Figure. 1 VakifBank is one of the leading multi-specialist banks in Turkey.
Since 1954, VakifBank has supported Turkey’s economic growth and savings by efficiently managing stakeholder assets and maintaining the vision to become a leading bank in the region.
In response to growing demand for digitalization, VakifBank decided to boost its technology infrastructure to deliver superior services to its end users.
Goals for Exadata migration
To deliver these services, the bank needed 24/7 system uptime, improved performance of all critical channels, and streamlined database management to improve root-cause analysis.
Suite of Oracle products used
Exadata Database Machine: Oracle Exadata Database Machine lets customers meet the needs of growing on-premises workloads with the highest performance, scale, and availability for transaction processing, analytics, AI Vector Search, and in-database machine learning workloads. By consolidating database workloads of all scale and criticality on a single system, customers reduce the amount of infrastructure they need, reduce administration, and lower costs.
Active Data Guard: Oracle Active Data Guard helps deliver high availability, data protection, and disaster recovery for enterprise data. The bank relies on the application to survive disasters and data corruption while creating, maintaining, and managing one or more synchronized standby databases.
Real Application Clusters: Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) is the world’s only scale-everything, highly available database architecture. It transparently scales both reads and writes for all workloads, including OLTP, analytics, AI vectors, SaaS, JSON, batch, text, graph, Internet of Things (IoT), and in-memory.
GoldenGate: Oracle GoldenGate is a managed service that provides a real-time data mesh platform, which uses replication to keep data highly available, and allows for real-time analysis. Customers can design, execute, and monitor their data replication and stream data processing solutions without needing to allocate or manage compute environments.
Customer’s solution
VakifBank migrated from an X86-based system, which ran the bank’s in-house core banking, to an engineered system: Oracle Exadata Database Machine, consisting of three full racks split across two data centers. The bank’s in-house core banking application stack, including mobile banking, ATM, internet banking, and call center databases, now runs on the Exadata infrastructure. VakifBank uses Oracle Active Data Guard as the replication method across the three Exadata machines, helping to ensure high availability and data protection between the two data centers. Oracle GoldenGate allows real-time data replication to reporting and analytical environments, as well as external integration platforms, with minimal impact on the core banking workload.
Migration path
The migration was carried out using Active Data Guard and completed within just two months, without external support or service downtime.
Figure 2: VakifBank’s architectural deployment.
Results
Following the migration, VakifBank achieved a 50% reduction in database execution times, significantly boosting performance on critical applications.
Using Exadata’s Smart Scan capabilities, the bank’s critical query times in the production environment improved by 1.5x to 4x, leading to increased employee productivity. Additionally, Real Application Clusters (RAC) interconnect latency improved 5x during peak hours and 2x during normal hours, thanks to Exadata’s Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA). The bank now benefits from real-time access to profitability data, allowing for rapid responses to analytical queries and helping bank leaders make more-informed business decisions.
Next steps
Looking ahead, the bank plans to further strengthen its already robust security posture and continue advancing the application modernization journey to help ensure that its infrastructure remains resilient, agile, and aligned with evolving digital demands.