It’s Not All Flash: Modern, Scalable Storage Helps KRUK S.A. Humanize and Optimize Debt Collection

Life delivers its fair share of curveballs. One day, you have the well-paying job of your dreams, and the next, you’re out of work. Unfortunately, the bills keep coming, and even the most fiscally prudent individuals can fall into debt.

KRUK S.A. is a Polish debt recovery company. We have worked in receivables management for over 25 years and employ more than 3,000 experts who introduce modern debt collection technologies and methods to the Polish financial industry. We understand that every life situation is different and give debtors the tools to take control of their finances.

Our clients are banks and financial companies. We strive to resolve non-payment cases amicably and, in the best circumstances, enter into payment arrangements with accounts in arrears. We also initiate legal proceedings if necessary. We take a humanized approach to our work and have helped 3 million people repay their debt to date.

Fast, secure infrastructure for high-quality service

We store and process sensitive financial information, so data integrity, security, and privacy are critical to our IT decisions. I’ve been with KRUK since 2019 and am now our Senior System Network and Hardware Administrator. While I don’t choose our hardware, I prepare it, update firmware, and optimize our compression and deduplication settings to ensure peak performance, efficient workflows, and reliable data.

I work closely with our analytics team, which takes financial packet data from banks and other financial institutions, sources it, analyzes it, and sends it back as actionable information. We need powerful servers, huge data stores, a fast network, and secure infrastructure to deliver the high-quality service our financial industry clients demand.

At the beginning of 2024, KRUK decided to relocate our primary data center to our new head office in Wroclaw. It was a big task and an opportunity to upgrade our infrastructure. We had used HPE 3PAR SSD-based and HPE MSA 2040 hard drive-based storage arrays from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise for many years, but support was ending in less than a year, and we didn’t want to move obsolete equipment into our new location.

At the same time, we wanted to duplicate our primary setup at our disaster recovery (DR) data center, which also meant replacing everything at that facility.

Rebuilding the data center with a long-time partner

Building a new data center and renewing our DR site are massive undertakings. KRUK couldn’t do both alone, so we brought in a handful of partners to manage various elements of these projects. It felt like we had hourly meetings with them, discussing our equipment needs and planning the physical layout of the new data center.

One of these partners was Betacom, our HPE supplier. We use different vendors’ technologies, but 70% of our hardware is from HPE, so Betacom is our primary IT partner. I like that I can connect with one of their engineers about an issue and get an answer in minutes.

Betacom knows our infrastructure and our business needs inside and out. We are working with them to lead the creation of the IT foundations of our new data center.

Optimizing storage and costs

When we thought about our new storage options, we didn’t have to look far. We had good experiences with HPE in the past, and we liked what we saw in HPE Alletra Storage MP: a cloud-ready, solid-state storage solution that delivers reliability, scalability, and efficiency. It features built-in data protection and data reduction, simplifies storage management, improves application speed, and provides data security and integrity.

We switched to HPE Alletra Storage MP to speed up our storage and increase capacity, but another tremendous benefit is saving space. Our previous configuration used two HPE 3PAR arrays. One had 10 cages, and the other had 22, with a combined capacity of 700 terabytes. We can store all that data in a single HPE Alletra Storage MP node, which frees up space in our new data center.

We didn’t want to overprovision our storage and pre-purchase hardware based on growth predictions. Instead, we adopted HPE GreenLake for Block Storage, which allows us to purchase only the capacity we need and scale as necessary. This approach allows KRUK to anticipate growth without making an upfront capital investment immediately.

It also offers a 100% data availability guarantee and the possibility of building an on-prem hybrid cloud that combines the security of on-site hardware (required to store financial data) and the flexibility of the public cloud (to bring new applications to market).

Deploying our new production environment

Even though we are still building our data center, we have already deployed HPE Alletra Storage MP as our primary storage platform in our production environment.

The initial improvements are tremendous. HPE Alletra Storage MP’s advanced data deduplication and compression algorithms allow us to store more data in less space and access it faster. Database read and write speeds are up, and our storage and energy costs are down.

The migration was seamless, and we’re getting great mileage from the technology. Our database team deployed the patented custom scripts we developed years ago in our new production environment, and our storage development and testing team is leveraging HPE Alletra’s snapshot and cloning features to safely deploy new features and patches. We test thoroughly, but now they have the peace of mind of knowing they can quickly restore the environment should something go wrong. We didn’t have that capability before.

HPE Alletra Storage MP has decreased the time we spend on hardware management. The control panel within the HPE GreenLake platform makes it easy to monitor storage usage and performance. We can eliminate bottlenecks by provisioning more as we approach capacity.

Standardizing on a single storage platform also saves us time and money because our engineers don’t have to train on or troubleshoot multiple systems to keep our infrastructure operating at peak performance. This improvement alone allows us to accomplish even more with less, adding to the multiplier effect of migrating our storage to HPE Alletra Storage MP.

Staying competitive in the debt recovery space

Financial institutions can be slow to embrace change due to complex regulatory frameworks governing transactions, fee structures, and data privacy. Nevertheless, the banking and financial services sector has embraced technology to increase the quality and variety of services, improve access to financial institutions, and humanize highly bureaucratic processes.

The HPE Alletra Storage MP is the first step in an expansion that will help us continue to innovate, serving our clients more efficiently while giving us the competitive edge to stay ahead.