Enabled by Veeam, UBS SDIC achieves a wonderful transformation of data management

Business Challenges

China’s traditional financial industry is undergoing a big data-driven revolution in which data that is the core assets of the financial industry will play an unexpected role. In 2016, relevant regulators put forward more stringent requirements for data exchange, backup and registration platforms in the fund industry, so traditional data management methods are not enough to tackle the challenges from the supervisors and users.

UBS SDIC has a good reputation for its investment and management capability, but it must make efforts to improve the ability to guarantee the security of data about information system. “The equipment is outmoded to make the business system face great pressure. The hot standby solution cannot solve the problem once and for all. In some specific cases, such as the hot standby solution achieving the same outcomes, such hot standby will have the same result with cold standby solution. The VM and application fail to take over the work of the defective one in the case of a failure, so it is necessary to manually enable hardware and services.” Qiu Dingyong, the operation and maintenance engineer of UBS SDIC’s IT department, takes the responsibility for internal IT operations and maintenance and management. It is necessary to make the corresponding adjustments to ensure system security and business continuity because traditional data management strategies lack automatic operation and maintenance capabilities.

UBS SDIC is preparing for building active-active data centers, according to Qiu Dingyong. Different from the model of active-standby data centers, the active-active data centers enable both production and DR site to run online. Each site can run as usual while the other site is offline, so that it is transparent to users and does not affect businesses. The active-active data centers’ service capacity is doubled via resource integration, thus avoiding the waste of standby data center as it is idle all year round. In addition to the active-active data centers, UBS SDIC will also plan to build a disaster recovery data center. As said by Qiu Dingyong, UBS SDIC is now working to handle network related issues and it will have more heavy data backup work.

In the financial industry, the need for data centers is often reflected in low latency, real- time data, high-frequency OLTP, data security, business continuity/disaster recovery, etc. The timely data backup and recovery is extremely important for financial institutions because great loss will be caused by one-minute latency during trading hours.

Not wanting to struggle with traditional backup solutions, UBS SDIC wants to modernize their backup solution to enable the availability of their Modern Data Center.

Veeam Solution

In the UBS SDIC data center, there are about 80 physical servers, so it needs time to migrate data and system coefficients on these servers onto virtual machines. However, with a sharp increase in business volume, UBS SDIC has stricter requirements for not only efficiency but also reliability of data backup and recovery provided by service providers.

After a comprehensive verify the UBS SDIC finally decided to choose the solution Veeam Backup & Replication, which can achieve instant outcomes during project implementation in the aspect of instant VM recovery, application recovery, file-level recovery, auto recovery verification, agentless, single backup, full backup, replication, Hyper-V support, cost, and so on.

“There are many companies that are migrating their core business to virtual environments. Veeam solution is the best one among solutions under consideration as its smooth backup and compression technology and data reliability help us save much time and efforts. The financial industry emphasizes the efficiency of resource allocation. We have no dissatisfaction with Veeam products and services.” Qiu Dingyong, the operation and maintenance engineer of UBS SDIC’s IT department, said. Qui Dingyong highly appreciates the actual application value of the Veeam Backup & ReplicationTM solution .

According to Qiu Dingyong, many traditional backup service providers are now able to perform image-level backup of virtual machines (VM) but they are far less efficient than Veeam who not only saves backup time but also enables full backup and reduction of storage space. “The Veeam solution takes only 16 minutes to back up 800 GB of VM data although our network is a gigabit one rather than a 10 GB one.” He highly appreciates Veeam’s fundamental advantages in improving backup efficiency.

Besides, Veeam’s quick compression and deduplication features are unanimously praised by UBS SDIC’s ID department where Qiu Dingyong works. The optimized combination of deduplication and compression is the master data simplified method. Veeam can perform task-level deduplication at both data source side and target side. The data source-side deduplication ensures only unique data blocks excluded at previous recovery points are transmitted via the network while the target side deduplication can compare the received data blocks with other VM ones stored in backup fi s and enable global deduplication for all VMs involved in backup tasks.

In addition, Veeam supports that a single backup agent performs 1 GB/S data stream processing during vSphere and Hyper-V backup and recovery. In the financial industry, time is money, so the time saved during backup means significant improvement in business operational efficiency. According to Qiu Dingyong, to some extent, Veeam has shown such an excellent compression and deduplication capability, not only saving a lot of storage resources but also significantly reducing processing costs for the UBS SDIC.

Currently, the UBS SDIC is deploying all businesses via virtualization onto the system. Veeam is responsible for local backup of all data on about 120 of the 400 VMs, and full backup is required for each VM.

As for VM recovery, Veeam’s vPower technology can enable it to directly run VMs from the compressed and deduplicated backup files on the periodic backup and storage device. On a storage device in the production environment, it is only necessary to enable VMs from backup files. Therefore, VMs can be restarted on any host within minutes if they suffer from a fault. This convenience helps the UBS SDIC minimize IT personnel labor costs.

The UBS SDIC, with its operation and maintenance not highly automatic, will apply Veeam ONETM to monitor backup and synchronization of Veeam Backup & ReplicationTM as well as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V to create an automatic, fully transparent IT environment and discover and address problems before these problems impact the system.

Achievements

• Improve the efficiency while reducing difficulties in operation and maintenance
  Veeam achieves more intelligent, convenient and efficient operation and maintenance management by providing a powerful and efficient VM backup feature, fast and flexible recovery feature and an advanced VM replication feature.
• Ensure availability of data and business while reducing risks of business data loss
  Provide a variety of backup options which can achieve not only on-site replication to realize high availability but also off-site replication to realize disaster recovery, avoiding data loss together with the built-in streamlined, efficient disaster recovery feature.
• Reduce one-time investment of building a backup system
  Save storage space and labor costs, and reduce network traffic by virtue of the built-in data deduplication, compression and other data simplification technologies.