Microsoft Windows Server System
Customer Solution Case Study
Overview
Country or Region: Turkey
Industry: Financial Services
Customer Profile
Based in Istanbul, Turkey, Garanti is
one of the country’s largest private
banks, with international operations
and assets of U.S.$24.4 billion.
Business Situation
Garanti Technology, the technology
subsidiary of Garanti, needed a
centralized administration tool to
help IT staff monitor some 800
servers, including more than 400 in
branch offices.
Solution
Garanti Technology deployed
Microsoft® Operations Manager
2005 to manage servers in its data
center and all of its branch offices.
Benefits
 Centralized management
 Enterprise-level performance
 Support for service level
agreements
 Easy customization
Turkish Bank with 437 Branches
Centralizes Windows Server System
Infrastructure Management
“With Microsoft Operations Manager we are
able to be proactive in ways that simply
weren’t possible before our deployment of
MOM.”
Ferda Bek, Unit Manager, Garanti Technology
One of the largest private banks in Turkey—with assets
of U.S.$24.4 billion—Garanti has a large IT infrastructure
that includes extensive use of the Microsoft® Windows
Server™ 2003 operating system and Microsoft SQL
Server™ 2005 database. The company’s technology
subsidiary, Garanti Technology, uses Microsoft
Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 to provide event and
performance management, proactive monitoring,
alerting, and reporting on systems and applications.
MOM agents are installed on some 800 computers,
including most servers in the data center and all of the
computers serving the bank’s more than 400 branch
offices. Garanti is benefiting because MOM 2005
provides centralized management, enterprise-level
performance, support for service level agreements, and
ease of customization so that its internally developed
“When the free Situation
Since its founding in 1946 in Ankara,
space of the hard Turkey, Garanti Bank has grown into
disk on a server one of that country’s largest private
banks, with assets of U.S.$24.4
drops below a billion. Owned by the Doğuş Group, a
threshold value, large Turkish conglomerate, Garanti
Bank provides retail, commercial,
MOM gives an alert. corporate, and private banking
… Prior to MOM we services. The bank’s more than
10,000 employees serve some 5
often didn’t learn of million customers a day through a
such problems until network of 427 domestic branches,
five overseas branches and five
we received a phone international representative offices—
call or e-mail in Moscow, London, Düsseldorf,
Shanghai, and Geneva. Garanti
announcing that expects to grow to some 600
something was branches by the end of 2006.
Garanti has long been a leader in
adopting new technology to enhance
its product offerings and services, and
has earned numerous industry awards
for its technological innovations,
including being named “Turkey’s Best
Internet Bank” for five consecutive
years by Global Finance magazine. In
2004, for the third year in a row, the
magazine also awarded the bank’s
Web site the Golden Spider Web
Competition Grand Prize in the
financial services category. Garanti
was the first Turkish bank to receive
an International Organization for
Standardization ISO 9001:2000
Quality Certificate covering all its
banking departments and functions.
To best achieve its business
objectives, Garanti has organized its
IT functions within a wholly owned
subsidiary, Garanti Teknoloji A.S.
(Garanti Technology). The bank’s
heterogeneous IT environment
includes IBM mainframe systems
running the DB2 database, UNIX
servers running Oracle, and
Microsoft® SQL Server™ running on
the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003
operating system. Both SQL Server
and Windows Server 2003 are part of
Microsoft Windows Server System™
integrated server software. For
several years Garanti has been
steadily increasing its use of SQL
Server and the Windows Server 2003
operating system.
With a staff of 520, Garanti
Technology has helped the bank
reduce processing loads on its
mainframe by steadily improving
existing internal applications and
designing its new applications to run
on Windows Server System, including
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 running on
Microsoft Windows Server 2003
Enterprise Edition.
The IT solutions created by Garanti
Technology enable the bank to
improve its efficiency in serving its
customers and to provide them with a
better experience. The solutions are
tightly integrated and developed
entirely in-house by Garanti
Technology. These systems are used
heavily across all delivery channels
and at all levels of Garanti.
Any organization with the processing
needs of a bank and hundreds of
branch offices faces major challenges
with operations management. Garanti
manages six Active Directory® service
forests, seven Active Directory
domains, 450 servers running
Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, 475
SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server
2000 servers with almost 600
databases, and some 50 Internet
Information Services (IIS) applications
hosted on almost 50 servers.
Garanti tried several third-party
management applications but didn’t
find one that met its enterprise-level
needs. The bank needed a solution
that would provide:
 Centralized management, including
that of its more than 400 branch
offices.
 Enterprise-level performance that
could keep up with its rapid growth.
 Support for service level
agreements (SLAs).
 Support for SLA documentation.
 Ease of customization to facilitate
monitoring internally developed
applications from the MOM
consoles.
This need escalated with the growth
of the company.
Solution
After evaluating other solutions,
Garanti deployed Microsoft
Operations Manager (MOM) 2000 in
2001. In late 2005 it upgraded to
MOM 2005, which provides
comprehensive event and
performance management, proactive
monitoring and alerting, reporting and
trend analysis, as well as specific
knowledge and tasks to improve the
manageability of Microsoft Windows®
based servers and applications.
Garanti deployed MOM 2005 onto four
servers:
 Two computers are configured as
MOM Management Servers, which
coordinate communication with
MOM agents installed on monitored
computers. They also support the
MOM Administrator Console, which
provides rules for editing and
component configuration, and, for
monitoring, the Web console and
MOM Operator Console. The two
MOM Management Servers are
configured so one acts as the
primary resource, and the other
takes over should the first server
become unavailable.
 One computer is configured as the
MOM database, which is used to
store operational data.
 The fourth MOM computer is
dedicated to data warehouse
archiving.
The four MOM servers are located in
Garanti’s main data center, with MOM
agents installed on some 800
computers, including most servers in
the data center and all of the
computers serving branch offices.
Generally, one computer is used for
each branch office, hosting SQL
Server, Exchange Server, and other
essential services and applications.
MOM Architecture
The MOM architecture has three
layers. The presentation layer
includes:
 The MOM Web Console, hosted by
IIS, provides monitoring capabilities.
“The MOM  The MOM Administrator Console Operations Database for use in
provides rules for editing and long-term reporting and trend
Management Packs, component configuration analysis. The MOM Reporting
including the ones capabilities. Console uses SQL Server 2000
 The MOM Operator Console Reporting Services to generate
for SQL Server, provides monitoring capabilities. reports from the Reporting
Active Directory,  The MOM Reporting Console uses Database. Data in the Reporting
SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services Database can be used to create
and Exchange to generate reports on the data in custom reports and applications.
[Server], have been the MOM Reporting Database. Users
can modify existing reports and
extremely helpful to create new reports.
our operations.”
The business logic layer includes:
Kenan Ağyel, Team Manager, Garanti
Technology  Management Servers, which collect
data and events from managed
computers and then pass data to
the Data Access Service.
 Data Access Service, which
processes database requests.
 Agent Managers, which can
automatically install agents as well
as install and collect attributes on
monitored computers.
 Agents, which collect data and
events, apply rules, and respond to
alerts and events. Agents also send
data and events to Management
Servers.

The data layer includes:

 The MOM Operations Database,

which holds all configuration data
and operations data, and is hosted
on SQL Server. The configuration
data includes rules and overrides,
computer group hierarchy, scripts,
views, server configuration, agent
configuration, and discovery
schema.
 The MOM Reporting Database,
which holds data from the MOM
“We now use MOM Garanti Deployment Features
At its branch locations, which
2005 for all of our generally are each served by a single
SLA management of server, Garanti uses MOM to monitor
systems and applications including
the Intel platforms. domain controller, Microsoft Exchange
MOM makes it easy Server 2003, SQL Server, Microsoft
Systems Management Server (SMS)
to report on SLA 2003, fax and file server, print server,
performance, which and EDM (a Garanti Bank software
distribution application for core
is important to us banking).
because SLAs are
At its data center, Garanti uses MOM
used throughout to monitor systems and applications
Garanti.” including domain controllers, SQL
Server clusters, Exchange Server
Ferda Bek, Unit Manager, Garanti clusters, print server clusters, file
Technology server clusters, fax servers, the
terminal server farm, Web servers,
domain controllers, EDM servers,
SMS, Microsoft Host Integration
Server 2000, and antivirus solutions.
Garanti makes good use of MOM
Management Packs. “We use 15 MOM
Management Packs, including those
for Windows Server, Exchange Server,
SQL Server, ISA [Internet Security and
Acceleration] Server, and Active
Directory,” says Kenan Ağyel, Team
Manager at Garanti Technology.
“Garanti application developers have
created some 25 custom
management packs to bring MOM
monitoring to internally developed
and third-party line of business
applications.”
The company takes advantage of the
rich feature set, using more than 20
MOM features, including:
Administrator Console, Operator
Console, Web Console, Reporting
Console, Instance-Aware Monitoring,
Cluster-Aware Monitoring, 64-bit
Agent Support, and Report
Customization.
Using MOM to Manage SQL Server
With some 480 instances of SQL
Server and about 500 databases, SQL
Server plays a critically important role
throughout Garanti Bank operations.
To help ensure the continual
availability of SQL Server in the data
center and throughout the branch
offices, Garanti Technology uses SQL
Server Management Pack for MOM to
monitor the performance and
availability of components and
functions such as the SQL Server
Agent, database health and free
space, SQL Server clustering and
named instances, security, and SQL
Server Replication.
The SQL Server Management Pack
provides both proactive and reactive
monitoring of SQL Server 2000 and
2005 across the Garanti enterprise
environment. Availability and
configuration monitoring,
performance data collection, and
default thresholds are built for
enterprise-level monitoring. Both local
and remote connectivity checks help
ensure database availability.
With the expertise built into the SQL
Server Management Pack, Garanti can
manage SQL Server to identify issues
before they become critical. The
management pack increases the
security, availability, and performance
“Before MOM we
didn’t have a
centralized tool.”
Hakan Acu, Systems Support
Specialist, Garanti Technology
for the entire SQL Server
infrastructure.
The company is in the process of
upgrading its SQL Server
Management Pack. “We’re very happy
with the additional information and
reports we have found in the SQL
Server Management Pack for MOM
2005,” says Umut Nazlica, Specialist,
System Management, Garanti
Technology. “One of the first things
we’ll use it for is to verify completion
of backups at the branch locations.
This is something we used to do with
scripts. Doing it with MOM makes it
easier to execute and manage.”
Benefits
Using MOM 2005 for health and
performance monitoring, service
monitoring, disk space monitoring,
security auditing, reporting, capacity
planning, and other functions has
given the company the operational
data it has long needed. The
deployment has generated several
benefits for Garanti, including
centralized management, enterprise-
level performance, support for service
level agreements, and easy
customization.
Centralized Management
Garanti Technology has an operations
team of about 25 dedicated to
providing round-the-clock monitoring,
using the MOM Operator Console.
Information from the Operator
Console is so complete that the
company has seen a significant
reduction in the number of issues that
are escalated to second-tier support;
the operations team now resolves
about 90 percent of MOM alerts.
MOM gives Garanti the centralized
point of management it needed to
better monitor and manage its
operations. “With Microsoft
Operations Manager we are able to be
proactive in ways that simply weren’t
possible before our deployment of
MOM,” says Ferda Bek, Unit Manager
at Garanti Technology. “We have
configured MOM to send e-mail and
SMS [Short Message Service]
messages to alert us when predefined
thresholds have been reached so we
can address issues before they
become problems.”
Metin Kiliç, Systems Support
Specialist at Garanti Technology,
provides an example of how
important these alerts can be. “When
the free space of the hard disk on a
server drops below a threshold value,
MOM gives an alert. This allows us to
take necessary action before the lack
of space becomes a problem. Prior to
MOM we often didn’t learn of such
problems until we received a phone
call or e-mail announcing that
something was wrong.”
Although some monitoring was done
earlier with scripts, that solution was
decentralized and provided only
partial coverage. “Before MOM we
didn’t have a centralized tool,” says
Hakan Acu, Systems Support
Specialist at Garanti Technology. “We
created scripts to monitor some
critical assets to test, for example,
that Active Directory was running. But
"The ability to this was only done for some of our
systems, and just those in our data
integrate our center. And while this allowed us to
custom scripts with test availability of hardware, we didn’t
have a way to verify whether
MOM helps us to applications were properly running.”
keep management
The ability to monitor application
centralized to the availability enhances customer
MOM consoles, satisfaction. “We now can monitor
and manage the entire network and
which is a great all of the servers from one location—
help.” including applications,” says Acu.
“Managing applications is important
Metin Kiliç, Systems Support because so many of the bank’s
Specialist, Garanti Technology applications are mission critical. If a
line of business application isn’t
working, people throughout the bank,
including those in more than 400
branch offices, can’t be working and
helping their customers.”
Enterprise-Level Performance
Garanti previously had tried other
operations management tools but saw
that they lacked enterprise-level
performance. “We found products on
the market that could handle 100
servers or 200 servers, but they fell
apart when managing 1,000 or more
servers,” says Nazlica. “We needed
an enterprise-level solution, and that
is what we have gained with MOM.”
The company also found MOM easy to
deploy across the enterprise. “With
some third-party tools that we tried,
we worked for two or three weeks to
get them up and running in our test
lab, and still couldn’t get the
performance we needed,” says
Nazlica. “With MOM we were up and
running and getting results within two
or three hours.”
Enterprise-level management is
enhanced because of the MOM
Management Packs that help create a
single point of integration. “The MOM
Management Packs, including the
ones for SQL Server, Active Directory,
and Exchange [Server], have been
extremely helpful to our operations,”
says Ağyel. “Combined with the
custom Management Packs we’ve
created for our internal applications
using the MOM MP Software
Development Kit, they have allowed
us to manage a large collection of
applications and services from our
centralized MOM Administrator
Console.”
Support for Service Level Agreements
Service level agreements are
important tools for Garanti to use in
ensuring, and documenting, the
availability of key services and
applications throughout the bank,
including its branches. “We now use
MOM 2005 for all of our SLA
management of the Intel platforms,”
says Bek. “MOM makes it easy to
report on SLA performance, which is
important to us because SLAs are
used throughout Garanti.”
The SLA reports generated with MOM
can also be used in budgeting. MOM
reports on network performance, for
example, can be used by a branch to
document the need for equipment
upgrades or for more wide area
network bandwidth.
MOM makes it easy to generate SLA the MOM consoles, which is a great
reports for branch sites, which was help.”
particularly challenging before the
MOM deployment. “With MOM we can
provide exacting SLA commitments
and reporting for the branches, which
we couldn’t do before,” says Ağyel.
“SQL Server is essential to our
operations and is deployed at all of
our branches. With MOM we are now
guaranteeing SQL Server availability
of 99.96 percent, and using MOM we
can demonstrate that we are
consistently meeting this SLA. We
offer similar SLAs for Exchange and
other mission critical services and
applications.”

Ease of Customization
Garanti creates custom MOM
Management Packs to monitor its
many internal applications. Garanti
also extends the SQL Server MOM
Management Pack with custom scripts
created using Microsoft Visual Basic®.
“We can easily create management
scripts for our internal applications so
they can be monitored from MOM
consoles,” says Nazlica. “We also use
scripts to use MOM to monitor things
like index fragmentation details
across our 500 SQL Server
databases.”

MOM makes it easy to manage

whatever custom scripts are created.
“We use MOM to initiate the scripts
and to log the results,” says Kiliç. “We
also use it to trigger any alerts or
other actions based upon the results
of the scripts. The ability to integrate
our custom scripts with MOM helps us
to keep management centralized to
For More Information
For more information about
Microsoft products and services, call
the Microsoft Sales Information
Center at (800) 426-9400. In
Canada, call the Microsoft Canada
Information Centre at (877) 568-
2495. Customers who are deaf or
hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft
text telephone (TTY/TDD) services
at (800) 892-5234 in the United
States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada.
Outside the 50 United States and
Canada, please contact your local
Microsoft subsidiary. To access
information using the World Wide
Web, go to: www.microsoft.com
For more information about Garanti
products and services, visit the Web
site at: www.garanti.com.tr
© 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
This case study is for informational purposes only.
MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, Active
Directory, Visual Basic, Windows, the Windows logo,
Windows Server, and Windows Server System are
either registered trademarks or trademarks of
Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or
other countries. All other trademarks are property of
their respective owners.
Document published February 2006.
Microsoft Windows Server
System
Microsoft Windows Server System
integrated server infrastructure
software is designed to support end-
to-end solutions built on the Windows
Server operating system. Windows
Server System creates an
infrastructure based on integrated
innovation, Microsoft's holistic
approach to building products and
solutions that are intrinsically
designed to work together and
interact seamlessly with other data
and applications across your IT
environment. This helps you reduce
the costs of ongoing operations,
deliver a more secure and reliable IT
infrastructure, and drive valuable new
capabilities for the future growth of
your business.
For more information about Windows
Server System, go to:
www.microsoft.com/windowsserversy
stem
Software and Services − Microsoft Internet Information
 Microsoft Windows Server System Services version 6.0
− Microsoft Windows Server 2003 − Microsoft SQL Server 2000
Enterprise Edition Reporting Services
− Microsoft Operations Manager
2005 Hardware
− Microsoft SQL Server 2005  Intel-based servers
Enterprise Edition
 Technologies
− Microsoft Active Directory