Nanhua Futures Picks All-Flash Storage for Billions of Transactions

Nanhua Futures is a commodity and financial futures brokerage company. Founded in 1996 and based in Hangzhou, China, it is a full member of the Shanghai Futures Exchange (SHFE), Zhengzhou Commodity Exchange (CZCE), and Dalian Commodity Exchange (DCE). It was also one of the first companies to gain general clearing member status on the China Financial Futures Exchange (CFFEX). It has 450 million RMB of registered capital plus a net capital of over 702 million RMB.

Nanhua Futures offers brokerage services to institutional, corporate, and individual clients.

As one of China’s top futures brokerage companies, Nanhua Futures provides its customers with stable, high-performance financial services. However, its existing IT systems were unable to deliver the performance and reliability required to manage its rapid growth.

Nanhua Futures chose Huawei’s OceanStor Dorado-based active-active and geo-redundant Disaster Recovery (DR) solution, that removes system performance bottlenecks, improves transaction performance by over 3 times, and provides 99.9999 percent availability.

Ground-Breaking Performance

As an industry-leading financial services provider, Nanhua Futures’ top priority has always been its timely response to the requirements of its users. However, recent surges in user numbers and business volume overwhelmed its existing systems. Nanhua Futures’ IT department concluded that its traditional storage system was the main performance bottleneck, and new technologies were required to address this issue.

Nanhua Futures often encountered more than 10 milliseconds of latency during peak service usage, severely affecting user experience. It planned to use all-flash storage or hyper-convergence technology to resolve this issue, and looked to Huawei’s OceanStor Dorado, that has high Input/output Operations per Second (IOPS) and low latency. OceanStor Dorado also delivers performance results twice that of other hyper-convergence and all-flash technologies. In actual deployment, the OceanStor Dorado eliminates system bottlenecks and improves system processing capability from 60,000 to 150,000 transactions per second, improving customer experience considerably.

With its FlashLink® technology, specifically designed for all-flash storage, Huawei’s OceanStor Dorado offers a stable 0.5 milliseconds of latency and can scale up to 16 controllers, satisfying Nanhua Futures’ future business development requirements.

Economic and Efficient

With new services continuously becoming active online and a growing user base, Nanhua Futures has experienced an explosive increase in its total data volumes, almost tripling over the past three years. The OceanStor Dorado leverages inline de-duplication and compression to guarantee at least a 5:1 data reduction ratio without affecting performance. This helps Nanhua Futures easily manage its growing data volumes while lowering its TCO by more than 50 percent.

Always-On Critical Business

Nanhua Futures needed to provide its users with highly efficient transactions, robust data security, and ongoing business continuity. The OceanStor Dorado employs a variety of technologies to ensure robust security.

Huawei’s HyperMetro-based (active-active) solution uses dual arbitration to implement real-time switchover and ensure that services are always-on, even in the event of a disaster. Its gateway-free design simplifies networking and maintenance, lowers latency, and reduces storage expansion costs, all while removing performance bottlenecks.