Veeam and Zizhou Investment jointly establish industry benchmark for internet financial data management

Business Challenge

In order to ensure the security of financial transaction data, the China Banking Regulatory Commission has proposed more detailed and stringent requirements for disaster recovery of financial institutions. These requirements, described as shackles, spur on securities or fund management companies to attach great importance to data disaster recovery management.

Now, the activity of the financial market is a booster for funding companies’ businesses. With the continuous expansion of business scale, it is inevitable that data undergoes a geometric growth. Moreover, with the gradual upgrade from the traditional data center to the next-generation cloud data center, it is extremely necessary to find efficient, secure and reliable channels for VM backup, duplication and restoration.

As for information-based system, the Zizhou Investment takes its place in the front ranks among financial institutions engaged in the same type of business. With two data centers and over 200 VMs, it provides services based on financial data terminals. In terms of enterprise positioning, it is a typical internet financial information service provider.

For internet financial service providers, each process of the businesses is achieved by relying on platforms and clients, regardless of information services or the third-party trading services. However, it is often seen that network failures, service disruption or performance degradation directly weakens satisfaction of user experience or even results in a high customer churn.

“This year, our business will continue to expand, our data centers will receive capacity expansion for both hardware and software. Now, we have a total of about 20 TB storage, which is estimated to be doubled by the end of this year,” Wang Xianfang, IT director of Zizhou Investment, said that the high requirements for business security and business continuity are the basic reason for which the Veeam solution is applied.

Meanwhile, there are a number of key virtual applications — such as data analysis services and asset management system applications — which realize the goal of high performance, high reliability, automatic operation and maintenance in backup and recovery, and shall achieve actual effect in cost control.

Unpredictable backup times, decreased Availability of business systems and uncontrollable labor costs are the pain points that Zizhou Investment tries to avoid.

Veeam Solution

In Wang Xianfang’s opinion, it is rare among similar products in the current market that one solution can enable backup, duplication and monitoring simultaneously, but that is exactly what Veeam does. Via the deployment of the Veeam solution, Zizhou Investment truly realized the importance of 24.7.365 operation and harvests the great benefits in recovery time and point objectives ( RTPO), labor costs, storage space, etc. The monitoring and reporting capabilities provided by Veeam enable more proactive and convenient operation and maintenance.

“The Veeam solution, which is powerful and efficient, minimizes risks of system downtime and data loss, and improves working efficiency while saving labor costs and releasing great space resources. It is a strong guarantee for the business continuity in our whole system,” Wang Xianfang said.

Veeam provides efficient, quick solutions for VM recovery by virtue of the vPower technology which can enable it to directly run VMs from the compressed and deduplicated backup files on the periodic backup and storage device. One VM can be restarted on any host within minutes in case of a failure, just like adding a temporary standby to the VM to enable recovery without service interruption or impacts upon users.

The Veeam solution saves great storage space for Zizhou Investment. “The average data volume is 500-600G for our VMs, whose backup also took up 500-600G storage space in the past, but it occupies less than 300G storage space after the application of the Veeam solution. This is amazing,” Wang Xianfang indicated.

Moreover, Veeam has also brought great benefits in terms of human resources. Wang Xianfang mentioned that three to five people were required to be engaged in the operation and maintenance of data centers in the past but now only one person is needed. Wang Xianfang described Veeam products as trouble-free, and time and labor saving. In addition, the Veeam ONE powerful centralized monitoring capability greatly lessens workloads. This is an important reason for which Zizhou Investment chooses Veeam. This is an important reason why Zizhou Investment chose Veeam.

As a powerful monitoring, reporting and capacity planning tool, Veeam ONE applies to Veeam backup infrastructure as well as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual environments, and it is also increasingly recognized by the industry users. It enables the IT environment to be fully transparent to monitor and report information on innumerable hosts, vCenter Server, SCVMM servers or Hyper-V failover clustering.

Currently, almost all businesses of Zizhou Investment have adopted a virtual deployment, including the virtual desktop of the entire company. Veeam undertakes the backup of all data in the whole business system and application system as well as data on all virtual desktops in the virtual environment.

In addition, Veeam will generally be the first to support the latest version of VMware products to ensure that customers are subject to no influence resulted from the application of old tools in the new virtual environments.

Achievements

• Deliver quick and reliable backup to ensure 24x7 data Availability and business continuity
  Deliver fast, flexible and reliable recovery of virtual applications and data, integrate VM backup and duplication into a single software solution whose support for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual environments is well-respected, and meets the RTPO for ALL virtual applications and data within 15 minutes.
• Enable real-time monitoring to prevent dangers
  Deliver a one-button fully transparent system performance, in-depth access to details if necessary, and make it possible to have a clear understanding of operation of backup and virtual infrastructure through the instrumental panel.
• Improve efficiency while saving resources
  Save space resources by 50%, shorten RTPO by 50% and reduce IT personnel from five to one.