Banco do Brasil Expands its Infrastructure With NetApp

Founded in 1808, Banco do Brasil S/A stands as a pillar of trust and innovation, known globally for its commitment to sustainability and social responsibility.

With over 86 million customers and 4,000 branches, it faces significant challenges in managing growing volumes of unstructured data. Efficiently managing this data and enhancing analytics capabilities is essential. Failure to do so could risk delays, missed insights, and disruptions to the service customers expect.

As part of the bank’s data center modernization, it explored options for improving object storage services. NetApp StorageGRID offers scalability, HA, and seamless integration with the existing storage ecosystem.

This future-ready infrastructure enables Banco do Brasil to enhance productivity and strengthen data security, while driving digital transformation and improving customer service across Latin America.

Reaching capacity limits
Navigating the evolving financial services landscape, Banco do Brasil turned to advanced technologies to manage the surge in unstructured data. The bank prioritized scalability, flexibility, performance, and automation to support its growing digital services. Key challenges included:

• Maintaining extreme data availability and durability to meet the 24/7 transactional demands of millions of users.
• Supporting rapid migrations and modern infrastructure for emerging workloads.
• Enabling adoption of S3 protocol for developers to automate storage processes, including creating buckets and streamlining object management.
• Keeping sensitive financial data secure and compliant with local and international privacy regulations.
• Delivering digital services to handle extensive operations, meeting customer expectations and fostering loyalty.

Banco do Brasil required a robust, highly available, enterprise solution to integrate cloud-like flexibility into its mission-critical private storage operations.

“A service interruption could affect 86 million customers, leaving them unable to transfer money, pay bills, or use credit cards. For critical services, I work closely with NetApp to develop a secure, resilient storage platform that offers HA,” said Fábio Pereira, principal storage engineer, Banco do Brasil.

Transforming its storage infrastructure
Banco do Brasil, facing rising demands for personalized digital services and competition from FinTechs, modernized its data infrastructure to handle unstructured data growth and drive innovation.

Since partnering with NetApp in 2020, the bank revamped its unstructured data platform, introducing NAS storage, automating persistent volume creation for Kubernetes, and consolidating storage into a unified platform using NetApp automation tools.

Banco do Brasil was an early adopter of ONTAP S3 for large-scale production, providing feedback to advance the protocol. By 2023, it expanded its ecosystem with StorageGRID, meeting requirements for a single namespace across data centers and S3 Select for AI workloads. The integration of ONTAP and StorageGRID offered robust NAS and S3 solutions, enabling superior scalability, flexibility, and automation to maintain 24/7 data availability for millions of users.

The modernization also enhanced fraud detection capabilities, leveraging NetApp performance to enable real-time analytics that prevented significant financial losses. Automation played a key role, with tools like Ansible modules and REST APIs simplifying infrastructure standardization and service catalog creation for NAS and object storage. The bank has developed an in-house S3 Console, avoiding the need for costly third-party tools.

Banco do Brasil embraced AI by integrating it into data pipelines, enhancing credit card processing, optimizing storage, and accelerating innovation. NetApp solutions supported this transformation, helping the bank offer advanced digital services, strengthen data protection, and prepare for future challenges with confidence.

Why choose StorageGRID?
NetApp tailored a solution that offered stability for existing infrastructure while deploying an advanced architecture to meet future demands. With full protection of the investments made on current NetApp technology, the solution proposed included native mechanisms for a fast, non-disruptive migration.

Superior capabilities
StorageGRID was selected as the core object storage platform after rigorous proof-of-concept testing.

Key features include:

• A scalable architecture that supports up to 800PB and 300 billion objects within a geo-dispersed single namespace, enabling efficient management of extensive data across the bank’s retail, commercial, and investment businesses units.
• Policy-driven data management allows Banco do Brasil to automate object placement and protection across multiple locations, providing high durability and availability for critical services.
• Advanced S3 bucket protocol integration streamlines developer workflows, accelerates internal application delivery, and strengthens data sovereignty by keeping data within the bank’s secure boundaries-providing faster time-to-market and fortified security.

An automation-friendly ecosystem
Banco do Brasil used StorageGRID developer tools and native S3 APIs to automate workloads, including migration processes. By creating custom storage classes tied to user-defined requirements, the bank streamlined resource provisioning through a portal built in-house. For non-API-based access, the DevOps team developed a custom S3 Console for basic object browsing and manipulation.

With support from NetApp Professional Services and the account team, a robust methodology was created to migrate over 2,000 buckets from ONTAP S3 to StorageGRID. Using ONTAP S3 SnapMirror and the StorageGRID import keys API, the bank executed a secure and efficient migration, safeguarding its investment. This migration is detailed in StorageGRID documentation.

Integration
Banco do Brasil integrated NetApp ONTAP with StorageGRID, combining ONTAP NAS capabilities with the scalability of StorageGRID object storage.

This integration supported modernization efforts and delivered key advantages:

• Optimized storage costs: NetApp FabricPool tiering automatically moves infrequently accessed data to cost-efficient storage tiers.
• Enhanced backup and recovery: SnapMirror to Cloud provides reliable backup and recovery by enabling efficient storage of NetApp Snapshot copies on object storage for long-term data retention and archiving.

Banco do Brasil’s AI vision
Banco do Brasil is using AI to enhance customer experiences, streamline operations, and apply data-driven decisions. StorageGRID plays a critical role in enabling this strategy, offering a robust infrastructure suitable for AI/ML workloads:

• Scalability and performance: An expandable architecture supports massive data volumes needed for AI/ML training and inference, maintaining performance that’s critical for real-time applications.
• Efficient data management: Policy-driven features allow organization and protection of AI/ML artifacts across locations, integrating smoothly into AI workflows.
• Streamlined analytics: Compatibility with third-party data lake engines enables SQL queries directly on StorageGRID, eliminating complex data movement and optimizing analytics.

Commitment to data privacy
NetApp architecture aligns with international financial regulations designed to enhance IT security and operational resilience. StorageGRID offers policy-driven data management, geographic redundancy, encryption, access controls, and WORM (Write Once, Read Many) capabilities.

Banco do Brasil benefits from a solution that meets rigorous compliance standards for availability, privacy, and security. This reinforces its dedication to exceptional reliability and data protection, fostering confidence and peace of mind.

Comprehensive technical support
NetApp provides personalized assistance via its Support Account Management team, assuring rapid responses to service issues and escalation pathways for technical challenges.

Additionally, the implementation satisfies key demands for features like S3 Select and a true single namespace across 2 data centers.

“NetApp‘s integrated services and APIs have streamlined our infrastructure as a service, enabling faster time to market, greater stability, and enhanced security for our operations. This helps us quickly deliver new digital apps to customers. It‘s a true competitive advantage,” said Pereira.

Key outcomes
The Banco do Brasil-NetApp partnership has transformed the bank’s data infrastructure, enhancing efficiency and future readiness.

• Massive scalability: NetApp StorageGRID and ONTAP technologies enable data management, supporting the bank’s extensive operations and growth.
• Improved automation: An API-friendly architecture streamlines operations by automating tasks like storage provisioning and data lifecycle management, saving hundreds of labor hours.
• Cost savings: The bank reduces TCO by 50% through efficient storage distribution and automation.
• Future-readiness: With advanced S3 support, geographic redundancy, and cloud integrations, StorageGRID adapts to new business needs.
• Performance: Solutions like the NetApp StorageGRID SGF6112 and SG1100 deliver the performance needed to maintain application stability and user satisfaction.
• Data security and sovereignty: StorageGRID facilitates modern object storage in private data centers, combining cloud-like scalability with complete data control and regulatory compliance.

These advancements directly translate into customer benefits. By leveraging massive scalability and improved automation, the bank can offer superior services, quickly respond to customer needs, and instill confidence-enhancing their overall banking experience.

“The partnership with NetApp optimizes processes and enables us to deliver services more efficiently. NetApp‘s automation tools save substantial time and resources–giving us the confidence to meet our clients‘ expectations every day,” said Eloi Salton, senior IT analyst, Banco do Brasil.

What’s next?
Banco do Brasil continues to advance its data infrastructure and strengthen its partnership with NetApp. By adopting features like FabricPool data tiering and S3 Select, the bank aims to enhance data retrieval, flexibility, cost-efficiency, and performance.

With support from StorageGRID automation, Banco do Brasil is also refining its S3 Console tool, keeping it efficient, user-friendly, and aligned with evolving demands. These innovations drive the bank’s digital transformation, streamlining operations and enriching customer experiences.

NetApp remains a key partner, providing scalable, secure storage solutions that equip Banco do Brasil to tackle challenges, seize opportunities, and lead Brazil’s financial sector into the future.