IBM announced that Garanti Bank has selected IBM System z mainframe servers as the foundation of its banking infrastructure.  The increased performance of the new IBM System z Mainframe servers will help Garanti Banks provide services to more than 950,000 clients and process more than 200 million transactions a day.

"Our new IBM System z Servers keep us ahead of the competition in attracting and retaining customers," said Tufan Alatan Vice President at Garanti Technology, a Dogus Group company that today is one of the largest IT services providers in Turkey.

Under the agreement IBM provided Garanti Bank with a solution based on two IBM System z Enterprise Class servers running the IBM z/OS operating system. The core banking systems run on an IBM Customer Information Control System (CICS) Transaction Server mainframe with data managed using IBM DB2 for z/OS software. The servers are clustered using IBM Parallel Sysplex technology enabling Garanti Bank to safeguard and recover critical information and reduce possible downtime in the case of a systems failure.

The adoption of IBM's System z reinforced Garanti's strategy to deliver fast and secure banking services 24 hours a day, ensuring fast, scalable, robust, flexible, cost-effective and secure environment across different channels - banking branches, ATMs, POSs, Internet and mobile channels.

"Drawing on IBM's globally-integrated network of capabilities and expertise, we offer our clients the possibility to have solutions especially optimized to manage specific workloads," said Gulseli Zeren Karadere, Director Finance and Public Sector, IBM Turkey. "This allows our clients to take advantage of that IBM knowledge and get a jump start on deploying solutions specifically tailored to their production environment."