Powering 400+ FSI Customers in Digital Innovation
With the rapid development of financial technology, many financial services institutions (FSI) are increasingly adopting cutting-edge technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and big data platforms to accelerate business operations and IT innovation. The adoption of these new technologies also places higher demands on the underlying IT infrastructure – it must not only deliver high performance, high reliability, and low latency support for core business systems and databases, but also meet the evolving needs of FSI in areas such as IT localization, cloud-native transformation, and AI applications.
As a leading enterprise cloud platform provider, SmartX has helped over 400 FSI enterprises modernize their IT infrastructure using our Enterprise Cloud Platform (ECP). These clients span various sectors, including commercial banking, securities, insurance, futures, fund management, and trusts. SmartX has deployed more than 10,000 nodes in FSI data centers, with the largest single-customer deployment reaching 1,500 nodes and the longest continuous usage exceeding 8 years.
Financial clients also leverage SmartX ECP to support a wide range of application scenarios—such as mission-critical systems including trading systems, core databases, disaster recovery and backup, development and testing environments, cloud-native transformation, AI applications, and big data platforms—achieving goals such as on-prem deployment, digital transformation, and VMware/Nutanix replacement.
This blog will focus on SmartX ECP’s use cases in the banking and insurance industries, sharing customer stories and more insights into FSI digital transformation.
SmartX ECP in Banking
Several top banks in China have already deployed SmartX ECP at scale to support critical trading systems, databases, Dev/Test and other application systems, and have extended its deployment across multiple branches.
Bank of Communications: Deploying Over 1,500 SmartX ECP Nodes Across Headquarters and Branches to Support 10,000+ Virtual Machines
As one of China’s leading commercial banks, Bank of Communications (BOCOM) began its IT infrastructure modernization initiative early on. In 2017, the bank conducted evaluations of various mainstream hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions at home and abroad. During the comparative testing between SmartX ECP clusters integrated with native hypervisor ELF and VMware virtualization, the bank highly valued the functionality and stability of SmartX’s native virtualization.
As a result, in 2019, BOCOM deployed over 60 SmartX ECP nodes (based on ELF) in the production environment of its headquarters data center. These nodes support general application systems, DB2 databases, Redis cache databases, and several other production systems.
Over the following six years, BOCOM continued to explore SmartX ECP application scenarios, building ECP clusters for IT localization, disaster recovery, and Dev/Test. The bank rapidly replicated its ECP deployment across more than 30 branches nationwide. To date, it has deployed over 1,500 ECP nodes in total, supporting the operation of more than 10,000 VMs. All SmartX ECP clusters are running SmartX native virtualization (ELF), significantly reducing operational complexity and total cost of ownership (TCO).
For large-scale cluster management, BOCOM utilizes SmartX single pane of management console to centrally manage all ECP clusters across headquarters and branches. The management console offers centralized monitoring and a global view of the infrastructure status, enabling administrators at headquarters to comprehensively track resource usage, performance metrics, and the health status of all clusters. This tool has greatly improved BOCOM’s operational efficiency and response speed.
>>More Resources:
Case Study – Bank of Communications
Why Enterprises Choose SmartX ELF Virtualization as a VMware Alternative – BOC Case Study
A Provincial Branch of the People’s Bank of China: Business Continuity with Active-Active SmartX ECP Clusters
To meet IT localization requirements, a provincial branch of the People’s Bank of China (PBC) initially built a 4-node SmartX ECP cluster using servers based on Hygon CPU to support mission-critical databases and OA systems.
To further enhance business continuity and explore active-active deployment of SmartX ECP based on the Hygon environment, the branch aimed to upgrade its existing OA resource pool. With support from SmartX, the existing ECP cluster was expanded and transformed into active-active clusters without downtime. Leveraging servers with hybrid-generation Hygon CPUs, the branch successfully built “4+4+1” heterogeneous active-active clusters (including a remote arbiter node), achieving a seamless transition with zero data loss. The active-active clusters now run stably, ensuring business continuity for the Hygon environment at a lower IT infrastructure investment.
SmartX ECP in Insurance
So far, SmartX has helped more than 50 insurance companies modernize their IT infrastructure using ECP, with over 1,200 nodes deployed to support critical systems, databases, disaster recovery, and VMware replacement.
A Top Insurance Company: Use Existing Nutanix Appliance to Deploy SMTX OS Clusters and Migrate 500+ VMs via SMTX Migration Tool
Faced with a series of adjustments from Nutanix towards mainland China, a leading insurance institution is processing a complete replacement of Nutanix HCI (integrated with VMware virtualization) with SmartX ECP (using native virtualization ELF).
Given SmartX ECP’s wide hardware compatibility, the institution reused its existing Nutanix appliances to build the new SMTX OS cluster, reducing hardware investment. Besides, using the SMTX Migration Tool, the company decided to migrate over 800 VMs supporting business applications and Dev/Test from the Nutanix HCI cluster to the SmartX ELF virtualization platform in two phases.
As of now, the first migration phase has been completed, involving the successful transfer of over 200 business VMs and 300 Dev/Test VMs. The remaining migration tasks are progressing on schedule. The institution is highly satisfied with SMTX Migration Tool’s efficiency, ease of use, and stability. The migrated VMs have been running stably in SMTX OS clusters for nearly six months, providing robust and high-performance support for both business systems and Dev/Test environments.
More Resources: SmartX vs Nutanix: Product and Performance Comparison, Migration Approaches and Use Cases – A Top Insurance Company Case Study
Everbright Sun Life Insurance: Replacing VMware Virtualization in a Flexible Approach
Everbright Sun Life Insurance, a subsidiary of China Everbright Group, initially relied on VMware virtualization and centralized storage to run its business services in the production environment. To enhance IT infrastructure performance and agility, the company opted to transition to a hyper-converged architecture.
During the selection of the virtualization platform, the company faced a dual challenge. Firstly, the company was concerned about VMware’s perceived instability in the global market and sought an alternative solution. However, there were also concerns about whether alternative platforms could meet the demands of financial business services in a production environment. With these considerations in mind, the insurance company aimed for a hyper-converged architecture that could support both VMware virtualization and an alternative platform, allowing for smooth migration and a gradual transition away from VMware.
In 2018, the company deployed several nodes of SMTX OS clusters (based on ELF virtualization) in its development and testing environments. After a year of testing, the reliability and stability of SmartX ELF virtualization were thoroughly validated, along with the feasibility of smoothly migrating VMs from VMware to ELF.
Over the following five years, the company systematically migrated VMware virtualization clusters hosting business services to SmartX ELF virtualization, including group insurance sales management systems, personal insurance core systems, group insurance core systems, group insurance rules engine, and corresponding MySQL databases. Furthermore, the company has utilized the SMTX OS cluster, converged with VMware virtualization, to support Oracle databases. Both virtualization platforms can be centrally managed, providing users with a flexible option for VMware replacement.
Taikang Insurance: Transforming from VMware Virtualization to ELF, Deploying Over 140 SmartX ECP Nodes
During five years, Taikang Insurance Group expanded SmartX ECP clusters over 10 times, deploying over 140 nodes to support 4 major business scenarios: Internet Business Zone, Development and Testing Zone, Security Management Zone, and Major Production Zone. Notably, SmartX ECP can integrate with VMware virtualization and native ELF hypervisor, adapting to various CPU architectures and commercial servers, and even supporting heterogeneous integration of servers from different brands and configurations within the same cluster.
In 2025, after years of verifying the performance and stability of SmartX ECP in its production environment, Taikang Insurance decided to adopt ELF virtualization as the virtualization platform for a newly built cluster to support production business systems, marking its first step toward replacing VMware.
An Asset Management Company: Replacing VMware with SmartX ECP and Enhancing Disaster Recovery Drills
Based on its current IT infrastructure, an asset management company planned to carry out VMware replacement and IT localization for different business systems, while also building an off-site disaster recovery cluster to ensure data reliability.
In the first phase of the project, the company deployed two SMTX OS (ELF) clusters—one on Intel-based servers and the other on Kunpeng-based servers—to support production systems such as the PUB cluster, OA cluster, and DMZ cluster. Corresponding disaster recovery environments were also set up. Using SMTX Backup and DR’s replication and restoration capabilities, business VMs from the primary data center are replicated to the DR site every 12 hours via a dedicated 150 Mbps line.
With SmartX ECP, the time required for DR drills has been significantly reduced, enabling the company to achieve its RTO goals: 20 minutes for infrastructure, 30 minutes for high-priority services, and 1 hour for major business systems.
Moving forward, the company plans to expand the cluster based on project outcomes to enable full business system migration and more comprehensive high-availability protection.
For more information on SmartX ECP, please visit our website and download SmartX ECP Product Portfolio Brief.
