Guojin Securities: Upgrade Distributed Storage and Promote Storage Innovation Upgrade

SandStone: How does Guojin Securities innovate and support business growth in IT infrastructure construction?

Guojin Securities Chen Ming: Guojin Securities Co., Ltd., formerly known as Chengdu Securities, was established in December 1990. It is a listed securities company with excellent asset quality, a competent professional team, and outstanding innovation capabilities. It provides customers with comprehensive financial services such as securities trading, investment banking, asset management, and wealth management.

With the comprehensive and in-depth digital transformation of the securities industry, challenges such as diversified customer demands, intense industry competition, and increasingly strict regulation have emerged. At the same time, problems such as insufficient integration of business and technology, system fragmentation, and data silos have become increasingly prominent. Guojin Securities actively promotes the cloud based upgrade of its IT infrastructure, building platform capabilities and empowering business development through technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and blockchain. For example, it builds customer profiles and personalized recommendation capabilities for wealth businesses, creates an integrated digital service platform for institutional businesses, and uses intelligent technology to enhance investment bank customer service capabilities and operational efficiency.

In response to the call and requirements for innovation in information technology applications, Guojin Securities actively responds to them, improves the independent and controllable level of core systems, key technologies, and infrastructure, and actively explores construction models and technological routes in a domestic environment.

SandStone Data: What challenges did Guojin Securities' previous IT storage architecture face?

Chen Ming from Guojin Securities: Previously, most of Guojin Securities' information systems were designed using the traditional "chimney style" architecture of "mini computers+centralized high-end storage". In practical use, the challenges faced mainly include several aspects.

Data is fragmented and resources are difficult to share. Almost every important information system is equipped with an independent hardware device, which stores data completely separated and makes it difficult to achieve resource sharing among them.

The capacity and performance do not match the business requirements. Due to the scattered storage resources, the capacity, performance, and business requirements are extremely mismatched, resulting in some storage space waste and some business performance cannot be met, making it impossible to achieve on-demand expansion.

● High storage costs. Traditional small-scale computers and high-end storage arrays have high procurement costs, face proprietary hardware bundling, and high construction and maintenance costs.

The operation and maintenance management is complex. The handling of a fault often requires the participation of personnel from multiple different professional fields, resulting in low efficiency and high manpower investment.

SandStone Data: What are the expectations and requirements of Guojin Securities during the storage upgrade process? How to implement it specifically?

Chen Ming from Guojin Securities: With the rapid development of Guojin Securities' business, diverse business types, and rapid growth in data volume, higher requirements have been put forward for storage performance, scalability, compatibility, security, and other aspects. We mainly considered the following aspects when upgrading the storage system.

Unified storage and management of data. We need to build a unified storage and management platform to achieve unified management of discrete data. At the same time, a user-friendly management interface needs to be provided.

● High performance and high scalability. For distributed storage, we plan to use it on a small scale in the initial stage, and then quickly achieve large-scale, multi center dynamic expansion based on data volume. At the same time, the capacity and performance need to have the ability to grow linearly with the hardware scale of the storage cluster, and there is no need for advance planning.

● High compatibility. Due to the involvement of various business systems such as imaging, backup, and OA, the storage end needs to provide multiple storage services, supporting blocks, objects, files, as well as protocols such as NFS, CIFS, S3, and SCSI, to be compatible with more new application platforms in the future and achieve rapid business deployment.

● Meet the requirements of Xinchuang, safe and reliable. To promote innovation in information technology applications, it is necessary for storage systems to meet the requirements of information and innovation. At the same time, it is required that the storage system architecture be stable, have large-scale cluster verification, and ensure business continuity. When a single point of failure occurs in the cluster, it cannot cause data loss and is friendly to operation and maintenance personnel.

In the process of selecting the solution, considering the advantages of distributed storage in scenarios involving massive amounts of data, especially unstructured data, we have decided to adopt a distributed storage solution. After examining the product solutions of multiple suppliers and conducting rigorous testing and evaluation, SandStone Data's technical accumulation and rich practical experience in the field of distributed storage have finally been recognized by us.

Guojin Securities adopts the SandStone Unified Storage Platform (SandStone USP) and builds a Xinchuang storage cluster based on domestically produced software and hardware such as Kunpeng Platform and Qilin Software. A storage platform that supports object, block, and file storage protocols, interfaces with office systems through independent network cards such as SCSI, and uses protocols such as NFS, CIFS, S3 to interface with other business systems, achieving unified storage and management of data.

The storage cluster supports flexible and rapid expansion, meeting the data growth and access needs of other business systems brought about by Guojin Securities' subsequent business expansion. At present, SandStone USP has supported the Guojin Securities OA system, file sharing EKP、 Double recording APM、 Dozens of business systems, including virtual machines, testing environments, and backup systems, have been running stably since their launch. The professional and fast service response of the SandStone team has made us very confident.

SandStone Data: What experience and thoughts do you have for the industry to refer to in this storage upgrade practice?

Chen Ming from Guojin Securities: Faced with the diversity of business and uncertainty of demand, traditional centralized storage often faces problems such as limited scalability, poor compatibility, performance bottlenecks under massive small files, low reliability, complex operation and maintenance management, and high costs. Distributed storage, with its overall performance and capacity advantages, strong system scalability, high operation and maintenance management efficiency, high availability and reliability, and ease of mining data value, has become the choice of more enterprises in large-scale clusters. Except for some scenarios that require extreme performance, distributed storage can be considered for storing various types of data, especially unstructured data.

In addition, the current distributed storage products in China are relatively mature and have been successfully implemented in many leading enterprises. With the high attention paid by the country to information security and the promotion of innovation policies in the securities industry, the adoption of domestically produced innovation storage in the securities industry will be the trend.