China: Superior Network Helps Yong An Insurance Boost Its Business

Background

As a pillar of the financial industry, insurance always appears persistent and prudent. Besides, insurance is tied closely with information. Insurance is a commitment, an intangible product, a service commodity. No part of the insurance business can go without information. The development of information technology has a great influence on the insurance industry. In particular, as Internet technologies are changing fast and becoming increasingly popular, more and more financial organizations have gradually integrated networking technologies with their financial products, making networking and information technologies crucial and essential for financial services.

Established upon approval of the People's Bank of China in August 1996 in line with the West Development strategy endorsed by the central leadership of the Party, and headquartered in Xi’an, Yong An Assets Insurance Co., Ltd. is engaged in a wide variety of insurance services, including property insurance, liability insurance, credit insurance, agricultural insurance, bonding insurance, short-term health insurance and accident injury insurance. Since its establishment, Yong An Assets Insurance Co., Ltd. has seized the opportunity of the West Development program to expand its business while keeping abreast of the changes. Based in Xi’an and oriented to the entire nation, Yong An is committed to offering its customers efficient and quality services with the backing of its strong shareholder base, modern computerized management system, information processing system, its efficient, speedy, flexible and leading-edge service system as well as its experienced and well-trained staff.

To fully improve its service standard and sharpen its competitive edge, Yong An Insurance joined hands again with H3C to upgrade its integrated service information network, build a robust core network platform, and switch all its services and applications to the platform.

Technology Solution

To date, Yong An Insurance has set up 363 establishments across the country, including 19 branches, 1 sales department at the headquarters, 75 central sub-branches, 11 sub-branches and 257 sales outlets. All the information nodes are built on a full series of H3C routers and switches. The following figure illustrates the networking architecture:

The HQ data center of Yong An Insurance is constructed of NE40-8 routers and S8512 (H3C S9512) switches. The networking infrastructure in other branches and sub-branches is built on R3680E, R2621, R2631E series of medium- and low-end routers depending on the amount of information.

The networking infrastructure of the HQ data center is designed to deliver high security, high reliability and high performance. Based on the fourth generation fully-distributed hardware processing architecture, and packed with good software flexibility and high hardware performance, as the fifth generation of routers, NE40 series routers support wire-speed packet forwarding and feature ideal service scalability and expandability, to maximize return on customer investments. The key components of the NE40 router include a processing system, a switching network system, a clock system, a power supply and a management bus, all in redundant hot backup for state-based hot switching. In addition, these components provide the following features:

- Hot plugging

- Passive backplane

- Hot patching for smooth software upgrading

- Taken together, this feature set ideally ensures fast and reliable network-wide operations.

Benefits

Thanks to its superior performance, the S8512 (H3C S9512), as the core switch for the data center, can well serve the purposes of high performance, high security and high reliability in network operations. Built on a fully distributed architecture, and a powerful ASIC chip for service processing, the S8512 (H3C S9512) is capable of packet switching over Crossbar switching network, ire-speed service processing, and switching capability expansion. The S8500 (H3C S9500) series routers revolutionize the method of packet forwarding with longest matching and packet-by-packet forwarding. In this way, this series eliminates the vulnerability of traditional switches caused by flow cache and exact match-based packet forwarding, guards against network viruses like Shock Wave and Red Code. In addition, the S8512 (H3C S9512) routers can support network-wide smart interaction with IDS and firewall, to secure the key servers in the data center. In answer to the booming insurance business, H3C has reserved enough space in the S8512 (H3C S9512) design for future expansion, enabling Yong An Insurance to deliver and deploy a broader range of services like VPN, voice and video on its network.

The IT infrastructure gives an impetus to the fast growth of Yong An Insurance, and shores up its core competitiveness. H3C’s solutions and products have laid a sound foundation for Yong An Insurance to deliver its broad portfolio of services, develop and integrate new services, enhancing its core competitive edges. These information technologies promote the sustainable business development of Yong An Insurance.

(2008-04-03)