H3C helps a top bank to implement comprehensive "Finance Clouds"

With the broad and in-depth development of China’s new economy, the status and role of the financial industry are becoming more and more prominent. Financial services are often needed for entrepreneurship, enterprise transformation, the industry 4.0 and other enterprise needs. In addition, the leapfrog development of insurance and new business forms like debt-to-equity swaps and inclusive finance are also providing precious opportunities for the development of financial enterprises. These external opportunities and internal developments have pressed financial institutions in speeding up digital transformation.

Faced with such financial changes, H3C’s new IT strategy focuses on Interconnectivity, Data Security, Big Data and Could Computing and provides one-stop comprehensive IT solutions and IT consultation based on new IT strategy. Relying on its professional financial service team and end-to-end integrated financial IT solutions, H3C helps financial customers to reduce costs, accelerate business innovation, strengthen management, control risk and pilot Internet financial models, and it facilitates the universally beneficial and user-centered transformations in the financial industry.

Digital Innovation to help the Bank become most value-add & creative bank

In recent years, the bank made remarkable achievements in reform and development and has ranked among the world's top banks. With the emergence of the information revolution represented by the mobile internet, cloud computing, big data and the IoT, the bank believes that its sustainable development capability in the future depends on whether it can realize operations, management and service innovation by making good use of big data. So the bank has accelerated in addressing the problems of internal data mining and analysis and the safe integration and utilization of external resources. It has also expedited talent development and infrastructure construction, as well as technological achievement transformation, and it has accelerated transformations, upgrades and sustainable development through efficient big data application.

H3C, through constant technological innovation, has supported the bank to become " most value-add and creative bank ". It has created an all-scenario network solution covering data centers, WAN backbones and branches, and it has helped the bank to successfully launch the "next-generation core system". It supports the launch of 15 applications and related IT frameworks, platforms, technologies and security components in the first phase of the "next-generation core system", setting the industry record by delivering thousands of virtual servers only in five working days, making the bank being the first commercial bank in China’s financial industry to realize the deep application of the "Finance Cloud" in the production environment.

Platform Upgrades to Meet the Traffic Demands of Financial Big Data

The bank's big data network follows the IO-type big data model. It is difficult to design a solution that meets the convergence ratio of east-west traffic according to the characteristics of big data traffic while integrating ETL, traditional data and other server areas in an organized manner. The bank's big data network uses a spindle-shaped "CLOS" network architecture model, with a total core bandwidth of 320 Gbps, safeguarding smooth traffic flows among ETL, traditional data and big data servers. H3C's data center products, including S12500-X, S5800V2 and S5120HI, are deployed on a large scale with big data and other related areas of the data center. Combined with H3C's experience in the construction, operations and maintenance of large bank data centers, it will lay a solid foundation for the bank's transition to an era of comprehensive big data application.

Based on the analysis of the demands for a big data processing platform, H3C has planned a distributed core architecture, also known as a "leaf-spine architecture", for the bank's big data processing platform network, and it has fully enabled 40G networking to ensure that there is no bottleneck of inter-server communication in the area. Over 2,000 servers can be accommodated in a single area and provides total memory capacity up to 100 PB, based on expansion to 50TB per single server, fully meeting the development and growth of the bank's big data business at present and in the future.

H3C's Wi-Fi products and software are widely deployed in the bank's head office, data center, development center, testing centers, branches and outlets, which not only facilitates business management, operations and maintenance, but also provides convenient "smart banks." H3C's WeChat-integrated Wi-Fi access solution also provides a data mining source of users' behavior characteristics.

Next-generation Technology to Realize the In-depth Cloud Computing in Finance

The "next-generation core system" launched by the bank is an overall reconstruction of the bank's current application system, as well as a unified and centralized information technology platform aiming at the enterprise level, SOA and cloud computing. H3C has designed NanHu DC, the next-generation all-application bearing center, to meet the overall architectural requirements of the "next-generation core system". It adopts S12500-X core switches and S5800V2 series 10-gigabit switches, with over 20,000 10-gigabit ports, realizing financial data centers of comprehensive 10-gigabit era. It innovatively adopts a flat and resource-based construction mode, increasing the utilization of computer rooms and network equipment by more than 50% — and increasing their upgrade efficiency in triple — compared with data centers during the past period.

The general manager of the bank's IT technology department said, "With the rapid development of cloud computing, the Internet and other information technologies, the construction of cloud computing data centers and O&M systems of large commercial banks has been put on the agenda of data management at commercial banks. In the process of constructing a cloud computing data center, our bank has built the 'next-generation core system' under the principle of 'centralization, integration and consolidation' and restructured the business-driven enterprise-level IT system. Proceeding from the overall O&M management of the enterprise, the system will, in the future, effectively support the cloud computing data center O&M management at the 'two cities and three centers'."

NanHu DC is an important carrier of the bank's "next-generation" core system, with its large-scale use of X86 architecture servers. In addition, its networking requires a large number of high-density 10-gigabit flat zones. H3C implements flat zone structure by deploying data center products, including S12500 and S5800V2. According to the idea of "one network architecture for all applications", carrying its production service in the open business area and other key areas and assisting in the establishment of the bank's "next-generation' core system, achieving the objectives of IT infrastructure management, i.e. "standard services, agile provisioning, flexible resources, automatic management and centralized control", establishing the bank's leading positions among data centers in large commercial banks. H3C has deployed new data center technologies, including IRF2 network virtualization, or each zone of NanHu DC’s production network, H3C’s overall network architecture and technical concepts have been recognized and accepted fully by customers.