The Beijing Municipal Bureau of Finance in China has embarked on a unified cloud storage platform as part of its data center overhaul.
The Bureau is a department of Beijing Municipal Government that manages financial revenue and expenditure, implements financial supervision and participates in the regulation of Beijing's economy; the data center reconstruction occurred as the Bureau realized its existing infrastructure could no longer keep up with its needs, which include financial revenue allocation, managing non-tax government revenue and overseeing financial and tax regulations and policies.
The Bureau's original production center included several IBM pSeries servers and IBm DS8100 storage, with unstructured data such as training and video data stored in NetApp storage. No backup systems were implemented for core data.
The overhaul required a scalable and sustainable unified cloud storage platform for both structured and unstructured data, in addition to a unified disaster recovery platform for backup purposes.
In 2011, the Bureau chose a unified offering from Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), which combined Hitachi storage virtualization with its content management platform. This deployment met all user requirements in addition to providing a storage and disaster recovery platform.
To meet the Bureau's business and unified management requirements, HDS proposed a centralized, upgradeable cloud storage system for all business systems within the Bureau.The HDS solution utilized 1 Hitachi Universal Storage Platform (USP) V. USP V would provide high-performance storage to build the virtualized storage pool.
Hitachi NAS Platform (HNAS) 3080, powered by BlueArc, was implemented as unstructured content cloud data gateway, thus creating a unified storage platform. Critical data, such as office documents, images and email attachments of Beijing Municipal Bureau of Finance needed large-capacity high-speed storage. This solution employed the high-performance, scalable HNAS 3080 to process this data and deployed unstructured data to the underlying USP V system.