Background Introduction

In 1987, China Merchants Bank (CMB) was founded in Shekou Industrial Zone of Shenzhen. It was a pilot bank, the first ever promoted as part of China's reform of the banking industry, and the first non-government bank. CMB is listed on the Shenzhen and Hong Kong Stock Exchanges. Its business covers commercial banking, financial leasing, investment management, life insurance, overseas investment banking, and other financial licenses of the banking group. In recent years, CMB has been focused on the "light-weight bank" strategy, balancing the development of quality, efficiency, and scale. In 2020, CMB started the construction of a comprehensive data middle platform and proposed the idea "everyone is a data analyst".

  • Plentiful resources

    Traditional appliances were difficult to scale out and could not meet the increasing demands for storage and computing power. A data platform needs to provide robust resources at a reasonable cost.

    Traditional appliances were difficult to scale out and could not meet the increasing demands for storage and computing power. A data platform needs to provide robust resources at a reasonable cost.

  • An efficient, high-quality environment

    Scattered, siloed data has been connected. An enterprise-grade data platform has been built to process data assets that are reusable and scalable.

    Scattered, siloed data has been connected. An enterprise-grade data platform has been built to process data assets that are reusable and scalable.

  • Innovation and monetization

    A secure, reliable, industry-leading data platform has been built to deeply explore the value of data assets and enable data-driven operations.

    A secure, reliable, industry-leading data platform has been built to deeply explore the value of data assets and enable data-driven operations.

CMB used Huawei Cloud GaussDB(DWS) to build a next-generation cloud data warehouse with more compute and more storage, improving retail experience with real-time monitoring and data visualization.

In the Cloud Data Warehouse Construction and Joint Innovation project, CMB worked with Huawei to develop a next-generation distributed cloud data warehouse. A 240-node ultra-large cluster was built to process all the retail data applications of the bank and can store up to 10 PB of data, more than four times the storage before. The time required for batch processing tasks has been significantly reduced. The cluster can be easily and inexpensively scaled out. The joint innovation lab established by CMB and Huawei made breakthroughs in backup and recovery, fine-grained disaster recovery, high-speed connections between clusters, and fast warm backup in financial scenarios. The backup speed can reach 150 TB per hour, and the unified logical access of multiple clusters has greatly improved production efficiency.

  • More compute

    Double the compute in typical scenarios

    Double the compute in typical scenarios

  • More storage

    Up to 10 PB

    Up to 10 PB

  • Faster backup

    700 TB of data backed up within 4 hours, 4x higher performance

    700 TB of data backed up within 4 hours, 4x higher performance

  • Cutting-edge financial technologies

    Innovation Best Practice in Technical FSI Applications on 2021 IDC China Digital Finance Forum

    Innovation Best Practice in Technical FSI Applications on 2021 IDC China Digital Finance Forum

We needed a large, fast, stable data warehouse, where performance could be massively upgraded by scaling up. The data warehouse cluster should be able to manage thousands of nodes and 100 PB of storage. Regarding its speed, we wanted it to run fully parallel tasks across servers. Stability is also important. We needed multi-active, backup, and multi-level protection to achieve high availability and build a disaster recovery system that could cope with a range of faults. Huawei GaussDB(DWS) could meet all these requirements and was chosen as our next-generation platform.

Tian YongjiangDirector of Data Center Application and Database Management, CMB


Tian Yongjiang
Director of Data Center Application and Database Management, CMB

We needed a large, fast, stable data warehouse, where performance could be massively upgraded by scaling up. The data warehouse cluster should be able to manage thousands of nodes and 100 PB of storage. Regarding its speed, we wanted it to run fully parallel tasks across servers. Stability is also important. We needed multi-active, backup, and multi-level protection to achieve high availability and build a disaster recovery system that could cope with a range of faults. Huawei GaussDB(DWS) could meet all these requirements and was chosen as our next-generation platform.