Saving 51% on costs using Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP with Banco Pan

A BTG Group company, Banco Pan is one of Brazil’s leading digital banks, serving more than 32 million customers. To meet changing consumer demands, Banco Pan launched an initiative to expand its digital financial services.

At the time, the bank ran its workloads, along with its Microsoft SQL Server database, in a data center. This setup required regular maintenance to minimize downtime, and it became cost prohibitive as Banco Pan grew. To enhance its business agility and optimize costs, the bank decided to migrate its on-premises environment to the cloud. “We had a goal, and we needed to migrate several environments to AWS to modernize our platform,” says Jonathan Pereira, database administrator at Banco Pan.

The bank required a cost-effective database solution that could seamlessly scale to 40 TB of financial data. Meeting regulatory and industry requirements was of equal importance. More specifically, Banco Pan needed to maintain a recovery time objective (RTO) of 5 minutes or less.

After evaluating multiple options, the bank selected Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, especially because of its built-in snapshot feature. “Using snapshots, we can restore our environment in minutes, regardless of the amount of the stored data,” says Pereira. “This is extremely important to us.”

Banco Pan’s SQL Server database supported several critical applications, so the bank broke the migration into multiple waves. “It was a complex migration,” says Pereira. “There were some initial concerns about the project because it was unfamiliar, but we overcame those challenges with the help of the AWS team.”

Banco Pan migrated 300 business applications to AWS. For its legacy applications, the bank relies on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. For cloud-based applications, Banco Pan containerizes its workloads on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a fully managed Kubernetes service that lets teams run Kubernetes seamlessly in both AWS and on-premises data centers.

Banco Pan deployed Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP across multiple Availability Zones on SQL Server failover cluster instances to maintain high service availability without increasing licensing costs. With this deployment pattern, the bank can achieve a recovery point objective (RPO) of 5 minutes and an RTO of 2 minutes, exceeding the requirements of its service-level agreements.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP supports data protection, security, and access control features, such as encryption of data at rest and in transit. This helps Banco Pan meet its security and compliance objectives under the AWS Shared Responsibility Model.

The bank also adopted Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts, dedicated hardware that supports existing software licenses and improves compliance. So, Banco Pan can run two cores per license, reducing licensing costs by 20 percent.

Banco Pan compresses its file system by using the data compression feature in Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, reducing the storage space that data consumes by 40 percent. Since migrating its SQL Server database to AWS, the bank has also cut its overall storage costs. “The cost of storing large volumes of data for transactional environments was one of our main challenges,” says Guilherme Torres, database manager at Banco Pan. “Using Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, we achieved 51 percent cost savings while delivering excellent performance and advanced features.”

By using a breadth of AWS compute services, Banco Pan has significantly improved the resiliency and availability of its services. “A major benefit of migrating to AWS is the stability, which was one of our principal goals,” says Pereira. “We don’t need to worry about the impact of outages on our customers.”

Banco Pan continues to modernize its technology stack on AWS. To cultivate innovation, the bank has adopted a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) strategy. Developers can quickly spin up new environments and test out features in the cloud. In line with these efforts, the bank plans to automate more of its workloads by using NetApp BlueXP Workload Factory for AWS, a software-as-a-service framework that connects Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP data volumes.

With a modernized cloud environment, Banco Pan is excited to expand its digital services. “It took our developers days to deliver an environment on premises,” says Pereira. “Using AWS, they can do that in minutes, accelerating the development of new features for our customers.”