As business has grown, the IT infrastructure of Henan Rural Credit Union has carried more and more processing tasks. Business involving bills ultimately leaves both paper and electronic archives. Electronic archiving requires counter bills to be scanned into the image system’s storage pool.

Customer Requirements

What enters storage through scanners is an image file of each bill, typically stored as massive numbers of small pictures. Hardware security can be assured, but logical-layer security (for example protection against data modification, data checksum monitoring and compliance checks) and fast retrieval cannot be fully met.

This project builds an IT image platform in terms of image-data stability, security, and storage capacity and performance scalability. Image workflow circulates through every step of business processing, reducing the risk of damage or loss of paper documents used at each step and raising efficiency. It also eliminates the possibility of bill fraud and minimizes major losses to the bank.

Solution

According to the overall plan for Henan Rural Credit Union’s new-generation IT systems, the image platform is to be deployed in a combined centralized and distributed mode: the provincial union’s IT center back-end stores index information for all structured data and important unstructured data; each county-level institution deploys storage for its own index-information cache and unstructured electronic image data, and periodically synchronizes to the provincial IT center over the network. Sugon provides a CAS storage solution for county-level institutions to ensure data security and real-time performance.

CAS, content-addressable storage, retrieves data by a fingerprint of its content. True content addressing means reads and writes with zero I/O indexing, solving the difficulty and time waste of path addressing. CAS can also complete data-duplication checks and business-data compliance checks, reducing application occupancy of host resources so that every application request gets an extremely fast response.

All structured-data index information of the rural credit union image platform is stored in multiple databases. Oracle RAC active-active mode places extremely high demands on concurrent access and response latency of index data. To make up for traditional storage’s inability to provide content addressing, compliance checks and similar functions, Sugon used the ParaStor distributed storage system, which completes those functions without relying on application hosts and further lowers customer investment.

Sugon’s CAS solution moves data from the application layer to the storage layer, effectively separating management and control and freeing system resources. Once storage takes over some application functions, the storage system can still meet demanding business requirements with short response times under high concurrency, significantly raising settlement service capability.

Solution Value

The new-generation IT image platform Sugon built for Henan Rural Credit Union serves more than 30% of outlets in the province and supports stable operation of dozens of application systems. It well solves content addressing, compliance checks and data-uniqueness verification on the image platform, and lays a solid foundation for subsequent e-banking construction and for personal and corporate online banking, credit cards and other businesses.