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

[introduction] every year, the science and technology departments of major banks are facing an archenemy during the 618 or Singles 11 Shopping Festival. Take the double 11 Shopping Festival as an example, in the past two years, the peak of concurrent transactions of large state-owned banks during the "zero-second kill" period of double 11 has long exceeded tens of thousands of TPS (transactions per second), and the transaction peak often lasts 10-15 minutes, which is a big test on the performance, reliability, stability and other aspects of the storage system carrying core trading tasks.

In popular terms, the higher the storage performance, the lower latency and stability, the more transactions per second are supported, which means that in the rush buying scenario, more users can buy the products they want, and the user experience is better. In the real-time transactions, online banking, clearing, money transfer and other An and B businesses of banks and other financial institutions, high-end storage, especially high-end all-flash memory, is an indispensable role. it supports the efficient and stable operation of a variety of An and B core businesses of financial institutions.

This trend of users has been verified on Huawei Storage. According to IDC's "Market tracking report on the Chinese Enterprise Storage Market in the first quarter of 2020", the overall storage market in China fell 7.8% in the first quarter of 2020, but Huawei achieved a reverse growth rate of 10.4%, ranking first in China for 19 consecutive quarters. Among them, the all-flash business achieved ultra-rapid growth of 80.8%, far exceeding the market average growth rate of 16.1%.

Specific to the financial market, Huawei Storage has achieved more than 60% compound growth in China's financial market in the past few years; in 2019, Huawei Storage accounted for more than 30% of China's financial market, making it the number one storage brand in China's financial market. Among them, including 6 major state-owned commercial banks, more than 10 joint-stock banks, and most insurance and securities companies have chosen Huawei OceanStor storage, and more and more financial institutions have deployed their core business on Huawei OceanStor all-flash memory.

Compared with the past, the term high-end storage has not changed, but because of the popularity of flash media, great changes have taken place in the technological change and product innovation contained in high-end storage. Therefore, through insight into the changes in the storage demand of the core business of financial institutions, and the analysis of Huawei's key technological innovation in the field of high-end storage, let's take a look at why high-end storage is still unshakable in the core business of financial institutions.

The core business of finance has these high requirements for storage.

Since the rise of big data in the Chinese market, the pace of digital transformation of China's financial industry has obviously accelerated. Online business, data value mining, intelligence and other financial institutions have become the development direction of many financial institutions. Including banks, securities, insurance and other financial institutions will take digital capabilities as the core competitiveness in the future.

Among them, the evolution of the core business of financial institutions is particularly important. Take the bank as an example, its core banking system is referred to as CORE Banking System, in which CORE is the abbreviation of Centralized Online Real-Time Exchange-- "centralized online real-time interaction". The bank core system is the most important front-end business system, which is the basis for banks to realize the core functions of banking business, such as customer relationship management, products and services, business processes, financial accounting and management, risk control, auxiliary management and decision-making.

In recent years, there has been a clear trend in the core business of Chinese financial institutions:

First, after the era of data centralization, many core businesses run on mainframes or minicomputers. After entering the era of big data, limited by the poor scalability and high cost of mainframe or minicomputer environment, most domestic financial institutions are accelerating the migration of core business from mainframe or minicomputer environment to open platform. for example, projects such as the "new generation core system" of the Construction Bank and the "mainframe downshift" of the Bank of China were born under this background.

However, financial institutions have not reduced the reliability of data and business continuity at all. For example, according to the Banking Information system disaster recovery Plan, the disaster recovery registration requirement for AB business is above level 5 and the business interruption is less than 15 minutes. Considering that the interruption of the business of financial institutions will have a serious impact on the user experience and daily economic activities, the disaster recovery business systems RPO and RTO actually deployed by banks and other institutions will be more stringent than the industry regulations. Therefore, no matter from the regulatory requirements of the relevant regulators, or out of the guarantee of more and more online business experience, the reliability and stability of the storage system are put forward extreme requirements.

Second, with the rapid digital transformation of the financial industry, the business types of financial institutions are also rapidly rich, the relationship between business and business is becoming more and more frequent and close, and the desire for business performance is also improving rapidly. For example, in 2010, the banking intra-bank payment system handled a total of 5.2 billion transactions, but with the rapid development and popularity of mobile Internet and mobile payment, small and high-frequency payment scenarios quickly become the norm. By 2019, the banking industry handles a total of 223.3 billion electronic payment business. Bank transactions, clearing and other businesses have a large number of data processing performance requirements.

With the continuous innovation of data-based business scenarios and the substantial growth of data processing requirements, the core systems of the financial industry will have new performance requirements for storage systems in the future.

Third, a large number of online business, as well as the rapid increase in the amount of data, the core business requirements for the capacity of the storage system has been greatly increased, coupled with the long history of financial institutions IT construction, often with multiple brands of multiple storage systems, so that the storage system needs to have sufficient capacity expansion, and needs to be simplified in operation and maintenance and management to make data management more efficient.

It is these real requirements that make the all-flash array rapidly replace the traditional high-end storage based on mechanical hard disk in the financial industry and become a new supporting platform for the core business of financial institutions. Take the customers of Huawei Storage as an example. After deploying OceanStor all-flash memory array, a large state-owned bank increased its transaction volume in Singles Day by 20%, while the transaction delay decreased by 30% in high-concurrency and high-traffic trading scenarios such as 618 and Singles Day.

There are many financial clients like this. Huawei Storage has achieved unprecedented growth in China's financial market in recent years, and has become the number one brand of storage in China's financial market. So what is the technical logic behind Huawei's popularity in financial markets? What has Huawei done to break the international brand monopoly of high-end storage?

The technical logic behind the storage of the first brand in the domestic financial market

All-flash memory means a brand new track.

Huawei Storage has ranked first in all-flash memory growth in the world for eight consecutive quarters on this track. Specific to the financial core business scenarios, it has extreme requirements for storage in terms of reliability, performance and capacity. How does Huawei meet these extreme requirements in terms of technological innovation and product power of all-flash memory?

Let's take the new generation of OceanStor storage Dorado series high-end all-flash memory released by Huawei last year as an example to take a look at the technical logic behind Huawei Storage becoming the number one brand in the financial market.

First of all, the IT environment of most financial institutions generally tends to be complicated, and the use of hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environment is increasing rapidly, which requires the development of storage system reliability to jump out of the relatively closed environment in the past and match the new requirements of financial institutions for storage reliability from a broader perspective.

Therefore, the idea of Huawei OceanStor storage Dorado series of high-end all-flash memory is to build an end-to-end reliability architecture from component level, architecture level, product level to solution level and cloud level, so as to ensure high availability of business up to 99.9999%. It well meets the extreme demand for reliability in the core business of financial institutions.

Specifically:

The core business usually involves frequent transaction settlement and requires a large number of concurrent read and write operations, which has an important impact on the life of flash drives. Therefore, Huawei OceanStor Storage Dorado series of high-end all-flash memory balances the business load to all flash disks by adopting global wear balancing technology on flash disks, and uses Huawei's patented anti-wear balancing technology to avoid collective failure of multiple disks and build high reliability for core business at the component level.

Considering that with the increase of financial core business, the number of storage system controllers will continue to expand, and multiple controllers may fail. Huawei OceanStor Storage Dorado series of high-end all-flash memory adopts the SmartMatrix architecture of front and rear full connection design and fully symmetrical AMUA controller design, which can tolerate the extreme situation of controlling 8 bad 7 at the architecture level, and achieve 100% load balancing.

At the product level, the OceanStor storage Dorado series of high-end all-flash memory hardware tolerates level 9 earthquake resistance and software tolerates simultaneous failure of three disks, ensuring the extreme reliability of a single set of equipment based on hardware reconfiguration and software depth optimization, and can prevent potential hazards to core business caused by environmental factors such as frequent earthquakes.

From a deeper point of view, the increase in the complexity of the financial core business system environment has further increased the complexity of financial institutions for the construction of disaster recovery backup, and how to simplify the complexity of core business disaster recovery construction. really enable users of financial institutions to ensure core business continuity in the event of emergencies. Therefore, Huawei OceanStor storage Dorado series high-end all-flash solution layer creates a gateway-free dual-activity solution, reducing failure nodes and system deployment complexity; at the same time, it can also interact with cloud data centers to achieve disaster recovery backup and cloud-level business recovery, which greatly improves the breadth and depth of core business protection.

Second, the core business of financial institutions will have a growing thirst for performance. Huawei OceanStor storage Dorado series of high-end all-flash memory can provide up to 20 million IOPS of performance and stable latency of 0.08ms, which can be called "both hard and soft" in terms of high performance. The so-called "hard and soft" means that all kinds of industry-leading and mature hardware technologies are adopted at the hardware physical level, so that the data of the core business can run fast and steadily; at the software level, it is deeply optimized by combining the advantages of hardware to make every aspect of data processing more efficient.

For example, in Huawei OceanStor storage Dorado series of high-end all-flash memory, NVMe Over Fabric (referred to as NOF+) technology plays an important role. In the past, the data center adopted IP, IB, FC, PCIe and SAS five protocols and three networks. Huawei OceanStor storage Dorado series took the lead in realizing end-to-end NVMe in all series of products, and built a protocol-one network based on full NVMe Over Fabric (referred to as NOF+), which is equivalent to building a unified management highway network for data transmission and processing. Compared with other manufacturers in the industry, Huawei NOF+ scheme also has a big advantage in that it can quickly detect and recover in the event of link failure, which further improves the reliability of the data highway and ensures continuous performance.

In addition, Huawei OceanStor Storage Dorado series adopts end-to-end acceleration platform and FlashLink flash intelligent algorithm to realize coordination and linkage between storage controller and flash disk, maximize the performance potential of flash media and match unpredictable business development needs in the future with predictable and high performance.

Finally, in terms of functions, Huawei OceanStor Storage Dorado series provides a wealth of software features, including re-deletion compression technology, quality of service control, heterogeneous virtualization, data migration, simplified configuration, snapshot, cloning, remote replication, gateway-free dual active, two places and three centers, and a series of rich functions, which can not only provide extreme capacity guarantee for critical business, but also provide sufficient guarantee for critical business continuity.

The future: smart + cloud native injects new vitality into the financial core business

For a long time, there are many brands and types of storage in the data centers of many financial institutions. From the perspective of future trends, as more and more financial institutions migrate their infrastructure to open platforms, storage consolidation is bound to become a general trend.

In this trend of integration, intelligence will become the most important feature of the storage system, it will completely change the traditional storage use, operation and management methods. Take Huawei OceanStor storage Dorado series of high-end all-flash memory as an example, it has begun many attempts in intelligent storage. For example, through the deep learning algorithm to learn the load law of the business, and predict the future development trend of the business, make read cache resource prefetching, lifecycle management more intelligent, and reduce the traditional dependence on administrators.

Therefore, in the relatively fixed business scene of the financial core business, through continuous learning and training, the storage system can carry out omni-directional intelligent management for the core business in the aspects of resource planning, performance monitoring, system tuning, risk prediction, fault location and so on, so that the storage and the core business can achieve intelligent resource matching, scheduling and optimization.

In addition to intelligence, the storage system must have an open ecology. On the one hand, open ecology is beneficial to the old, on the other hand, it is conducive to the application of new technologies. For example, in many financial institutions, there are not only a large number of minicomputer operating systems or databases, but also a variety of domestic operating systems and databases. For these different types of products, storage systems are often required to have a wide range of ecological support capabilities.

Moreover, the distributed transformation of financial institutions is also a general trend, the core system will gradually adopt distributed, cloud native and other new technologies, such as a variety of cloud technologies, open source technologies, container platforms will be adopted. These further require the storage system to have good support for cloud native technologies such as containers.

Overall, Huawei has invested in storage for 18 years and will continue to invest in the research and development of related new products in the future. Last year, the emergence of a new generation of OceanStor storage Dorado series of high-end all-flash memory well reflects the demand of the core key business of the financial industry for the extreme performance, reliability and stability of storage, and also leads the exploration of storage intelligence in the key business.

There is no doubt that with the further improvement of Huawei's storage in all-flash products, its position as the number one brand in the domestic financial market is expected to be further consolidated.

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