Availability Means Profitability for Turkey’s Largest IT Services Provider

In the world of most products and services, visibility is key. Whether a new clothing line or the latest phone model, most companies want consumers to have their product top of mind. Things are a little different in IT. The best technology should be invisible, and no one should constantly think about things like server resources. When IT professionals stop the normal flow of business to troubleshoot, companies lose money and resources.

This situation is our reality at KoçSistem, Turkey’s largest IT services provider. Founded in 1945, we provide data center and cloud solutions to clients in more than 30 countries, and clients from nations like Azerbaijan, Malaysia, and England all depend on our infrastructure. Our hundreds of customers come from various backgrounds, including finance, insurance, and retail. In addition, we provide services to around 100 companies that are part of the Koç Group.

Through our three data centers and thousands of cloud servers, we offer a wide variety of specialized products, including IoT, cloud support, security, managed services, and business applications. 

The Perks and Responsibilities of Being a Leader

As the most prominent IT systems and cloud services provider in Turkey, a major outage could impact a large portion of economic transactions across the country—resulting in lost revenue and potentially lost customers. Being a leader in the field means setting the tone for reliable service and cutting-edge technology.

One of our responsibilities is keeping up with the customer demand that accompanies continuous growth. Every time a client requests a service, they expect us to deliver or else connect them to a resource that can fulfill their wish. If we cannot respond to their request quickly, they will likely turn to a competitor. In this way, being a leader also requires a commitment to developing responsive infrastructure based on the latest technologies.

When our servers began approaching capacity and end of support, we knew we had to plan for the future. We needed a robust and reliable SAP HANA appliance to reduce our time to market and ensure we could accommodate our increasing capacity needs in the coming years. 

A High-Density Solution Delivers High-Quality Results

SAP HANA is one of our core business services. That business continues to grow every year, so our search started with SAP HANA-certified solutions. One of the solutions that came up in conversation was the HPE ProLiant DL560, which offers high density and low power consumption. It had a low total cost of ownership while exceeding SAP Certification for performance.  

That said, performance is only half the picture—even outstanding performance doesn’t matter during outages. The combination of HPE hardware and our existing HANA solution greatly reduces our risk of failure. The HPE ProLiant DL560 also includes redundant components, such as automatic backups and multiple resource options that improve our backup and recovery capabilities. If a disaster strikes, we can offer our clients better recovery times due to system redundancies. In addition to the stability of our operations, enhanced disaster recovery is essential to retain the trust of our customers.

In addition to seamless integrations with SAP HANA, the HPE ProLiant DL560 offers an array of other integrations. These integrations are an excellent accelerator for our business. We constantly add new services, including open-source and microservices like Elasticsearch, Redis, Cassandra, RabbitMQ, Spark, Kafka, and Airflow. We are one of the first hybrid cloud service providers in Turkey and are also integrating public cloud providers like Azure and AWS. The HPE ProLiant DL560 enables us to develop all these services and more with confidence that everything will work together.

Since deployment, we have experienced 99.9% availability, improving consistency for our customers and decreasing costs. We have an extensive infrastructure, and any outage leads to an increase in maintenance costs. With less downtime, we can dedicate fewer human resources to issues. 

Another positive impact of adopting the HPE ProLiant DL560 is our ability to shorten the lead time between a service request and a response. Because our customers don’t have to wait long, they are less likely to have their needs met by another company. Availability means profitability, and HPE helps us improve in both areas.

A Reliable Partner Made the Natural Choice

The HPE ProLiant DL560 was a great choice, and HPE was a natural partner. At the beginning of our search for a new solution, our experiences as a long-time HPE customer led us to a few conclusions:

• We knew HPE provided reliable equipment resulting in very few outages
• We knew HPE could meet our cost expectations
• We knew HPE would provide us with responsive service

That last point is worth noting. Technical problems are always possible, so it is great to have the extra assurance that HPE prioritizes our issues and can resolve them quickly. Outages are obviously a massive problem in our line of work, but we don’t want our internal staff to spend all of their energy troubleshooting and putting out fires. Our clients hire us to grow with them and anticipate future technology needs, not simply maintain current service levels. But our technicians can’t take the necessary steps to advance our business if they’re constantly trying to fix problems. 

Combining shared infrastructure with excellent service means we can escalate problems if we can’t handle them internally. HPE service techs can help monitor our system and find and fix issues in real time. We can speak directly with their local team, who can visit the offices if necessary. We live in an increasingly global business world, but nothing beats high-quality local assistance.

An example: One of our biggest clients once experienced an outage in their storage infrastructure. The outage affected around 200 servers, so we immediately dedicated several internal staff members to the situation. Realizing the critical nature of the emergency, HPE also activated their local team and escalated the request on their side. Working together, we were able to get the situation resolved within a few hours. If we had been working with a less responsive vendor, the outage likely would’ve lasted much longer. 

None of us knows what the future may bring, so it’s critical to create an infrastructure—and a partner—that can scale with you. Our partnership with HPE guarantees we can adjust our resources to meet tomorrow’s challenges, and the addition of our new HPE ProLiant DL560 servers ensures we can quickly deliver systems and solutions to our customers today.