Paramatik, the bank’s ATM network. Most recently, Garanti Bank added Oracle Exadata Database Machine to improve data warehouse queries and support its goal of becoming the most profitable bank in Turkey. With Oracle Exadata, the bank can run faster reports, which gives users visibility into key metrics, including metrics for profitability and risk management.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Garanti Bank

  • “To achieve the ambitious goal of becoming the most profitable bank in Turkey, we use Oracle Exadata Database Machine, the best product available in the market today. Oracle Exadata Database Machine’s real benefit is that it enables us to make the right decisions at the right time to drive profitability.” – Tufan Alatan, Chief Technical Officer, Garanti Bank

  • Achieve high performance in data warehouse queries to support the bank’s ambitious plans of becoming the most profitable bank in Turkey
  • Enable accurate and timely reporting on data-intensive queries, such as for managing risk and profitability, vital to a growing financial services company and necessary to comply with increasingly rigorous regulatory reporting requirements
  • Eliminate long-running data warehouse queries on mainframe computers due to low central processing unit power, especially on critical days, such as at the beginning and end of the month, tax payment days, and Mother’s Day
  • Provide the bank’s 800 data warehouse end users with a better user experience and give them more time for analysis
  • Improve backup strategy by enabling daily backups and reducing time required to complete them
  • Avoid user complaints about the duration of report queries that originate from shortcomings in system power due to missing and suboptimal resources for data warehouse workloads

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Deployed the preconfigured and ready-to-deploy Oracle Exadata Database Machine with Oracle Linux to consolidate data warehouse applications onto a common platform, increasing data warehouse performance substantially and reducing performance-related customer complaints to an insignificant number
  • Transferred 2.5 terabytes of data daily from mainframe systems through 1,300 scheduled file transfer protocol loads and Oracle external table features, resulting in nearly 8 billion daily inserts
  • Used the full-rack Oracle Exadata Database Machine to convert more than 2,500 reports extremely quickly and easily—in merely 20 days—enabling 800 end users to run their reports at any time
  • Moved from a first version full-rack Oracle Exadata Database Machine to a half-rack Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2 with high-performance SAS drives with a 600 gigabyte capacity to reduce data storage requirements with hybrid columnar compression from 17 terabytes to 5 terabytes, database server nodes from eight to four, and storage server cells from 14 to 7, improving performance by a factor of three while saving on floor space and energy consumption
  • Used Oracle Exadata’s smart scans and smart flash cache features to reduce the amount of data sent to servers and to break random input/output bottlenecks, achieving a 10-fold performance improvement in data warehouse queries
  • Enabled employees to run reports in a few minutes instead of up to eight hours, freeing them to spend more time on subsequent processes, such as generating the same report with modified key parameters
  • Took advantage of time gained through faster query processing to more thoroughly test data, resulting in more reliable and accurate reports
  • Enabled the bank to make data-intensive queries that it could not attempt before—for reports on things such as the management of profitability, customers, risks, products, and strategic performance—giving managers the information and time needed to make appropriate decisions, even on critical days
  • Optimized data backup with full instead of incremental backups, completing seven-terabyte backups in only three hours on Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2

Why Oracle

Garanti Bank did not consider other manufacturers, but compared Oracle Exadata Database Machine with the deployment of Oracle Unix boxes that included a storage area network. Oracle Exadata’s predictable extreme performance―coupled with out-of-the-box configuration that offers the fastest time to value, lowest risk, and unlimited scale to match Garanti Bank’s ambitious growth plans―clinched the decision.

Implementation Process

In three months, Garanti Bank moved from Oracle Exadata Database Machine Version 1 to Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2, including conversion of 2,500 reports.

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