Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

Customer interviews: finance / Insurance

In the era of new financial technology, the reliability of data and the computing performance of the platform are the core essentials, and the speed of online expansion of new business is an important key to win in the fierce competition. Under the guidance of the concept of innovative technology-driven business development, Bohai Life Insurance Company, an emerging life insurance company in the insurance industry, selected SmartX to help enterprises take the lead in enabling the super-integration architecture, meeting high-performance requirements while reducing operation and maintenance costs, greatly improving the efficiency of development and testing, using technical tools to promote continuous optimization and launch of business, and maintaining sustained and rapid growth.

The following is a transcript of our interview with the head of the information technology department of Bohai Life, which objectively presents the application practice of super integration in the transformation and upgrading of Bohai Life IT architecture, as well as the value in improving the efficiency of development and testing.

A transcript of the interview

As the first insurance company to settle in Tianjin Free Trade Zone, Bohai Life Insurance has been developing for three years. Our company also proposed transformation and development as early as 2017, relying on the Internet and the fine development of new technologies.

The biggest feature of the development of the Internet now is fast, whether it is development or testing or the whole online. Therefore, it also puts forward a higher requirement for us, how to solve the problem of fast iteration.

In the first half of 2017, we made an overall systematic planning, replanned the infrastructure, and introduced a lot of new technologies, such as super-convergence and hybrid cloud. In the traditional model, the trouble is that the initial investment is relatively large, and the expansion is not flexible, and the whole point of failure is very many. The ideal infrastructure must be high performance, easy to expand, easy to maintain, stable and reliable.

We now use three machines (10 nodes) of SmartX Halo 400. all of our original development and test environment have been moved to a super-converged server, solving the deployment and installation of more than 30 systems and nearly 200 environments.

In virtualization, it achieves the whole reasonable allocation and use of resources. The performance of the entire storage has improved us by nearly 5 times, which can reduce our workload by 30%. No matter in terms of space utilization, or energy saving and consumption reduction, super integration has its advantages.

At that time, our super integration had domestic brands and international brands, and the whole thing we made a POC. Comprehensive evaluation, SmartX score is the highest, it is a company specializing in super-integration technology, at the same time, the intellectual property rights of SmartX is completely domestic, our financial enterprises first of all talk about stability, the premise of stability is to have a professional team to provide us with professional services.

In the next two years, we may introduce super-convergence to the production environment, where we will build a private cloud. Now our Internet business has been on the public cloud, and then we will form a hybrid cloud architecture.

Now everyone may be in the experimental stage, and there are not many people using super-integration in the production environment. But everyone is studying and considering this new technology, and I think this is a trend.

Case analysis

Break through the traditional barrier and speed up the launch of business

As an active practitioner of innovation and technology in the field of digital finance, Bohai Life has successively launched insurance service cloud platform, online claims settlement, electronic signature, face recognition and other services, and through intelligent services, product innovation, resource interconnection, to meet the various needs of customers, and continue to build and improve customer-oriented, cross-platform, multi-contact insurance service system.

With the expansion of the company's business scale and the corresponding improvement of system diversity and other requirements, the traditional IT infrastructure is difficult to easily support. Especially for the development and testing, its efficiency directly affects the online speed of the business, affects the iterative efficiency of the system function, and also affects the user's functional experience of the business, which restricts the actual insurance business development.

Bohai Life's previous development and test system is built on a typical traditional IT infrastructure, that is, the combination of traditional centralized SAN storage + FC SAN network + VMware virtualization. Due to the use of traditional storage devices, storage expansion and storage performance can not meet business needs.

The specific pain points are as follows:

Poor storage scalability

Limited by the scale-up expansion mode of the traditional storage architecture, the storage capacity of a single device is limited by the storage controller. When the upper limit of single storage expansion is reached, new storage devices have to be purchased. In addition, it will also cause resources between different storage devices can not be shared, resulting in data islands.

Insufficient storage performance

For some high-pressure test models, such as high-concurrency database services, storage can no longer provide higher storage performance and delayed response when it does not reach the expected business scale.

With the rapid development of the company's business, the traditional three-tier architecture + virtualization model encountered bottlenecks, affecting the business system development and testing efficiency and iterative speed, as well as the end-user experience, the upgrade of IT infrastructure is imminent.

Super fusion injects new vitality into the development and test platform

SmartX integrates the advantages of software and hardware to reconstruct the data center infrastructure for Bohai Life through the SmartX Halo 400 all-in-one machine, which includes core software systems such as SmartX Elf virtualization platform and SmartX ZBS distributed block storage. With simple and convenient solution deployment, continuous and stable performance output, flexible and dynamic expansion management, this solution effectively supports the development and test environment of the core business system to fully meet the needs of Bohai Life's business development.

At present, all the development and test systems of Bohai Life are deployed on the SmartX super-integration platform, including core business systems such as Oracle database and SQL Server, as well as electronic insurance policy system, reserve, bancassurance, OA, anti-money laundering and other business systems.

The picture shows the logical topology of SmartX superfusion scheme.

This high-performance and high-stability IT infrastructure effectively ensures the accuracy and efficiency of development and testing, simplifies operation and maintenance management, realizes the flexible and dynamic expansion of IT resources, fully meets the needs of different departments, and improves the collaboration efficiency and production efficiency of the whole company.

The specific benefits are as follows:

5x increase in storage performanc

SmartX distributed block storage technology realizes SSD-HDD intelligent hierarchical storage, and the storage performance is improved by 5 times. The hybrid IOPS reaches more than 300000, and a small amount of SSD can achieve high performance Icano, which can easily carry multiple test and development platforms. The high pressure and high concurrency test content of the database has been solved smoothly. The improvement of the performance of the development and test system not only greatly optimizes the work efficiency of the development and test department, but also improves the business department's experience of using the IT basic environment, and improves the satisfaction.

Effectively reduce TCO by 30%

As the SmartX super-convergence architecture adopts the mode of standard x86 server + distributed storage software (without open source technology and completely self-controlled), the pre-procurement and late operation and maintenance costs have been reduced. Built-in Elf virtualization computing (deeply customized KVM) and network save the procurement cost of traditional virtualization software on the basis of ensuring stability, adequacy and ease of use. In the subsequent management of operation and maintenance, there is no need to maintain special storage equipment, which reduces the complexity of operation and maintenance, and the cost of operation and maintenance is also reduced. In terms of procurement, management, operation and maintenance, the overall TCO cost is more than 30% lower than that of the traditional architecture.

More than 50% increase in resource allocation efficiency

The super-converged platform enables unified allocation of storage and computing resources, and IT infrastructure administrators can coordinate as soon as business requirements are raised, eliminating the need for storage and virtualization administrators to configure them separately. Compared with the traditional model, the efficiency of resource management and allocation has increased by more than 50%.

Flexible expansion with high compatibility

The super-converged solution of SmartX Software-defined Storage is highly compatible and enables smooth dynamic scale-out. Bohai Life can use SmartX super-converged all-in-one machine or third-party standard x86 server to achieve horizontal expansion of the development and test platform and rapid launch of resources. At the same time, the extensive support of the SmartX super-convergence platform for the mainstream virtualization platform can also ensure the possible adjustment requirements for the virtualization system in the future.

Increase system deployment efficiency by more than 2 times

Complete the implementation of the storage and virtualization system within 1 day, using the batch deployment feature of the system, the efficiency of system deployment has been improved by more than 2 times; a virtualization OPS engineer can complete the operation and maintenance of the entire super-converged platform (including storage) at the same time.

As a "model" scenario, development and testing is of great significance for reference.

In the first phase, Bohai Life used 10-node equipment to develop and test the environment. After practice, the SmartX super-fusion architecture fully meets Bohai Life's high requirements for storage performance and reliability, while effectively reducing TCO, making the development process faster, flexible and unrestricted. At present, the SmartX super-integration platform carries all the development and test systems of Bohai Life, including core business systems such as Oracle database and SQL Server, as well as electronic insurance policy system, reserve, bancassurance, OA, anti-money laundering and other business systems. As a main scenario of super-integration, development testing is highly replicable and has great exemplary significance for the whole insurance industry.

The head of the information technology department of Bohai Life Insurance said: "in the process of type selection, we realized the unique advantages of super integration and the importance of independent and controllable technology." We are impressed by the excellent performance of SmartX super convergence and the high reliability of enterprise-class storage. The out-of-the-box solution has not only greatly improved the efficiency of our development, testing and product launch, but also greatly reduced the overall cost, bringing us great practical value. "

At present, SmartX super-integration solution has become an important supporting force in Bohai Life IT infrastructure. In the future, Bohai Life will continue to expand the idea of super-integration application in use. After the accumulation and verification of technology, Bohai Life will gradually use super-fusion architecture in production systems and disaster preparedness centers to bring more powerful carrying capacity and expansion space for the business.

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