Türk Telekom collaborates with Hitachi Vantara

Türk Telekom, a leading Turkish information and communications technology company, is reducing energy costs while also boosting performance and management of its data infrastructure through the deployment of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) solutions. The new architecture is more environmentally sustainable by design, reducing Türk Telekom’s total footprint from 23 cabinets to nine and decreasing power and cooling requirements from the replaced cabinets by approximately 60%. The upgrade has also led to a 30% reduction in total cost of ownership.

Türk Telekom serves more than 15 million broadband and 25.6 million mobile subscribers. As the company plays a critical role in leading Turkey’s digital transformation, they sought to modernize their infrastructure supporting business-critical systems, including core billing and charging applications and databases, SAP applications, and virtualization and cloud service platforms. Having the right infrastructure is crucial for business-critical systems that sit at the center of Türk Telekom’s digital architecture.

“Our main goal is to provide systems that will improve the daily lives of our customers, and to do that requires integrating the latest technologies into an end-to-end architecture,” said Mehmet Fatih Bekin, data center and cloud services director at Türk Telekom. “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 just as importantly, the energy efficiency of our new VSP arrays is not just better for the environment, it also reduces our operational expenditure.”

Türk Telekom deployed new VSP 5000 Series arrays, enabling a successful switch from hybrid disk to non-volatile memory express (NVMe) storage, dramatically improving performance with a five-fold improvement in application response times. The new infrastructure also reduced data center space and cooling requirements. Additionally, the ability to consolidate systems in the data center provides a much smaller footprint and a considerable reduction in power consumption, which reduces CO2 emissions.

“We know that eco-friendly infrastructure not only helps businesses reduce emissions and carbon footprints, but it can also reduce space requirements and lower costs,” said Bharti Patel, senior vice president, Product Engineering, Hitachi Vantara. “As a leader in data center decarbonization efforts, Hitachi Vantara has continually lowered greenhouse gas emissions across the entire lifecycle of our data infrastructure solutions. We have patented technology within our arrays to reduce power consumption so that our customers can meet their sustainability responsibility needs, improve their bottom line, and accelerate their competitive advantage.”

Powering an Eco-Friendly, Data-Driven Future

Hitachi Vantara helps governments, cities and companies cut their carbon footprint by combining data-driven outcomes with industrial know-how. The company has followed a rigorous process for lowering the carbon footprint of its systems as a core design principle for more than a decade. For example, Hitachi Vantara has reduced the CO2 emissions per 1TB per year of Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform by up to 30-40% since 20141, and several models have been certified under the U.S. ENERGY STAR program.

Additionally, the company’s Storage Virtualization Operating System (SVOS) utilizes enhanced data reduction technology, which lets customers store more user data on their purchased capacity. Reduced usage leads to reduced power and cooling costs, which helps reduce CO2 emissions – in some use cases, by as much as 60%.

Hitachi Vantara takes a non-disruptive approach when it comes to the replacing older systems with next generation systems, without the need for data migration. Doing so allows organizations to avoid a time-consuming project that requires old and new systems to run in parallel throughout the migration. Such processes consume a lot more power and require additional cooling and floorspace, as well.