VakifBank Migrates to Oracle Exadata to Address Digitization Demands

VakifBank migrates to Oracle Exadata to enhance performance, ensure high availability, and meet rising digitization demands.

VakifBank, one of Turkey’s leading banks supporting the country’s economic growth and savings, recently undertook an exercise of boosting its technology infrastructure to deliver superior services to its end users. To achieve the same, the bank needed to ensure a 24/7 system runtime, improved performance of all critical channels, and an improvement in analyzing root cause of errors through streamlined database management. To achieve this, the bank availed four Oracle products – Exadata Database Machine, Active Data Guard, Real Application Clusters, and GoldenGate.

Furthermore, VakifBank transitioned to running its in-house core banking application stack, including mobile banking, ATM, internet banking, and call center databases on Exadata infrastructure. Oracle Active Data Guard is used as the replication method across the three Exadata machines, which helps ensure high availability and data protection between the two data centers. Oracle GoldenGate allows data in reporting and analytical environments to be replicated in real-time, apart from offering external integration platforms that have minimal impact on the core banking workload.

Moreover, the bank was able to optimize time by completing the migration within just a couple of months. Active Data Guard facilitated this without the need to rely on external support or service downtime. Analyzing the results reveals a 50% reduction in database execution times, significantly boosting critical applications’ performance. The bank was also able to ensure enhanced employee productivity by using Exadata’s Smart Scan capabilities that improved critical query times in the production environment from 1.5x to 4x. Exadata’s Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) also saw real application clusters (RAC) interconnect latency improving by five times during peak hours and double during normal hours. According to CIO Bulletin, VakifBank’s migration to Oracle Exadata infrastructure provides it with the platform to further fortify its robust security systems while continuing to progress on the path of application modernization. This would ensure that its infrastructure meets evolving digital demands by remaining resilient, agile, and aligned with the latest trends.