Shenzhen Power Supply Bureau of China Southern Power Grid: Smart Grid, Ambitious for High Intelligence

Shenzhen Power Supply Bureau Co., Ltd. is a wholly-owned subsidiary directly controlled by China Southern Power Grid Company Limited, being a super-large urban power grid highest in power supply load density, leading in reliability and as large as a provincial power grid in China. Since 2010, Shenzhen Power Supply Bureau has been actively applying cutting-edge technology and management means to realize intelligent power consumption and more reliable power supply. Moreover, it has been ranked in the national top ten for 9 consecutive years in the industry in terms of power supply reliability.

The world-class smart grid is mainly supported by scientific and technological innovation. After years’ exploration and research, Shenzhen Power Supply Bureau has had deep accumulation in information construction and the requirements have been further improved a lot. It has a large number of business information systems and private cloud platforms, but the data is scattered in the local storage of multiple PC servers and traditional storage arrays, so there is great difficulty in management; these business applications have accumulated a large number of data and even more in the future, so the maximum capacity of a single storage array cannot easily meet the demands of data (tens of PB) for storage in the future. 

In daily work, Shenzhen Power Supply Bureau has more than 5000 employees using the exchange mailbox in the internal and external networks of China Southern Power Grid and more than 5 million emails will be generated in the mailbox every month. Furthermore, the key business and unstructured data of the company are stored on FC SAN, the e-log system and enterprise network disk are also faced with massive data transmission, which is easy to occupy the full array bandwidth, so there will be a great impact on the mailbox system, OA collaborative office system and other key businesses sensitive to storage performance.

Shenzhen Power Supply Bureau has built a unified storage resource pool based on SandStone USP (SandStone Unified Storage Platform) and nearly 100 x86 servers to provide block, file and various other storage interfaces, which can satisfy the needs of private cloud (VMware/OpenStack), virtualization storage platforms, traditional applications (including OA, mail systems, network disk systems, log systems and database backup), with the total storage capacity up to PB.

In addition, Shenzhen Power Supply Bureau has also stored the unstructured data of the integrated system on the content storage platform built based on SandStone Mass Object Storage (SandStone MOS) and ensured high availability in case of failures in a single data center by virtue of the MOS dual-center disaster recovery.

The capacity can be expanded linearly on demand

SandStone distributed storage platform can support a maximum of 1024 server clusters, realize the storage in hundreds of PB, accommodate the storage of the unstructured data generated by the mail system, enterprise network disk and other business systems used by nearly 5000 people in Shenzhen Power Supply Bureau, and guarantee the performance and experience of the core applications. Moreover, it can support online server expansion, automatic data balance and linear expansion of capacity and performance; provide block, file, object and FTP/SFTP interfaces, with one set of storage solution deployed to meet the needs of network disk, mail system, integrated system and future data storage, and realize on-demand construction.

Procurement, operation and maintenance costs have been greatly reduced

SandStone distributed storage (SDS) based on x86 servers and 10GB switches has no complex storage array, storage fiber channel VM and supporting devices, etc., so TCO can be reduced by more than 40% compared with proprietary storage hardware. In terms of operation and maintenance, based onx86 servers, the technology is simple, which can facilitate later operation and maintenance by Shenzhen Power Supply Bureau and thus save a lot of costs in operation and maintenance. 

Stable operation of the system has ensured data security

The multi-copy redundancy mechanism adopted can realize the storage of data and its copies between hard disks, storage nodes, racks and computer host rooms based on the strategy, able to ensure the copy consistency based on the technology for strongly consistent replication. Even if a data server or even the whole rack has halted in Shenzhen Power Supply Bureau, there will be no impact on data availability and reliability.

At the same time, the SDS disaster recovery mechanism and capacity for fault switching between data centers can be used to achieve “zero leakage of sensitive data and zero system accident”.