2 May 2007

Garanti Bank, one of the largest private banks in Turkey, was supported by a heterogeneous IT environment that included IBM mainframe systems running the DB2 database, UNIX servers running Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database software running on the Windows Server 2003 operating system. The mainframe also supported mission critical applications including document management. Because processor utilisation on the mainframe approached 100 per cent at times, the company needed to either add more processing capacity to the mainframe, or move to another platform.

Solutions sought included: · Enterprise-grade support for mission-critical applications

· Added agility to rapidly develop and deploy new solutions · Eliminating weekly system offline periods (necessary for maintenance) · Enhanced management tools to support data purging and other maintenance tasks · Improved reporting solution, including support for near real- time reporting · Server consolidation to reduce administration and maintenance costs.

Guided by Garanti Technology, the bank's internal IT service provider, Garanti Bank is in the early stages of upgrading to SQL Server 2005, and has also upgraded to Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 to take advantage of the new features and functionality of the event and performance management tool for Windows Server 2003.

The move to SQL Server 2005 provides Garanti with a robust database foundation for creating and deploying mission-critical applications, and relieving loads on mainframe processors. Further benefits include, the agility to move applications off the mainframe, a 270 per cent performance boost, more system availability with SQL Server 2005 Online Indexing, near real-time reporting with SQL Server 2005 Database Snapshots, and easier database management.

Garanti Technology prepared to update the document management application it had developed internally and deployed on the mainframe using a DB2 database some years earlier.

As the IT team began the process, they found that the mainframe presented a problem. "Our mainframe usage was very high, sometimes running at 100 per cent," comments Ferda Bek, business unit manager, system management at Garanti Technology. "We faced the choice of either upgrading our mainframe capacity or moving our document management application onto SQL Server. Since we were going to rewrite the application anyway, we decided we should create the new version to run on the most cost effective environment, which was SQL Server running on Intel–based hardware."

The result was StorAge, created by Garanti developers, which is being upgraded to SQL Server 2005. In addition to reducing the load on the mainframe, moving applications to SQL Server lowers the cost of solutions for Garanti's internal customers.

Garanti developers appreciate the Service Broker feature of SQL Server 2005 because it reduces the complexity of creating distributed applications. "We are developing several asynchronous applications that are dependent upon moving data between tables. Service Broker will make our work much easier," says Osman Tufanoğulları, senior expert, image and workflow systems at Garanti Technology. "Service Broker technology will eliminate the need to program queue solutions because it will handle this for us. Having Service Broker as part of SQL Server 2005 gives us the ability to build very scalable applications, and that's what we need."

SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services is being deployed on the real-time reporting server. "We found that transaction processing performance with SQL Server 2005 was nearly three times faster than compared to SQL Server 2000," says Umut Nazlica, Specialist, System Management, at Garanti Technology.

"We did side-by-side testing and found that our old reporting tool could process five reports per second. Reporting Services processed 14 reports per second," notes Haydar Bilgin, senior expert, system management at Garanti Technology.

When the Garanti development team members tested Online Indexing, they found a mere 14 per cent reduction in transactions per hour using Online Indexing. Actual results were: 843,737 transactions per hour using SQL Server 2005 without Online Indexing, and 724,838 transactions per hour with Online Indexing.

Garanti is preparing to reduce loads on its production systems by using the Database Mirroring and Database Snapshot features of SQL Server 2005 to provide near real-time reporting. Database Mirroring provides synchronous log shipping to provide a live standby server from the production system. In addition to using Database Mirroring to replicate data for disaster recovery, it will also be used to constantly update a server dedicated to reporting. Database Mirroring provides the replication, while the Database Snapshot feature supports reporting against the data.