How strong statements beat hard choices – and why the financial industry is implementing all-flash storage

Within this revolution, data is one of the major pillars and an ever-growing strategic resource – as well as an ever-growing issue. This explosion of data demands revolutionary storage solutions that go beyond traditional storage technologies to deliver significantly higher capacity and unified control, but at lower operating costs and more environmentally friendly.

This is why so many banks are turning to all-flash storage. In particular, Huawei’s OceanStor Dorado was one of the early leaders in the industry, being adopted by more than 100 major financial institutions around the world, including 8 of the world’s 20 largest banks.

Technically, all flash storage offers plenty of opportunities, with lightning-fast response times – up to 21 million input / output operations per second (IOPS) – unmatched flexibility and reliability that enable banks to overcome increased transaction volume and performance delays. All of this can be achieved with reductions in total cost of ownership and in a more environmentally friendly way; A far cry from the hard drive storage used since the 1950s – with its mechanical rotating disks, motors, and magnetic read / write heads – each a potential point of failure.

In practice, the adoption of such technologies offers far-reaching opportunities: robotic infrastructure, which includes unified management and control, end-to-end automatic deployment, intelligent operation and maintenance, and rapid service provisioning, energy savings, high reliability and intelligent financial management. a more in-depth digital infrastructure and Data Intelligence as well as Agile Innovation. In turn, financial organizations can leverage these attributes to gain market share in growing areas such as financial inclusion and integrated digital financial services (Industrial Finance). These will also be explored further at the June summit.

Each bank will have its own priorities and reasons for adopting this technology. In the case of EuroPoint; As a Serbian FinTech providing financial, commodity, trading and online trading platform information, low latency is vital for its competitive advantage.

Like many, EuroPoint’s existing storage just wasn’t up to the task and couldn’t support new applications that would improve customer experience and analytics. For EuroPoint, superior levels of low data latency along with the ability to securely scale data were the key factors in the upgrade decision.

To do this, the company wanted to find a partner who could carefully plan the migration process, minimize unplanned costs and unplanned downtime, and ensure that end users were not inconvenienced. And while there were a few competitors available in the market, only the capabilities of Huawei’s solution met the stringent technological requirements. With an innovative hardware platform, FlashLink, intelligent algorithms and end-to-end express non-volatile memory (NVMe) (E2E) architecture, Huawei OceanStor Dorado offered latency as low as 0.05ms and could handle transactions. simultaneous tens of millions of users. OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage was also chosen for its ability to effectively prevent downtime, providing fault detection systems that allow services to always stay the same, with no waiting times during system upgrades. . EuroPoint has now also implemented a FusionServer Pro Rack server to deliver superior performance and excellent scalability while improving the use of data center space. For the project, both the system implementation and the data migration went smoothly, with no disruption to customer services. “The knowledge of Huawei partner’s storage and server virtualization products, as well as his experience in data migration gave us a lot of confidence and was a great relief,” said Niko Cuca, Director of Europoint . Rapid growth in digital services, Huawei’s solution increased system performance and reduced application latency. EuroPoint’s IT upgrade also directly increased end-user satisfaction, ultimately helping it attract more customers. Expanding Easily In 2020, predicted growth in data was threatening As digitization across all industries leads to explosive growth in data, in many cases this data simply needs to be stored locally so that it can be easily retrieved, but even with projections for future capacity needs factored into the upgrade process, Sympany’s data growth was so high that a new solution w as requested. Fortunately, around this time, the innovative OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage products appeared, making it easy to integrate flash storage solutions. failure of up to seven out of eight controllers, Sympany had the confidence to go solid.

Huawei partner Belsoft Infortix installed the all-flash OceanStor Dorado storage in Sympany’s data center, laid the associated cabling systems and also performed the basic setup, with the whole process taking less than two days. And once the system was put into service and the first performance test carried out, a compression ratio of 4.6 to 1 was achieved – a pleasant surprise for Sympany and almost double the guaranteed rate while still delivering outstanding performance. “At these compression rates, we gain even more storage space than expected, and these compression rates are also available when storing real-time services. The system is powerful, and we have a comfort zone, given the extra capacity. And that is why this project can be described as a real success in the real world, ”said Aleksander Baumann, IT operations manager at Sympany. Learning from the lessons of success The two case studies present two different reasons why moving to all-flash storage with Huawei can help solve problems that old infrastructures cannot, thus enabling the vision of these two companies to financial services to flourish. However, such an implementation also has many other advantages that companies have discovered. As COP26 (United Nations Conference of the Parties on Climate Change) approaches, it is worth considering the impact of large data centers on energy consumption (they have the fastest growing carbon footprint in the world. the IT sector), and the enormous potential for carbon savings from afar. more efficient storage solution. Whether it’s improved customer service, reduced costs, or flexibility, the adoption of OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage lays the foundation for innovative new digital solutions to build, enabling the organization to be more agile, adaptive and innovative while ensuring 24 × 7 business continuity. As digitization becomes an essential part of the program, it is reassuring to know that there is a solution that can be a real game-changer. All of these opportunities and solutions will be discussed at the upcoming 2021 East African BFSI Summit (https://bit.ly/3AxiD4k) ： Digital transformation is accelerating the open banking ecosystem. In attendance will be industry and business leaders ready to explore the latest industry trends and ideas for success in the new age!

The full agenda is available here (https://bit.ly/3EAbraa), along with links to many resources. Don’t miss this exciting summit!

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of Huawei Enterprise.