Türk Telekom Drives Efficiencies and Transformation with High-Performance Storage

Overview

Challenge

• Modernize infrastructure to facilitate delivery of agile cloud services for both internal and external customers.

Solution

• Establish a new storage infrastructure that maximizes reliability, availability, serviceability, and performance for business-critical services.

Outcome

Türk Telekom has now modernized its core billing system to meet future needs and support broader digital transformation across the business.

• 5x improvement in application response times
• 4x increase in data throughput
• 30% reduction in total cost of ownership
• Footprint reduced from 23 cabinets to 9
• 60% reduction in data center space, power and cooling costs
• 87% reduction in time spent on storage management tasks

Challenge

Türk Telekom is a multiplay provider of mobile, internet, phone, and TV products and services and a leader in the Turkish market.  With the vision of accelerating Turkey’s transformation into an information society, they serve over 17.1 million fixed-line, 14.6 million broadband, 2.9 million TV and 24.6 million mobile subscribers*

Their goals are centered on digital transformation to enable the provision of agile cloud services to both internal and external customers. “Our main goal is to provide systems that will facilitate the daily lives of the end-users of our applications,” explains Mehmet Fatih Bekin, Data Center and Cloud Services Director at Türk Telekom. “That means integrating the latest technologies into an end-to-end architecture.”

Getting the infrastructure right is key for business-critical systems that sit at the center of Türk Telekom’s digital architecture — including its core billing and charging applications and databases, its SAP applications, and its virtualization and cloud service platforms.

“The data volumes that our core systems need to store and process are growing by 20% per year,” says Mehmet. “We need to be sure that our storage systems won’t start causing bottlenecks that could impact performance and reliability for our end-users and create potential issues around revenue collection. We also need to ensure that the whole storage landscape remains manageable as it grows.”

Solution

Türk Telekom’s storage infrastructure includes hardware from a variety of vendors but chose long-term partner Hitachi Vantara for most of its critical storage environments. When the company decided to replace its legacy billing system with a more demanding new application, it was time to modernize the storage layer too. Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) 5200 and 5600 arrays were a natural choice.

“Due to the criticality of the billing system, the reliability, availability, and serviceability of the storage architecture was our top priority,” says Mehmet. “Based on our experience, Hitachi Vantara stood out as the company with the best reliability record for enterprise storage.”

The new VSP 5000 Series arrays have enabled Türk Telekom to switch from hybrid disk to non-volatile memory express (NVMe) storage, dramatically improving performance and reducing data center space, power and cooling requirements. Türk Telecom’s IT team were impressed with the inline deduplication and hardware-assisted compression, which will help manage storage growth more efficiently.

Türk Telekom is also now using Hitachi Ops Center Administrator, Analyzer and Protector. This simplifies and accelerates storage management tasks, provides user-friendly analytics and ensures data protection. The software provides a common point of control for all the company’s storage arrays, as well as API libraries that enable integration with third-party tools such as Grafana, Ansible, and Micro Focus Operations Bridge.

“The team from Hitachi Vantara Professional Services provided excellent support during the installation phase, as well as helping us create and automate operations and policies for data security and replication,” says Mehmet. “Hitachi Vantara has been our trusted partner for a long time — they do a great job of analyzing our needs and helping us design and deliver the right solutions.”

Outcome

Türk Telekom has now modernized its core billing system to meet future needs and support broader digital transformation across the business.

“The most critical outcome is that latency is no longer a concern,” says Mehmet. “With our Hitachi VSP 5000 arrays, disk access is more than four times faster, and we’ve seen a five-fold improvement in application response times. From a billing perspective, that means no late invoices and no delays in receiving income.”

The new architecture is also much more environmentally sustainable. The total footprint has reduced from 23 cabinets to 9, saving space in the data center and reducing power and cooling requirements by around 60%.

“The energy efficiency of Hitachi VSP 5000 is not just better for the environment — it also reduces our operational expenditure,” says Mehmet. “Overall, this upgrade has reduced our total cost of ownership by 30%.”

Finally, Hitachi Ops Center makes it easier for Türk Telekom’s IT team to manage its storage landscape. Storage administrators can now complete tasks such as provisioning, data protection, bottleneck analysis and reporting with just a few mouse-clicks.

“Operations that took 40 minutes in our old tools are a five minute job in Hitachi Ops Center,” says Mehmet. “We can handle much more of the storage management work ourselves, which means the Hitachi Professional Services team can focus on more specialist tasks such as integration.”

Mehmet concludes: “We look forward to continuing our partnership with Hitachi Vantara to build a truly modern infrastructure that takes full advantage of artificial intelligence and automation, simplifies anomaly detection, handles data growth efficiently, and integrates easily with the cloud.”