Simply Effective: Huawei Data Storage Takes Securities Data Backup to the Next Level

Shenwan Hongyuan Securities Co., Ltd. (Shenwan Hongyuan), a top securities institution, is actively developing an innovative proprietary backup platform to meet its increasing backup needs and ensure end-to-end data resilience.

Shenwan Hongyuan chose to partner with Huawei Data Storage due to the latter's extensive experience in financial data infrastructure.

At the end of 2023, the two parties completed the initial construction of a next-generation backup platform. Huawei's OceanProtect X8000 Appliance replaced the previous backup software and media, and Huawei OceanStor Pacific scale-out storage replaced tape libraries for archiving. This upgrade modernized the legacy backup platform (TSM and Commvault).

Shenwan Hongyuan's efforts reflect the securities industry's proactive response to potential data risks. The company has ensured efficient uninterrupted operations for its financial data centers. Its collaboration with Huawei Data Storage is a prime example of how storage products and solutions can be modernized from the ground up to drive innovation in financial data DR and backup. This can serve as a valuable reference for the industry.

Simplifying Complexity: The Key to Effective Financial Data DR and Backup

Financial institutions have the most stringent requirements for business continuity and zero data loss in the financial sector. In the securities industry, even minor data loss could cause immeasurable damage.

Therefore, the securities industry has very low tolerance for DR and backup failure, but DR and backup for securities is highly complex. Common approaches include geo-redundant 3DC DR, remote DR and backup, and intra-city DR and backup. There are also cloud-based DR and backup, active-active configurations within the same equipment room, dual-cabinet setups, cluster high availability (HA), and traditional backup. DR and backup must ensure resilience while meeting performance and efficiency needs. Now, DR and backup reflect a convergence of digital capabilities, serving as the ultimate test of overall coordination and technological depth.

In accordance with regulations, Shenwan Hongyuan must provide backup protection for its business systems. However, a large-scale backup system can easily lead to O&M and management issues. Shenwan Hongyuan must also consider the costs of data DR and backup after meeting different regulatory and business requirements. After all, the costs of a huge data DR and backup system are not negligible, even for large companies.

Given all these complexities, how can data DR and backup meet the needs of all parties? In their collaboration, Shenwan Hongyuan and Huawei Data Storage developed a scenario-specific backup system solution featuring simple and effective logic.

In the digital-intelligent era, the combination of diverse technologies and operational elements creates complexity, and in turn uncertainty. The more complex the data DR and backup, the simpler the backup system solution needs to be.

In the past, Shenwan Hongyuan faced data backup issues including a low data reduction ratio, poor performance, and high costs. With the help of Huawei Data Storage's OceanProtect Appliance and OceanStor Pacific object storage, the company has implemented integrated backup and tiered data flow, demonstrating the power of simplicity in the face of complex data DR and backup. As a result, Shenwan Hongyuan has significantly improved the reliability and performance of its data DR and backup while reducing costs.

The Power of Simplicity in Securities Data DR and Backup

Complex data DR and backup tasks in the securities industry include mass data backup, continuous data protection (CDP), real-time replication, cross-platform migration and read/write splitting of database data, cross-platform migration of huge numbers of business systems or VMs, and application HA of active/standby business systems. O&M support and DR drills are also complex.

Against this backdrop, Huawei Data Storage provided technical support for Shenwan Hongyuan's data DR and backup. This collaboration enables simplicity and effectiveness in two ways to prevent uncertainties caused by complexity.

The backup method is simple and effective.

Huawei Data Storage helps Shenwan Hongyuan centrally back up its cloud and on-premises business systems. One system handles many applications, including databases, virtualization, file systems, and cloud platforms. This eliminates difficult management and operations in complex and cumbersome backup systems.

Huawei Data Storage makes this upgrade possible with its extensive ecosystem collaboration with different application vendors. The OceanProtect X8000 Appliance converges different products to replace the backup software, servers, and media. This simplifies and improves Shenwan Hongyuan's data backup, unifying management and O&M, reducing fault points, and improving reliability. The new solution is a clear demonstration of a new paradigm of simplicity and effectiveness.

The backup system is simple and effective.

Built with the support of Huawei Data Storage, Shenwan Hongyuan's backup system has a "3-2-1" structure, that is, three backup data copies (production system copy, level-1 backup copy, and level-2 backup copy), two backup storage systems (level-1 and level-2 backup storage), and one remote center.

This backup system meets China's macro supervision requirements. Furthermore, Huawei Data Storage provides highly organized storage capabilities that are clear and easy to understand.

For the production system copy, the system emphasizes reliability to prevent single points of failure. For the level-1 backup copy, a high-performance dedicated backup foundation is used to enhance backup, recovery, and deduplication performance. For the level-2 backup copy, which is not frequently used and often incurs high costs, Huawei Data Storage uses tiering policies to store it in the OceanStor Pacific object storage device. This ensures offline recovery of backup copies and optimizes overall archiving costs.

With remote DR, this system meets different backup requirements and provides a complete and operable emergency solution that is reasonable, simple, and clear. It ensures quick and accurate response to risks and full use of resources, preventing issues such as redundant construction of DR and backup systems, low utilization of cold standby VMs, and high costs incurred by idle standby VMs.

Simplicity is effectiveness. The technology and product innovation of Huawei Data Storage are guided by the principles of performance and cost-effectiveness.

The performance of storage products is always the most essential measure of effectiveness, regardless of how simple the products are. Huawei Data Storage's OceanProtect X8000 Appliance has five times higher single-node physical bandwidth (20 TB/hour for backup and 12 TB/hour for recovery) than traditional backup products. This significantly improves efficiency and slashes the backup time. The appliance also provides comprehensive functions, such as live migration and recovery, copy mounting and availability, and DR drills.

In addition, DR and backup costs are always a key consideration for financial enterprises. Huawei Data Storage's OceanProtect X8000 Appliance is an all-in-one product with a 40% higher data reduction ratio than peer products. This means more data can be stored in the same storage space. OceanProtect X8000 takes up 60% less cabinet space than five backup servers with the same backup capability. Furthermore, it supports source deduplication and deduplicated replication, which save inter-city bandwidth costs. As a result, Huawei Data Storage's solution helps Shenwan Hongyuan reduce its total cost of ownership (TCO) for data DR and backup by 30%

With its superior reliability, performance, and costs, the solution is helping transform data DR and backup in the securities industry.

Beyond Compromise: Advancing DR and Backup Through Ecosystem Collaboration and Innovation

The collaboration between Huawei Data Storage and Shenwan Hongyuan will set a benchmark for data backup platforms in the securities industry. It serves as a reference for not only how to achieve data resilience, but how self-developed innovations can replace legacy DR and backup solutions without compromising performance, as is often the case in other fields. Enterprises can build on this foundation to achieve further breakthroughs. Shenwan Hongyuan's success story shows that securities companies can confidently choose solutions tailored to their needs.

This industry benchmark is the joint result of Huawei's long-term commitment to the storage industry and wealth of expertise in the financial sector, the strong technologies and extensive business practices of partners, and Shenwan Hongyuan's strong data foundation and execution. It provides a practical reference for the securities industry and the broader financial sector on how to develop data DR and backup systems in an era when data resilience is becoming increasingly critical. It also demonstrates the technological heights that can be reached through self-developed innovation and ecosystem collaboration.