Data is the new gold in the rapidly transforming financial services industry

Australia’s top four banks have removed 2,150 ATM terminals and closed 175 bank branches since June 2020.  In India, the local real-time payment system, United Payments Interface (UPI), saw an increase in spending by roughly 70 percent over the first seven months of 2020, while in the UK, the average daily transaction value processed by the Faster Payments service rose by more than 10 percent from the fourth quarter of 2019 to the end of March 2020.

According to the 2020 McKinsey Global Payments Report, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a series of existing trends in consumer and business behaviors, significantly boosting the ongoing shift towards e-banking, digital and instant payments and bringing about half a decade’s worth of changes in just a few months.  

Yet it is worth noting that prior to the pandemic, the transformation of the financial services industry had already begun. The Bank 4.0 era where ‘banking will be possible from everywhere but never at a bank’ has steadily been gaining ground. Mobile phone payments have become one of the defining features of the new era, marking a major shift away from traditional payment methods. And although each transaction is small, the high transaction frequency and need for 24/7 availability places a more than tenfold increase in pressure on bank IT systems. 

Banks’ transactions and clearing services demand high performance for data processing to enable the completion of an entire digital transaction within 1 second. The IT system also needs to be robust enough to avoid errors and support hundreds of thousands of transactions per second (TPS) during peak hours. Data is the new gold in the Bank 4.0 era with the cost of one hour of downtime for mission-critical services in the financial industry pegged at USD 6.48 million! 

Huawei’s awarding-winning OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage meets all the requirements of evolving financial institutions, handling real-time transactions, e-banking, clearing, and transfers. Since its launch in 2010, OceanStor Dorado has already served more than 10,000 enterprises worldwide and is recognized as a Leader in Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage Arrays. Now, Huawei’s latest generation of the OceanStor Dorado series is power-packed with even more innovative technologies, capable of providing a latency of 0.05 ms and 21 million input/output operations per second (IOPS), double that of its closest competitor. (Source: SPC-1 Benchmark ratings).

Huawei’s enhanced NVMe over fabrics (NVMe-oF) solution for 30% higher service efficiency

Non-volatile memory express (NVMe) is a new generation of storage technology with obvious advantages over Fibre Channel (FC) storage in performance, networking and costs. Gartner has acknowledged the benefits of this technology, stating that, “NVMe and NVMe-oF offerings can have a dramatic impact on business use cases where low-latency requirements are critical to the bottom line. Though requiring potential infrastructure enhancements, the clear benefits these technologies can provide will immediately attract high-performance computing and OLTP use cases where clients can quickly show a positive ROI.”

The industry-standard NVMe-oF utilizes an IP design, so the system can take up to 15 seconds to detect link failures – an intolerable delay for a financial transaction.  Huawei has leveraged its expertise and the advantages of its extensive product lines to launch the enhanced NVMe over fabrics (NoF+) solution. Huawei’s OceanStor with NoF+ solution runs over an intelligent lossless network while the all-flash storage enables an automatic system for fault detection in real time. As a result, faults can be proactively rectified and the link failures are detected in less than a second. This greatly improves system reliability and provides a seamless core service.

SmartMatrix architecture for increased reliability

Financial Services CTOs are increasingly moving towards intelligent systems, as these can consolidate multiple types of services and ensure stable operations. Huawei’s OceanStor Dorado series utilizes SmartMatrix, a full-mesh, balanced architecture that provides the core foundation of a high-end storage system. It employs a continuous cache mirroring technology so that if a controller fails, the mirror controller can reconstruct a cache mirror. In this manner the system can tolerate failure of seven out of eight controllers, facilitating data consolidation at 99.9999% service availability for always-on services.

AI-powered data management in three layers for five times more efficiency

The OceanStor Dorado Series differs from traditional storage in its use of the intelligent data management system (DMS) solution. The solution logically integrates and intelligently manages the data of devices, enterprise data centers, and clouds for seamless services.  It provides enterprise users with storage resources and intelligent operations and maintenance on and off the cloud to enable data centers to evolve smoothly to the cloud. 

Huawei’s OceanStor proves its mettle, powering the world’s fastest stock trading exchange- The Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE)

With more than 5,500 listed companies, the BSE faces massive transaction requests every day and these demands are only growing.  When it became necessary to replace the stock exchange’s outdated storage systems, Huawei  set up a proof of concept lab to show how its solutions were fully capable of meeting BSE’s highly demanding requirements. “Our trading platform gives us a response time of six microseconds. To maintain this criticality and also the uptime, it is very important that our network, systems and infrastructure is of world class standard,” says Kersi Tavadia, CIO, BSE.

BSE uses Huawei’s OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage, allowing the trading exchange to achieve a low latency of less than one millisecond for all flash configurations. It is one of the primary reasons BSE has earned the status of being the world’s fastest stock trading exchange. 

For more information about Huawei’s OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage, please participate in Huawei Tech Summit on March 18,2021.

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