Case Study: a major Canadian bank modernizes HDFS and cuts storage costs with MinIO AIStor

The Bank of the North cuts storage costs by nearly 60% with MinIO

The Bank of the North, a major Canadian bank, faced performance and stability issues with its antiquated Cloudera/Hadoop data warehouse as its data grew. The bank needed a modern solution to handle its data-intensive workloads for machine learning and real-time analytics, and it wanted the cloud operating model without the cost and loss of control associated with the public cloud. This led them to the vendor MinIO and its AIStor product.

MinIO implemented a modern, Kubernetes-based object storage solution featuring two deployments in separate data centers with active-active replication for site-level disaster tolerance. This provided the bank with infinite scaling and high availability. The results were significant: a more than 50% reduction in storage footprint while simultaneously doubling capacity, a nearly 60% reduction in costs, and a 30% improvement in machine learning task performance. MinIO also positioned the bank for future cloud-native success.