Background

Postal Savings Bank of China (PSBC) was established in 2007. It is a leading large retail bank in China, positioned to serve communities, small and medium-sized enterprises, and agriculture, rural areas, and farmers, and is committed to serving the most dynamic customer groups in China’s economic transition. At the same time, PSBC actively serves large customers and takes part in major projects, making an important contribution to China’s economic development.

PSBC has more than 40,000 outlets and serves more than 500 million individual customers, with strong asset quality and significant growth potential. It has built a full electronic banking system covering online banking, mobile banking, self-service banking, telephone banking, TV banking, and WeChat banking, forming a financial-service landscape in which electronic channels interconnect with the physical network and offline branches advance alongside online virtual banking. In 2016, PSBC listed on the Main Board in Hong Kong and entered the international capital market. In the 2016 Top 1000 World Banks ranking, PSBC ranked 22nd by total assets.

Business Challenges

After commercial banks completed large-scale information centralization, internet technology continued to change rapidly and internet finance grew. On the regulatory side, market-access rules also changed, and a number of private banks were approved to enter the financial market. Financial disintermediation and interest-rate liberalization brought new challenges to existing commercial-bank business. Changes in informatization itself would touch many areas and ultimately reshape banking processes. Today, from customer-facing online banking, telephone banking, mobile payment, and call centers to enterprise operations such as e-bills, electronic reports, business imaging, and office automation, informatization has reached every aspect of banking business and management and has become a core element of commercial-bank competitiveness.

In the internet era, commercial banks must change how they operate with internet technology and thinking, and provide faster, more flexible innovative financial services, in order to stay competitive.

PSBC’s original platform ran on minicomputers plus high-end storage. First, a single minicomputer has limited scale-up capacity, so the architecture could not keep up with rapidly growing applications, and a single vendor source also made procurement and maintenance expensive. Second, building basic applications on a traditional redundant x86 server architecture kept the system safe and stable, but application efficiency was low, large amounts of hardware sat unused, and data-center operating cost and operations complexity were high. Finally, the traditional architecture and capacity could no longer meet PSBC’s increasingly complex application needs and urgently required upgrade and expansion.

Solution

While continuing to track x86 server technology, PSBC deployed x86 servers for online banking, a big-data analytics platform, and a financial open platform. Live results show that, compared with the closed hardware of minicomputers and their high expansion cost, general-purpose x86 servers have clear advantages in procurement, expansion, and maintenance cost. In addition, the stability and flexibility of x86 servers plus a virtualization platform better match the need for rapid response and agile, efficient financial services.

From 2016 to 2018, Sugon was shortlisted for PSBC IT and network equipment procurement across multiple hardware product lines, including I620, I840, and I980 servers and the DS600 storage system.

Solution Advantages

Sugon’s eight-socket I980 server offers high performance, high stability, and high reliability; the four-socket I840 offers stable, flexible performance; and the two-socket I620 offers high stability, easy management, and flexible expansion, providing PSBC with foundational support.

During deployment, Sugon servers and storage were combined with an OpenStack cloud platform to support PSBC’s agile business systems, providing a foundation for flexible deployment and rapid launch of business modules.