Fawry has a long history with IBM, having chosen IBM solutions to underpin its business again and again over the last decade. The company relies on both IBM Db2 and Oracle database software running on IBM Power Systems to support its bespoke electronic financial platform, processing 2 million transactions per day.
“Together, IBM Db2, Oracle database and IBM Power Systems solutions give us the ability to process huge transaction volumes,” comments Abbas. “They provide a powerful foundation for our business, and have scaled seamlessly as we’ve grown.”
To ensure that it selected the best offerings on the market for its latest refresh, the company’s IT team undertook a thorough evaluation of storage and server options from multiple vendors.
“We put together business cases for a range of solutions, and IBM Storage came out on top – again,” says Abbas. “With software-defined storage solutions from IBM, we can be certain about where our data is stored. And that we can access it whenever we need it.”
To manage data across its storage environment, the company relies on a suite of IBM Spectrum Storage solutions, including IBM Spectrum Control, IBM Spectrum Protect, IBM Spectrum Scale and IBM Spectrum Virtualize. Fawry implemented an IBM Elastic Storage™ Server to support its data retention strategy, gaining a scalable, cost-effective platform for backups.
The company also deployed IBM FlashSystem®, grid-scale, all-flash storage technology designed for data at scale. “The efficiency and performance gains promised by the latest generation of IBM FlashSystem technology were too good to pass up,” recalls Abbas.
The technology offers data compression and deduplication features that enable Fawry to boost utilization of storage resources. Abbas adds: “IBM FlashSystem offers much greater performance than our previous storage platform, meaning that we get both optimized data economics and short response times. We were able to achieve a seamless migration to the new platform with zero downtime.”
To support its quest to understand its customers more deeply, Fawry will soon deploy IBM Watson Machine Learning Accelerator, which includes popular open source deep learning frameworks and efficient artificial intelligence (AI) tools on accelerated IBM Power Systems AC922 servers. Power Systems AC922 servers pair POWER9 CPUs and NVIDIA Tesla V100 with NVLink GPUs, providing massive throughput capability for high performance computing, deep learning and artificial intelligence workloads. Abbas explains: “The combination of IBM Watson Machine Learning Accelerator and FlashSystem solutions will give us the incredibly high performance required to extract new insights from our data.”