Background

The People’s Bank of China is China’s central bank and a constituent department of the State Council. Its duties are to formulate and implement monetary policy, prevent and mitigate financial risk, and maintain financial stability.

In the past, domestic computing developed slowly, and PBOC information systems used foreign-brand minicomputers. As financial business deepened and internal business types expanded, the original Treasury Information Processing System ran entirely on minicomputers and mainframes. The closed nature of that hardware, operating systems, and software greatly limited expansion and increased the risk of upgrades.

Customer Requirements

The Treasury Information Processing System (TIPS) is an information exchange and processing system built on the independent information systems of finance, taxation, and the treasury. It enables networked information exchange among the functional departments of national budget revenue and expenditure, increases the speed and transparency of budget execution, helps departments understand budget execution in a timely way, speeds the turnover of budget funds, raises the efficiency of fiscal funds, and ensures normal execution of the national budget.

Through TIPS, PBOC builds internal financial metropolitan-area networks, electronic clearing systems, and payment systems for centralized information exchange. The system supports tax-treasury-bank networked electronic payment and real-time posting of taxes and fees to the treasury.

To protect internal systems and data and to reduce monopoly of domestic business platforms by foreign hardware vendors, a second-generation TIPS based on PC servers was introduced. While keeping business systems secure, it accelerated migration of the bank’s critical workloads to x86 architecture.

As China’s IT industry has developed, breakthroughs have continued in high-end servers. High-end eight-socket and four-socket servers can now fully replace the basic minicomputer architecture in performance and redundant safety.

Solution

In response to PBOC’s strong need for simpler IT architecture and decoupling of software and hardware, Sugon used x86 eight-socket I980 and four-socket I840 high-end servers and a distinctive converged product design. The design closely matches TIPS as the hub of internal bank data exchange and meets high standards for hardware security and stability.

After multiple surveys with the bank and months of testing, Sugon proposed pairing eight-socket servers with a cache-acceleration design to further improve response time and greatly shorten resource-allocation cycles. In head-to-head tests against minicomputers, Sugon high-end servers led in both stability and performance. Strong test results passed solution validation and strengthened the bank’s resolve to carry out U2L transformation of the system.

After years of work on this information-system project, Sugon successively met the challenges of security, stability, and reliability and won the bid for the second-generation Treasury Information Processing System, supplying eight-socket I980 and midrange four-socket I840 servers and contributing to PBOC’s second-generation treasury system.

Solution Advantages

The high processing capacity and high stability of eight-socket servers provide high-performance computing for TIPS.

Core business systems moved from Power architecture to an open x86 architecture, greatly reducing procurement and operations cost.

Resource efficiency improved, operations complexity fell, and management became easier.

A single server achieved more than 5,000 transactions per second.