“Many problems came up against us during the construction of our data center. But SDS resolved them all, just like a resourceful Doraemon, you could ask it for everything.”

------ the IT Department Head of a Bank

 Introduction:

The customer is a foreign-invested bank (hereinafter, the D-Bank), one of the most powerful consortiums maintaining a business operation in the entire Asia-pacific region and in most major countries in the world. In 2008, with the approval from China Banking & Insurance Regulatory Commission (CBIRC), it decided to launch its Shanghai Branch Project. According to CBIRC regulations, a foreign-invested bank should establish a data center before it could start any banking business in China. After soliciting professional opinions from third-party consultants and comparing the proposals from different contractors, it chose SDS as the contractor of its Tier 4 Disaster Recover Data Center project to ensure that the project meets the reliability requirement on the same-city disaster recovery arrangement and other CBRIC industrial regulatory requirements, and, to better safeguard its future business development.

01

Solution

• High Standard Disaster Recovery Data Center: Built according to Tier 4 Standards plus full redundancy design ensuring 99.995% power supply SLA;
• High Quality Network: Dual-line access to the Big Three Chinese telecommunication networks, plus BGP automatic routing and DDOS attack defense;
• BCP Disaster Recovery Desk: Ace-class tailored disaster recovery office, plus all-round BCM business continuity consultation and implementation services;

02

Essentials of Success

• 24/7 Quick Response Local Service meeting customer needs as fast as possible;
• Based on years of service experience, provide users with the right data center project planning, design and consultation services;
• Rule-complied data center and IT operating and maintenance qualification meeting all financial regulatory requirements;   

Driven by the fast growing global digital economy and new financial technology innovations, banks in the world suddenly find themselves at the doorway of a digital transformation that forces them to digitalize every aspect of operation, ranging from service to channel and to user experience. While improving the competitive edges of banks, such transformation also put them under greater technological risks, which, in turn, makes them hold higher requirements on the bank data center performance in security, reliability and operational stability, and service continuity. In such circumstance, the disaster recovery center plays an essential role in a bank’s risk resistance capacity.

The Preferable Choice of a Foreign Bank Trying to Land in China

While watching over the landing of its Shanghai Branch, the D-Bank hopes to enhance its disaster resistance capacity and damage control capacity by building a disaster recovery center. Also, it wishes that, when a disaster should happen, it’d be able to restore its banking service as soon as possible and keep its business loss as low as it could be.

After going through the recommendations from neutral third-party consultants, the D-Bank chose the SDS as the cooperative partner of its disaster recovery center project. On the one hand, the decision was made on the ground that the high-class SDS data center has the technical capacity that’s good enough to maintain banking business. On the other, it thought that the SDS’s long experience of serving financial industry could be a strong guarantee for the successful landing of its branch.

Over years, SDS IDX Data Centers have been the preferable choice of foreign invested banks who want to establish themselves in Chinese market for SDS’s high level performance in security, availability and reliability. Built at the Tier 4 standard, the highest ever, SDS IDX Data Centers adopted No-Single-Point-of-Failure (NSPF) design and the highest redundancy for both core systems (including power supply, cooling and network systems) and sub-systems to meet the high requirements that foreign-invested banks put on data centers.  

In terms of network services, all SDS data centers in Shanghai provide dual-line access to the Big Three telecommunication networks in China (China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile) and BGP-based automatic routing support. When a visitor browses the official website of a bank, the SDS BGP routing product will automatically select for the visitor a data line providing the fastest speed at the time, so that he or she could enjoy the fastest possible browsing experience. In addition, SDS offers banks with an IPv4 to IPv6 Upgrading Deployment Solution to help them meet regulatory requirements and future development needs.

Other than the business continuity guarantee of IT systems, the D-Bank also expected to have a good protection over its non-IT systems. For example, when a disaster should happen and the original offices be damaged, it’s essential for the customer to maintain its business operations in a backup office space. To meet that need, SDS has developed an ace-class customizable product that offers an office space in the disaster recovery office zone adjacent to the hosted zone in the data center, together with a complete set of high quality office equipments and shuttle support, to provide the customer the best possible convenience.

An All-time Helping Hand, Just Like Doraemon

During project implementation, SDS service team received unanimous recognition for its professionalism and strong service capacity. In the preliminary stage, the SDS project team had to face a very general description of technical needs and a nonnegotiable project deadline that the CBIRC set up. In other words, the SDS project team had to pinpoint all the details of the project plan and complete project implementation within a very tight schedule.

Swift was the SDS’s response. The customer needs were quickly and precisely defined. A detailed site implementation plan was carefully developed. A professional planning that covers the location of computing cage, the running of cable tray and the arrangement of the office, was recommended to ensure that it’s easy for the disaster recovery center to up-scale and catch up with the future development of data center.

Whenever a problem should occur during on-site implementation, installation and trial-run, the SDS O&M team would go to the site immediately and came up with a solution. Such quick and effective response helped the customer sailing through all project sections from entrance, installation, system debugging, to line performance test with great ease.

The response of the SDS team was prompt, and its service, thorough. Based on its long and extensive experience in serving high-end customers, it could almost meet all needs. In a time, when the customer had trouble with shipping two equipment modules from abroad, the SDS IDX data center lent the same equipment to it for two or three months. In another time, when it’s told that the customer couldn’t start one of its exchange boards, the SDS quickly found one in its inventory and delivered it to the customer. As for other small tools and hardware, e.g. screwdrivers, screws and screw nuts, cable ties, and cables and cords, the SDS has all of them in all varieties. At the end of the project, feeling very satisfied with the SDS services, a foreign IT expert working as the project Site Coordinate said, ‘SDS is like the magic pocket of the Doraemon, you could ask it for everything. It’s amazing! I’ve seen many data centers in the world. The response speed of the SDS is awesome. I’m impressed!’

Eventually, with the joint efforts of the customer, SDS completed before the deadline the construction of VIP partition, installation of heavy and light current power cable trays, computing cages, cage PDUs, access control video monitoring systems and all other tasks.

In addition to BCP disaster recovery office, SDS offers all-round BCM consultation and project landing services and, against potential crisis and risks, helps customers to develop an effective business continuity plan.

With its extraordinary infrastructure and excellent services, SDS helped the foreign-invested bank built a disaster recovery center better than the one located in its HQs, in other words, offered the customer a service experience beyond expectation.