PostFinance Case Study

Cloudian Enables Leading Swiss Financial Institution to Retain and Analyze More Big Data

PostFinance, a digital innovation leader in the Swiss banking world, wanted a robust data archive and state-of-the-art storage solution for its big data platform. After evaluating the top storage vendors, the company chose Cloudian’s HyperStore object storage solution for its scalability and cost advantages and has continued to expand the use cases it serves. Most recently, PostFinance capitalized on the integration of HyperStore with Splunk SmartStore, enabling the company to index, store and analyze more of its big data at a lower cost.

The Challenge of Managing Big Data

Building on a storied 100-year history, PostFinance today provides financial services to three million personal and business customers. One of its top goals is creating an ideal customer experience across the digital and physical worlds. The company previously used Hadoop as the foundation for its big data analytics but found that traditional block and file storage couldn’t provide the cost-effective scalability needed for storing this data.

“We decided we needed an object storage solution,” says Andre Kocher, Senior Systems Engineer at PostFinance. “Starting with a list of major storage vendors, we conducted a thorough selection process and ultimately chose Cloudian.”

Cloudian’s limitless scalability, compelling TCO benefits and full S3 compatibility were key differentiators.

Working with Infoniqa, a leading Swiss integrator, PostFinance deployed Cloudian’s HyperStore object storage appliances in its two data centers, along with Cloudian HyperStore File to support file services from the HyperStore platform. Data protection is provided across the data centers through Cloudian’s integrated policy-based data replication.

“The installation was very smooth, and, after testing the Cloudian solution with various applications, we put it into production,” says Kocher.

A Modern Storage Foundation for Multiple Use Cases

PostFinance’s first priority was integrating HyperStore into the big data platform and moving data from HDFS to the Cloudian object storage. The company quickly began seeing the benefits.

“Cloudian’s integrated data protection meant we didn’t need a separate backup process and backup software licenses for the data,” reports Kocher. “This has saved us money on our backup infrastructure over time.”

Seeing the advantages Cloudian provided, PostFinance also deployed HyperStore as the storage platform for a 100 million file document repository and separately for archiving data to meet various regulatory requirements. In addition, the company deployed Cloudian as a data lake landing zone supporting data analysis primarily done with Apache Spark.

Leveraging Cloudian and Splunk SmartStore to Extract Greater Value from Data

After recently learning about Splunk SmartStore’s integration with HyperStore, PostFinance realized the advantages of adding SmartStore to its infrastructure. The Cloudian-Splunk solution enables organizations to add compute on demand for search and indexing workloads while growing storage independently to accommodate capacity and retention requirements. Cloudian has shown that the solution’s decoupling of compute and storage can provide a 60% TCO reduction in Splunk environments.

SmartStore simplifies infrastructure and storage management functionality by utilizing S3-compatible object storage to scale the retention of warm buckets in an economical manner, while the indexer’s local storage is used for hot buckets and cache copies of warm buckets.

The Cloudian-Splunk solution moves the master copy of the warm bucket to Cloudian HyperStore and retains the bucket locally on the indexer until it is evicted to make space for active datasets, thereby reducing the cost and scalability shortcomings of traditional SAN and NAS offerings. In addition, because HyperStore can be scaled to an exabyte without interrupting workflows, more data can be retained and analyzed within Splunk infrastructure.

“Beyond the significant reduction in costs, the Cloudian-Splunk solution enables us to retain and analyze more data and thereby gain deeper insights into our digital assets,” says Kocher. “All of this helps us in continuing to enhance the services we provide to our customers.”

“We originally deployed Cloudian because we wanted to move away from a traditional file-based storage system to a more modern, flexible architecture, and it was an ideal way to do so,” reflects Kocher. “With over 2 PB of data now under Cloudian management addressing a range of use cases, we view Cloudian as a key enabler for driving further success in our business.”