Someone once joked that the smartest "brain" in the world is not in the laboratory, but in Wall Street.
For a long time, many high-achieving students from the world's top prestigious schools have been tempted by high salaries and entered the financial field. This has also allowed us to see the vigorous development of financial-related fields in recent years.
The financial industry has the characteristics of index, monopoly, high risk, profit dependence and high debt management. Financial index data reflect the overall and individual conditions of the national economy from various angles, so the financial industry is known as the barometer of national economic development. At the same time, finance also values data more than any other industry, and it is clearly ahead of other industries in terms of data collection, utilization and development.
Changes, changing times in the financial sector
As a barometer of national economic development, finance is also one of the earliest industries to be exposed to IT. It can be said that at any time, the financial sector has the most advanced IT equipment in the world. Early expensive mainframes and minicomputers also generally served users in the financial field, supporting various key businesses with powerful computing power and high reliability.
Times have changed, and the IT industry has undergone tremendous changes. Many fields have begun to enjoy the convenience brought by cloud computing, and the financial industry is also facing transformation. Different from other industries, the financial industry has high requirements on IT systems, especially databases, reports, settlements, etc., and servers must be absolutely reliable. Moreover, the construction of data centers in the financial industry must follow the relevant standards of the China Banking Regulatory Commission. Generally, financial industry data centers, financial industry information systems, infrastructure level certification, and computer room power system level certification are required. The requirements are very strict, and the purpose is only to ensure the integrity of the core system. Stability and security.
However, this has virtually raised the threshold for the transformation of the financial industry, and also blocked many mature traditional IT solutions from the door.
The times are always moving forward, and we have not seen the financial industry lagging behind because of the threshold problem, because they have already started the "walking on two legs" plan. On the one hand, we will continue to use minicomputers and business-critical servers to ensure the high reliability of our core business. On the other hand, we will embrace cloud computing and make full use of more efficient and agile cloud resources to expand new businesses, including our commonly used mobile banking, securities, insurance, etc. app.
So, facing the future, is it still necessary to continue using minicomputers at the core business level?
The IDC report shows that as of 2021Q4, the market share of Unix servers based on RISC and EPIC processors in China has dropped to 0.2% , while the shipments of x86 servers are increasing year by year. From the perspective of users, the cost of minicomputers is high, the update iteration speed of hardware equipment is very slow, the performance is generally stretched, and the maintenance and management talents are scarce, and the development and maintenance are even more difficult. They cannot meet the requirements of open architecture and open source support. Demand, there is a feeling of being abandoned by the times.
Accordingly, the industry predicts that business-critical servers with an open architecture will become the successors of minicomputers in the new era.
H3C's mission-critical server HPE Superdome Flex is a flexible and powerful mission-critical platform, which is specially designed to cope with the increasing processing of massive business data from customers. And it adopts a modular expansion design concept, so no matter what kind of business or scale, it can be applied. For example, users can choose 2-channel products at the beginning, and then expand to 4-channel, 6-channel, 8-channel or even 32-channel when the business grows, and support up to 48TB memory, which is far better than similar minicomputers in terms of scalability.
In terms of hardware, the HPE Superdome Flex series has four major advantages over minicomputers: first, it has RAS features comparable to minicomputers, which is enough to match minicomputers in terms of security and reliability; second, it has performance advantages. The HPE Superdome Flex family can be based on The second and third generation Intel Xeon® Scalable processors surpass the same type of minicomputers in terms of the number of cores, computing performance and memory capacity, providing strong performance support for business-critical applications. The third point is the use of modular design, users can expand freely; the last is the open architecture, because it itself is an x86 platform, so it has the best compatibility, supports various open operating system platforms, and supports in application development and support, etc. On the one hand, it suppresses minicomputers in an all-round way.
RAS, key indicators cannot be relaxed
We have seen that many cases in the current financial industry have one thing in common, that is, users in the financial field generally use the HPE Superdome Flex platform to replace minicomputers. So, can mission-critical x86-based servers really replace the minicomputers that once dominated the financial sector?
The most important point is the RAS feature. The full name of RAS is Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability, which can be simply understood as reliability, availability, and security. In IDC's rating, applications in key business scenarios need to meet the AL4 standard, which is also the rating standard for minicomputers and mainframes. Although it is an x86 server, the availability of the HPE Superdome Flex solution in IDC's evaluation has reached the same AL4 standard as the minicomputer.
It is understood that the planning, design and team of the HPE Superdome Flex series mission-critical servers are inherited from the original minicomputers. Therefore, although they are both x86 architecture systems, they are quite different from traditional servers.
Whether it is the BIOS design, the choice of processor and other accessories, or the design materials, HPE Superdome Flex adopts the strict design of the benchmark minicomputer. HPE Superdome Flex has features such as fault self-healing and temporary fault isolation to prevent faults from being directly transmitted to the operating system, so as to ensure the normal operation of applications. It also provides users with better correction suggestions by providing finer-grained reports and logs to accurately locate faults.
Based on this, the HPE Superdome Flex series mission-critical servers have RAS features comparable to minicomputers, and rely on the compatibility of the x86 architecture, allowing them to help financial users open up the road to core business.
In actual combat, the advantages of HPE Superdome Flex are fully demonstrated
Since the HPE Superdome Flex mission-critical server is so powerful, what is its actual combat effect?
Let’s first look at a set of real evaluation data from financial institutions. The first set of platforms is based on well-known minicomputers in the industry, and the storage is also an all-flash product of the brand, representing the existing platforms of many financial institutions; the second set is based on The HPE Superdome Flex series mission-critical servers, paired with HPE 3PAR storage, represent an open platform for the future.
In the OLTP test, the Unix platform is 520TPS, while the HPE Superdome Flex platform has reached 1800TPS, the gap between the two is nearly three times .
The batch processing test, including two tests of interest calculation processing and radix accumulation processing, took 3 hours, 17 minutes and 45 minutes on the Unix platform; 20 minutes and 10 minutes on the HPE Superdome Flex platform .
It can be seen that under the performance test based on the production environment, compared with the Unix platform, the performance of the HPE Superdome Flex Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) test is 3 times. The time performance of the interest-calculation processing test has been improved by as much as 10 times, which has truly achieved a qualitative leap.
HPE Superdome Flex drives the financial industry to explore the future
Driven by business needs, a bank in Turkey migrated RISC-based SPARC servers to HPE Superdome Flex platforms based on x86 architecture, which greatly improved scalability and flexibility . Additionally, infrastructure RAS has been enhanced with automated system management and disaster recovery tools, ensuring continuity of mission-critical workloads and minimizing downtime.
The person in charge of the bank said: After the upgrade, the new platform based on HPE Superdome Flex 280 allows us to no longer worry about insufficient capacity, and can follow up the need to increase processors and memory at any time, relying on the better openness and compatibility of the x86 architecture , allowing IT teams to explore more new projects.
In the next five years, the bank will continue to replace Unix servers with HPE Superdome Flex, and the production environment and bank APP will be transferred to run on the Linux platform.
In terms of energy saving and emission reduction, because HPE Superdome Flex has stronger stand-alone capability and higher single-system stability, it does not need to stack ordinary servers to improve performance and reliability, which greatly simplifies the IT architecture of enterprises and further reduces the cost of computer rooms. The cost of power distribution and cooling, and the reduction of the floor area of the data center reduce the operation and maintenance cost for the financial data center where every inch of land is expensive.
Another actual case comes from Japan's JCB , which stands for Japan International Credit Card Corporation. The annual transaction volume of JCB credit cards exceeds 33.8 trillion yen, covering more than 150 countries and regions around the world, with 140 million members and 37 million merchants.
With the rapid development of business, JCB is facing challenges from system expansion, cloud native, consistency, hybrid cloud construction, flexibility and agile development.
After a comprehensive upgrade to the new-generation infrastructure core platform, the new mission-critical servers consist of HPE Superdome Flex 280 and all-flash array HPE Primera, and Red Hat OpenShift serves as the enterprise-level Kubernetes container platform. From this, a high-efficiency hybrid cloud platform was built: MyJCB. CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) container-based agile development applications are built through Kubernetes container orchestration. By using cloud-native technology on the HPE Superdome Flex platform to empower key business systems, JCB can respond more agilely and quickly to the needs of the market and customers.
Recalling the past, about ten years ago, when I used my first smartphone, the first batch of software installed included multiple banking and stock apps. It can be said that the financial field has always been a pioneer in the application of IT technology. They value the value of data more than any other industry, and have extremely high requirements for system security and reliability. At the same time, they have been actively expanding the agility business that can change the future.
Looking back at the traditional Unix minicomputer, limited by its architecture, it can no longer meet the needs of cloud native, container, agile development, etc., and its business scope is also narrowing year by year. It can be judged that the baton of core business will be gradually passed to HPE Superdome Flex mission critical server hands.
Facing the future, I believe that more flexible applications will flourish. Under the open HPE Superdome Flex+Linux platform, the value of data will be mined in a more efficient way, and other industries will be driven forward.