The Client

Founded in 1912, Bank of China has expanded its business and offerings for nearly a century. Throughout the years, it was a national central bank, an international foreign exchange bank and a bank dedicated for foreign trade, playing a significant role in China’s national economic growth and social development.

Bank of China has branches in 28 countries and regions, more than 600 overseas outlets, and approximately 12,000 domestic outlets. As one of the first Chinese finance companies to adopt an IT-based business strategy, Bank of China began using microcomputers in 1979 to deliver business services; in the late 1990s, it decided to centralize data from each province.

Project Background

As Bank of China’s business expanded and IT management tools and technologies evolved, Bank of China sought to construct five large data centers in North China, East China, South China, Northwest China and Southwest China in 2002. These data centers would centralize provincial financial data.

In 2003, Bank of China started designing an “IT Blueprint” plan to further integrate all business systems and data centers, and develop a unified business system to centralize national data. Simultaneously, Bank of China planned to construct a key business data center in Beijing as well as a disaster recovery center in Shanghai; this would enhance Bank of China’s business capabilities and disaster recovery preparedness.

When Bank of China’s Beijing data center went live in 2007, the construction of its Shanghai disaster recovery data center became a top priority. Building a highly available and high-performance disaster recovery center was on the agenda; selecting the right long-term partner to ensure the project’s success was the next challenge.

H3C Solution

The H3C solution divided Bank of China’s disaster recovery data center network into a core layer, convergence layer and access layer, as well as several functional areas. In this particular design, core switches connect to each other and to other network segments via 10 Gigabit Ethernet line-speed ports; this considerably enhances network performance. In important server areas in the disaster recovery center, H3C SecBlade firewall modules are deployed in S7500E modular core switches at the convergence layer to protect each area from unwarranted intrusion or attack. The overall disaster recovery data center solution involves multiple low-end, mid-range and high-end switches, routers and security modules, including:

Ø 2 SR8808 data center/core routers to converge traffic on national backbone networks (Class 1 networks);

Ø 2 SR8802 data center/core routers, used on the external connection platform;

Ø 2 S9512 modular core switches, used as core switches in the disaster recovery center;

Ø More than 50 S7005E Series modular core switches, used to converge the traffic of each area and at the access layer; and

Ø Approximately 20 S5500-EI Series Gigabit Ethernet switches to access servers and terminals.

Why H3C

H3C is a world-class vendor of switching, routing, wireless, security, multimedia and managmenet solutions backed by unsurpassed global services and support. H3C’s comprehensive IToIP solutions can address the separate needs of the core network in Bank of China’s headquarters, data center, disaster recovery center, backbone network, access network and outlets. Furthermore, H3C products and solutions have been proven in the field to satisfy the robust demands of financial clients. This reputation for quality and value, paired with a capability to deliver professional service and support throughout China, made H3C the clear choice to help Bank of China design, develop and deploy the IT infrastructure it required.

Benefits

The H3C integrated switch platform delivers high-density convergence and industry-leading security, while simultaneously reducing the number of devices in a network. This provides a simplified data center architecture that delivers extremely high network performance, reliability and availability while reducing the total cost of ownership of the network.