As Banrisul experienced rapid growth, the performance of its storage was impacting key banking systems. Important procedures needed to execute more rapidly in order not to impact the production environment.

With IBM DS8886F all-flash storage, HyperSwap and IBM Spectrum Control, Banrisul has gained significant performance and resiliency for future growth and better customer experience at a lower cost.

Digital transformation of processes and applications at Banrisul allows the delivery of new experiences and more convenience to its more than 4 million customers in Brazil and abroad. However, as customer transaction levels increase, the back-office transaction workload also grows, placing significant strain on the bank’s IT infrastructure.

Faced with declining systems performance, how could Banrisul continue to deliver outstanding customer service?

To support its operations, Banrisul, which keeps a decades-long partnership with IBM, relies on IBM Z® enterprise servers and IBM Db2® data management software. The data storage subsystem was getting obsolete with usage levels consistently above 70 percent of total capacity. In addition, the data storage subsystem was unable to take advantage of the latest IBM zHyperWrite technology for the IBM Z platform. IBM zHyperWrite is a technology exclusive for IBM storage and allows superior write performance on DB2.

Adding to these challenges, backup and disaster recovery procedures were complex, involving a lengthy set of manual procedures to enable failover. Banrisul invited vendors to submit proposals for new data storage capabilities in an open tender, and, as required by law, looked for the most cost-effective solution.

José Andrade, IT Infrastructure and Operations Manager at Banrisul, remarks, “Not only was there little room for further growth, but poor storage performance was also impacting our IBM Db2 database, which supports a number of critically important business processes. To serve our customers more effectively and continue our successful growth, we wanted sub-millisecond response times, higher throughput, and enough storage capacity for projected business growth until the next Banrisul IT hardware refresh cycle.”

Mobile and home banking online services rely on the data processed by the IBM z14 server, managed by IBM Db2 and stored on IBM DS8886F. With the integrated IBM solutions in place, Banrisul is seeing significant performance improvements that translate directly into enhanced customer experience.

José Andrade remarks, “The daily process to update checking account transactions that formerly took 19 hours now takes just 13 hours; processing direct debits formerly took 10 hours and now takes 4 hours; and loan payment value updates that formerly took 20 hours now take 6 hours. We did not upgrade the server CPU; these gains are all due to improved data I/O performance from the all-flash DS8886F solution.”

For Banrisul, the introduction of IBM storage technologies has strengthened business resilience and continuity, as José Andrade explains: “The previous system failover process could take up to two hours, with many processes relying on manual intervention. With IBM HyperSwap, failover can be confirmed with a few clicks of a mouse, and we can be back up and running on the second instance in up to 28 seconds.

“In Brazil, banks are required by law to demonstrate that they have the technical capability to failover data processing to a secondary site, and validation is normally completed once or twice a year. With the IBM DS8886F and HyperSwap solution, we can demonstrate compliance immediately and easily with no business downtime, a significant time and cost saving.”

Using IBM Spectrum Control performance monitoring, a capacity planning and storage management software, Banrisul captures and monitors more than 200 metrics across its storage landscape. This helps the organization improve the management of these critical IT resources without increasing headcount in its technical team.

While Banrisul’s primary objective was to enhance customer service by solving technical challenges, the bank has also reduced its total cost of ownership through lower energy consumption and reduced server room real estate. The all-flash DS8886F is around half the weight and size of a disk-based array, and consumes about half the energy—and, consequently reduces the data center air conditioning load, lessening the IT environmental impact.

José Andrade concludes, “The performance and lower total cost of ownership of the IBM DS8886F will directly contribute to enhancing the customer experience and supporting Banrisul’s ongoing business success. Combined with excellent services from IBM Systems Lab Services and Training and the IBM Spectrum Storage solutions, IBM DS8886F and IBM z14 offer an outstanding, high-performance and resilient solution for Banrisul.”

Founded in 1928, Banco do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul (Banrisul) (link resides outside ibm.com), is the largest Bank in the Rio Grande do Sul state, and the seventh-largest Brazilian bank. Banrisul generated an annual revenue of roughly USD 3 billion in 2017, has 11,000 employees, more than 4 million customers, and over 500 branches across 433 cities.