Simplify Compliance and Improve Productivity

Latin American multiservice bank has 122 branches and a focus on providing greater convenience to customers.

The Challenge: Meet Compliance Obligations and Improve Access to Data

Banco de Brasília S.A. (BRB) is a multiservice bank, providing customers with commercial, foreign exchange and real estate services. With 122 branches, more than 45,000 ATMs and a range of mobile applications, the bank aimed to offer greater convenience to its customers.

With new Central Bank regulatory requirements around digital technology, BRB needed to improve the availability of its virtualized data center environment. At the same time, the staff of BRB were also keen to improve access to data for both customers and employees.

The existing solution was based on replication between two data centers, but the bank struggled to cope with periods of high customer demand, resulting in slow service.

BRB wanted to improve the availability, speed and security of its virtualized environment to enhance employee productivity and improve the customer experience.

The Solution: Active-Active Data Center Offers Better Resilience

BRB decided to partner with Hitachi Vantara to design and build a new virtual environment. After identifying the project’s needs and areas of focus, the joint team decided on a VMware-based architecture. The solution uses a vSphere Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC), supported by the global-active device feature of Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System (SVOS), and unites two storage arrays to create a virtual storage environment (VSM).

The VSM includes two data centers, 10 local hosts and approximately 1,500 servers. With the VSM based on an active-active configuration, BRB can ensure high availability, optimum performance and security for its data.

With the vMSC architecture and global-active device, the virtualized environment can operate a single cluster with geographically disparate nodes without a loss of performance, as all data I/O processes are performed at the local data center. If a virtual machine is moved to another data center, the I/O is also relocated to the local storage array.

Using the global-active device, the storage environment is able to present a given disk volume with the same ID for two or more data centers. As a result, the disk doesn’t need to be reassigned if data center availability is compromised, or when a virtual server needs to be moved.

Thanks to the architecture of the virtualized environment and storage resources, BRB can ensure high availability and exceptional performance. The proposed architecture was implemented throughout the BRB production environment in order to reduce latency and ensure high-availability data access. This was critical to comply with Central Bank regulations and improve the user experience for customers and employees.

The Outcome: Improved Employee Productivity, Greater Customer Satisfaction

BRB now has an extremely resilient virtualized environment based on an architecture that is currently unique in Latin America, setting a new industry benchmark. This has led to other companies within the financial services sector approaching BRB to learn more about the project and its benefits.

The new solution can activate around 1,500 servers within just four minutes, reducing system start-up time. It has also reduced bandwidth consumption for capturing and replicating storage data from 65% to just 5%.

Internal productivity and marketing campaign planning have also been optimized with a 90% decrease in server response times, which has reduced storage-dependent processing time and has contributed to improvements in other processes.

“The architecture proposed by Hitachi Vantara and deployed by BRB has set the benchmark in the Brazilian IT market due to its reliability and the peace of mind it provides in terms of availability and performance for the computing environment,” says Braulio Lourenço da Silva Junior, Infrastructure and Storage Platform Manager at BRB.

In addition to gaining confidence in performance and reliability, BRB now has a far more mature disaster recovery process. The new environment not only enables the bank to comply with the latest regulations, but has also significantly improved the user experience for employees who handle the bank’s day-to-day operations.