As the main force in the securities industry in Hebei Province, Caida Securities has always insisted on using technology to empower its business and promote informatization and digitalization in an all-round way. In this video, we invited Xie Jingmin, Chief Information Officer of Caida Securities , to share how to gradually realize the cloud transformation of IT infrastructure based on SmartX hyper-convergence to meet the company's "two-state" business needs.
Click to watch " Caida Securities: Hyper-convergence helps IT infrastructure to smoothly transform to cloud and stably carry "two-state" business ".
Original interview
Hello everyone, I am Xie Jingmin, Chief Information Officer of Caida Securities. With the company's digital transformation, our company is also emphasizing the mutual integration of business and technology, and the mutual promotion of business and technology . In the future, we can see that with the deepening of digital transformation, securities companies may evolve into a technology-driven company, or a new type of technology company.
Last year, our company also established a corresponding financial technology department to ensure that financial technology capabilities are empowered in the business. In fact, the company emphasizes the development of various business lines, which brings new requirements to information technology.
Traditional information technology requires a steady state to ensure the security and stability of the entire information technology center and to provide corresponding support functions for each business line. With the diversification and Internet-based business, businesses are increasingly required to be able to adapt to sensitive work .
The transformation of information technology from the original project-based construction method to the capacity-based construction method has brought about changes in the entire information technology architecture, which is also a natural evolution process in the entire industry.
The earliest information technology evolved from centralization to virtualization, then to hyper-converged architecture, and later to cloud. This is an evolutionary process of information technology that matches business development.
In order to better support business development, our company has adopted a large number of hyper-converged architectures to achieve flexible, stable, and secure support . Nowadays, the information technology architecture mainly used by securities companies, including our company, is a hyper-converged architecture.
The hyper-converged architecture has its own characteristics. In addition to the advantages brought by the distributed architecture, more importantly, it is a lightweight cloud base. This lightweight is very suitable for the development of the brokerage itself .
Brokerages are not particularly large in terms of their own system architecture. Generally speaking, a brokerage has several thousand servers or less, one or two thousand servers. To meet this kind of computing demand, we choose the cloud, which requires a relatively large base to support it, which is not particularly economical for our brokerage.
We want to choose a base that is relatively small and lightweight, but has outstanding disaster recovery and performance. This distributed and simple cloud base can meet our requirements. And the evolution of this cloud base to a private cloud is very smooth and natural, so we chose a hyper-converged architecture .
But among so many hyper-converged manufacturers, why do we choose SmartX? The main consideration is that SmartX is very excellent and representative in the entire industry, and its performance is also very outstanding.
In the early stage, we found a large number of manufacturers based on hyper-converged architecture and conducted corresponding POC tests. In particular, SmartX showed excellent performance in this test. Our traditional centralized storage uses a flash memory architecture, but the IO under the SmartX hyper-converged architecture is far superior to our original flash memory architecture .
In addition to the technological leadership of SmartX, what impressed me even more was the professionalism and dedicated and sincere attitude of its personnel . We propose corresponding solutions not only from our own technology, but from the overall technical perspective of the securities company. This gave us very good advice and opinions on a professional level.
In addition, the information construction of securities companies is quite unique. Generally speaking, in order to ensure the stability of the system, most system construction is done on holidays and at night. Our employees at SmartX are not afraid of hard work and can cooperate well with our company under such difficult conditions. This professionalism also touches us very much.
Our company has been cooperating with SmartX company since 2019. Through gradual construction, we have moved almost all systems except the core database to the hyper-converged architecture. Especially in the disaster recovery computer room, a small private cloud based on hyper-converged architecture has been completely built, including the core trading system and online trading system .
As a brokerage, there are dozens of systems involving transactions, large and small, and we have completely integrated these systems into the hyper-converged architecture.
Our current IT construction model has transformed from the traditional project construction model into a capacity construction model. We will consider the annual capacity requirements of the entire system at the beginning of the year. After completing the construction of the entire system, if business needs arise, we can respond quickly and greatly shorten the original project construction cycle.
The original project construction was measured by months. Through this technology, we shortened the time to measured by days and hours.
The business in the securities industry changes very rapidly, which requires rapid information system construction. Especially when the registration system is implemented this year, including the establishment of some new apps ourselves, a large amount of investment in equipment is required.
We can provide hundreds of machines in one day, providing a basic architecture for these business systems, saving the company's construction time and cycle.
Our company has established corresponding branches and R&D centers in Shanghai and Shenzhen. The construction of local cloud and the combination of existing clouds are also a new demand for us, including the increase in business needs. We also have some new points that we can discuss and cooperate with SmartX.