Contributed by Shen Yimeng
With Double 11 (Chinese online Black Friday) having just passed, is your wallet empty? Forget about my wallet—my whole bank account is empty. After having prepared to fight for goods, I managed to get it all at the first attempt. My shopping cart was emptied and I got everything I wanted. What about your Double 11?
During this year’s Double 11, the number of transactions for online retailers broke the records once again. All kinds of online payment methods make financial technology (FinTech) irreplaceable during this buying frenzy. It seems this festival has spread from the e-commerce to Internet finance.
A huge volume of financial transactions within a short period of time presents great challenges to the payment technology, data processing, and even network security of e-commerce platforms and banking systems. This means Double 11 is a huge test for China’s commercial infrastructure and for China’s financial IT technologies.
Huawei CloudFabric data center network solution has the following three Fabric models: High Availability Fabric, Multi Fabric, and High Performance Computing Fabric. These models provided huge technical support for this shopping festival, especially in the financial sector.
Huawei High Availability Fabric in the financial sector:
Automatic and flexible scaling, fast service provisioning: Based on the physical network constructed with CloudEngine switches, customers can leverage automatic configuration tools, such as ZTP and Ansible, to use preset scripts and bring devices online in batches. The Agile Controller opens capabilities of the logical network plane to services. Network policies are automatically adjusted as services change, implementing deployment in minutes. At this year’s Double 11, the payment peak for Alipay broke the record, hitting 256,000 transactions per second. About half of those payments required the use of bound bank cards to complete payment. Before Double 11, the online payment assurance department of banks performed stringent pressure tests on their networks—Huawei CloudFabric easily passed these tests.
High reliability, ensuring service continuity: dual-control plane M-LAG technology is exclusive in the industry, offering inter-chassis link aggregation and ensuring services are uninterrupted if one device has a fault. The hardware-based BFD technology reduces the link fault detection time from 50 ms to 3.3 ms, ensures that services are migrated if there is an application cluster fault, network policies can be quickly released, and services are not disrupted.
High security, providing a lifeline for banks: In Internet financial systems, there are many complex service system access relationships. Faults in single service systems, such as those caused by a virus, must not spread to other service systems. Huawei CloudFabric prevents the global spread of faults by implementing fine-grained isolation based on discontiguous IP addresses, virtual machine (VM) names, and operating system names. This solves the difficulties on security isolation that have plagued financial service systems, such as complex traffic distribution, complex configurations, and isolation of all network segments, and also solves the problems of independent O&M of networks and security.
Intelligent O&M, locating faults in minutes: On the day of Double 11, transient burst traffic may cause packet loss. Huawei FabricInsight intelligent network analysis platform associates network traffic with applications to display traffic relationships between different application systems graphically when there is a large volume of concurrent services. By leveraging its capability to retrieve tens of billions of data records per second, the service system can locate faults precisely.
Huawei Multi Fabric in the financial sector:
Unlike traditional financial institutions that have three data centers in two cities, Internet finance usually uses the browser/server mode to construct a distributed cloud architecture with multiple Fabrics in a single data center and multiple data centers in multiple cities. To ensure the consistency of platform transactions, Huawei’s CloudFabric data center network employs an open architecture to easily interconnect with various cloud platforms and management platforms of banks. It implements central policy deployment and service orchestration across multiple data centers.
Huawei High Performance Computing Fabric in the financial sector:
China’s economy is entering a new state of being consumer-driven. A new financial system is required to support this new economic transformation. In addition, this new financial system should be based on cloud computing and big data technologies and oriented towards inclusive finance of consumers. Huawei HPC Fabric reduces the service latency of Ethernet networks to a matter of nanoseconds by using the proprietary virtual queuing technology and dynamic congestion control algorithm. This effectively supports artificial intelligence (AI) applications such as those of financial data and AI voice identification.
Leveraging a scenario-based Fabric model, Huawei CloudFabric provides high scalability, high levels of automation, high reliability, high security, high controllability, low latency, and service continuity. It helps financial institutions such as the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), Agricultural Bank of China, China Construction Bank, and China UnionPay to cope with the huge volumes of transactions during Double 11.
The post What Network Support Does the Finance Sector Need for Soaring Transactions appeared first on Huawei Enterprise Blog.
Source: Huawei Enterprise Blog
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