Finansbank Bank Cuts Costs while Gaining a Highly Scalable, Powerful and Flexible Virtualization Solution

"We wanted to be sure that the needs of the bank and its clients would be met. Therefore, we developed and tested different scenarios that would show what Windows Server 2012 could do for us. I’m very happy to say that it passed with flying colors.”
Evrim Eroğlu, Expert Designer and Team Leader, Finansbank

As a financial institution, Finansbank has a reputation for providing innovative banking services to its customers. It therefore needed to ensure that its network, systems, applications and IT infrastructure were flexible and powerful enough to support the needs of the bank and its clients. In order to achieve this, the bank needed a powerful but cost-effective virtualization solution that was agile, fully-scalable, and easy to manage.

For Finansbank, the solution also needed to be able to:

• reduce licensing, operational and infrastructure costs

• use virtual machines (VMs) in high-performance demanding environments

• set up a new server within short notice

• replicate VMs from a primary site to a backup site without the need for specialized storage or networking hardware

• live migration with non-shared storage

• minimize cluster downtime

For the bank’s IT department, upgrading to Windows Server 2012 would give Finansbank the solution it was looking for. The high scalability and flexibility in building and maintaining a virtual environment all at a minimal cost - would be a definite advantage for the bank.

Evrim Eroğlu, who works as an Expert Designer and Team Leader at the bank’s IT department, was quite positive and very happy with the results in testing the features of Windows Server 2012.

“We wanted to be sure that the needs of the bank and its clients would be met. Therefore, we developed and tested different scenarios that would show what Windows Server 2012 could do for us. I’m very happy to say that it passed with flying colors.”

Some of the scenarios that were tested involved:

• Hyper-V Live Migration with non-shared storage

• Hyper-V Replica

• dynamic memory management

• bandwidth management

• cluster-aware updating

• reduce costs

• Hyper-V 3.0 VMs will support up to 64 vCPUs, 1TB RAM, 16TB of storage and NUMA technology, which is adequate for almost all workloads

• Hyper-V Replica provides a disaster-recovery solution for VMs that doesn't require a SAN storage

• use virtual machines (VMs) instead of physical machines

• faster turnaround regarding requests for a new VM (only takes 2-3 hours)

• cluster-aware updating, which minimizes downtime

• minimizes the need for resources