Banrisul Supercharges Its Storage Environment with Cisco MDS
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The State Bank of Rio Grande do Sul SA (Banrisul) is a financial institution located in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Banrisul provides commercial, credit, financing, and investment services and also helps execute the economic and financial policies of the state government. For more information, visit www.banrisul.com.
| Executive Summary |
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| Customer Name: Banrisul Industry: Financial services Location: Brazil Number of Employees: 11,000 |
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| Challenges |
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Compete with small, innovative banks
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Increase business speed and agility
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Upgrade storage environment without downtime
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| Solutions |
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Cisco® MDS 9000 Series Switches
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| Results |
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Improved the customer experience
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Accelerated SAN and application performance
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Increased systems integration and automation
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Challenge: Evolve to compete in a changing market
Serving more than 365 cities, Banrisul is one of the largest and oldest banks in Brazil. But a new wave of competition is forcing the state-run institution to reexamine and revitalize longstanding business processes.
“We are in a new era of the financial market,” says Gustavo Barreto, IT analyst at Banrisul. “There are more than 500 new fintech companies in Brazil, and they’re very small and aggressive. To compete with them, our business operations, customer services, and company culture all must change. We need to be faster, more agile, and more customer-oriented.”
Banrisul has revamped the structure and role of its IT organization accordingly. In addition to adopting DevOps practices, the bank’s IT leaders want to make greater use of cloud resources, agile methodologies, IoT solutions, and AI/ML technologies. And they have made critical upgrades to the bank’s IT infrastructure to support such ambitions.
With the help of IT services partner Teletex, Banrisul recently deployed Cisco MDS switches to boost the performance and flexibility of its storage area network (SAN). Featuring multiple layers of network and storage intelligence, advanced security, and unified management, Cisco MDS switches support highly available, scalable storage networks.
“Cisco MDS met all of our technical requirements and was also the best price,” says Barreto, noting the open bidding process required by law. “It’s easy to configure and easy to use.”
As a government-run financial institution that serves millions of citizens and business in Brazil, Banrisul’s services—spanning mobile, online, branch, and partner channels—must be continuously available.
“It is not acceptable for us to be offline,” says Barreto. “The best part of this project was that we did it with zero downtime.”
Teletex established two independent SAN fabrics, he explains, and migrated them one at a time using automated scripts. In addition to enabling a zero-downtime migration, the two fabrics feature synchronous replication and provide critical redundancy.
“Cisco MDS has increased the performance of our SAN, reduced application latency, and had a direct impact on the customer experience,” Barreto says. “Our services are more accessible and our transactions are faster.”
“Cisco MDS has increased the performance of our SAN, reduced application latency, and had a direct impact on the customer experience. Our services are more accessible and our transactions are faster.”
- Gustavo Barreto, IT Analyst, Banrisul
Sweeping digital transformations take time, and Barreto says Cisco MDS switches are helping bridge Banrisul’s legacy systems with its new applications and workloads, 80 percent of which are virtualized. The switches can support everything from the bank’s aging mainframe to a host of next-generation technologies.
“Cisco MDS switches are an enabler for the entire storage environment—not just the network,” Barreto says. “With higher performance and support for NVMe, we can leverage new blade servers, storage arrays, container platforms, and applications.”
“Cisco MDS switches are an enabler for the entire storage environment—not just the network. With higher performance and support for NVMe, we can leverage new blade servers, storage arrays, container platforms, and applications.”
- Gustavo Barreto, IT Analyst, Banrisul
With training from Cisco and migration scripts from Teletex, Banrisul plans to increase its use of “infrastructure as code.”
“We use the migration scripts every day to automate our storage infrastructure,” Barreto says. “We plan to integrate all of our containers, VMs, zones, and disks, and we’ll continue to use scripts for configuration, deployment, and orchestration.”
To learn how Cisco can help your organization on its journey, please contact Cisco Sales or your Cisco registered partner contact.
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