The Journey to Data Center Modernization: Emirates NBD

Digital modernization will look different for every enterprise. But a common thread in all modernization initiatives is the imperative to increase resource utilization and scalability. To do this, many enterprises are adopting cloud-oriented architectures for their on-premise data centers.

For businesses in the financial services sector the ability to meet customer demands while also complying with regulatory requirements is a careful balancing act that requires the right technology partners and solutions. AMD EPYC™ processors offer the assurance of modern security along with exceptional levels of performance and energy efficiency.

Emirates NBD is the latest financial services company to collaborate with AMD, selecting AMD EPYC™ processors on their path to data center modernization and enhanced value from virtualization infrastructure.

Emirates NBD Path to Modernization

Emirates NBD is the largest bank in Dubai and one of the largest lenders in the UAE, with total assets of nearly $200B USD and serving more than 17 million customers in 13 countries.

To support this growth, they continue to seek ways to innovate and invest in their technology platforms. A critical part of modernizing the bank’s data center is the expanded use of APIs to improve agility in meeting the changing needs of internal and customer-facing business applications. To date, they have built over 1,500 APIs that are in regular use. On an average day, the organization sees approximately 30 million API calls, which can peak at up to 2,000 API calls per second. This requires very high performance and flexibility to manage.

Emirates NBD with Epic Impact

With the world’s highest performing x86 server processors¹, AMD was uniquely positioned to help Emirates NBD continue to deliver the best user experience to its customers. As Emirates NBD, and enterprises around the world, move to a more virtualized, software-defined data center AMD EPYC™ processors are built to support them.

Upon switching to AMD EPYC™ processors, Emirates NBD saw an average performance increase of 42%. In addition, API speed increased with some transactions completing in only half a second. For customers, this means a faster response time when accessing services, resulting in a better customer experience.

Response time has improved for the internal IT teams as well. Before switching to EPYC™, calling up a log to investigate an issue may have taken 10-20 seconds. Now each job is on average half a second, meaning the bank can see logs in almost real time, giving their operations team a true benefit to address issues.

Best of all, this increase in performance did not come with ANY increase in cost or data center footprint. With the increased performance per core, Emirates NBD has been able to run the same amount of VMs on fewer servers. This resulted in 20% savings on licensing costs simply by moving to higher performance CPUs. This kind of efficiency helps ensure that the organization has room to grow as needed without increasing costs or sacrificing the performance needed to support current, or future, services.

Onward to Modernization

As a premiere banking institution, Emirates NBD must continue to push the boundaries of its technology infrastructure. And likewise, enterprises of all industries face challenges to increase revenue and service levels, while maximizing cost and energy efficiencies. Choosing AMD EPYC™ processors for virtualization deployments can lead to amazing business results:

• Yahoo! Japan recently revealed the efficiencies they’ve achieved with EPYC™ processors – reducing the number of racks by 20%, saving energy and improving TCO.
• Quality Technology Services (QTS), a company with more than 9 million square feet of data center space in North America and Europe, was able to drop their socket count in half while maintaining the same number of VMs.
• And DBS, a leading financial services group in Asia, was able to reduce power consumption by 50% and maintain exceptional capacity for future growth by deploying virtualization infrastructure with EPYC™ processors.

If you are leading an IT transformation in your company’s data center, CPU choice is critical to your journey. Outdated thinking can mean increased costs, lower performance, and a loss of a competitive edge. Here’s what you really need to know:

• AMD EPYC™ CPU-powered servers are the obvious choice to gain the full economic value from virtualization deployments, able to use fewer, higher-performing servers to achieve workload targets with exceptional energy efficiency.²
• AMD EPYC™ processors come with a full suite of AMD Infinity Guard security features and only EPYC™ provides the assurance of confidential computing.³
• Servers powered by AMD EPYC™ processors are available from all major OEMs and available worldwide.

Learn more about Emirates NBD’s data center transformation journey with AMD.