CSCO: GarantiBank Selects Cisco Systems for New Turkish Datacentre Backbone

Cisco Systems® today announced that Garanti Bank, the leading Turkish retail, commercial and corporate bank, has selected Cisco to provide a new backbone network infrastructure for its datacentre operations comprising storage area networking, data centre switching and integrated security. The new data centre infrastructure will help the bank support the data security requirements of its mainframe applications.

Garanti Bank's data centre houses all its banking data. The new data centre network infrastructure will also help allow the company to take advantage of improved capacity to handle expanding requirements stemming from areas such as multi-channel banking and the need to comply with banking regulations.

"We have been very impressed by Cisco's Data Centre Network Architecture and the integrated systems approach to providing interoperability between data centre components," said Mrs. Eser Unal, Business Unit Manager, Network Services for Garanti Teknoloji. "As we develop our strategy, we are looking to achieve further cost efficiencies by deploying Cisco SAN technologies and Cisco's virtualized Firewall Services Modules (FWSM) to help support high levels of reliability and security within our data centre environment. One key advantage of the Cisco technology is that there is a consistent integrated networking approach across its data centre switching and storage networking portfolios."

The new storage area network infrastructure is based around Cisco MDS 9509 Multilayer SAN directors, with Cisco MDS Multiprotocol Services Modules. In addition to redundant Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series switches with the Cisco Supervisor Engine 720, Garanti Bank's network upgrade features a number of other Cisco network components, including integrated security with Cisco Firewall Services Modules. The Catalyst 6500 Series switches will also help allow Garanti Bank to boost switching rates in the data centre from 140 Gbps to 720 Gbps, and interconnect to Cisco Catalyst 4510R series switches at the network edge.

"The Cisco Data Centre Network Architecture represents the practical realization of our intelligent networking vision for the data centre. An important benefit of Cisco's data centre strategy lies in helping enterprises to plan for future growth through a tight integration of intelligent architectures including switching, optical, storage area networking, integrated security and server load balancing," commented Kaan Terzioglu, VP for Central and Eastern Europe for Cisco Systems. "We are working to provide the building blocks for a phased evolution of our data centre strategy as organizations move to consolidate, virtualize and ultimately build automation into their data centre environments."

The approach to using Firewall Service Modules in the data centre is to help give fully controlled access to host systems from different regions on the Garanti Bank network. FWSM modules operate in multiple context modes using a stateful failover approach. Using different contexts for each segment, the traffic from all parties can also be isolated. Contexts can be used either in routed or transparent mode; by using a context in transparent mode Garanti Bank is able to pass Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) traffic through the context, eliminating the need for static routes. The advantage is that this approach is more reliable, more secure and more practical.

About Garanti Bank
Garanti Bank is one of the top banks in the Turkish finance sector, with 467 branches in September 2006 and US$29,8 billion in assets at the end of June 2006.