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 securities and futures industries, sharing customer stories and more insights into FSI digital transformation.
SmartX ECP in Securities
To date, SmartX has helped nearly 60 securities firms modernize their IT infrastructure using ECP, with over 4,800 nodes deployed to support critical trading systems, databases, cloud-native applications, disaster recovery, and network security.
Guotai Haitong Securities: Gradually Deploying Over 1,100 SmartX ECP Nodes to Replace VMware and Nutanix
As one of China’s leading securities firms, Guotai Haitong Securities requires its IT infrastructure to support massive volumes of trading and non-trading workloads, with extremely high demands for stability, performance, security, and autonomous control. In 2016, the firm began exploring HCI technologies, initially adopting products from international vendors such as Nutanix, HyperFlex, and VxRail, mainly for POC testing on peripheral systems and partially for production environments.
As domestic HCI technology matured, in 2017, Guotai Haitong Securities conducted a comprehensive evaluation of multiple domestic vendors, considering product capabilities, ecosystem compatibility, performance, service support, and long-term development capabilities. The firm ultimately chose SmartX and, over the following eight years, gradually expanded its deployment to over 1,500 nodes. These ECP clusters now support various use cases, including IDCs, critical trading, cloud-native applications, and IT localization, covering nearly all aspects of IT infrastructure.
- Initial Phase (2017–2019): SmartX ECP was deployed in IDC environments to support internet applications, with a focus on validating performance and stability.
- Expansion Phase (2019–Present): After successfully handling peak business loads, SmartX ECP entered large-scale expansion. The firm continuously upgraded cluster configurations and rapidly rolled out deployments across multiple data centers in cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Chengdu.
Guotai Haitong Securities is also exploring the adaptation of national commercial cryptographic algorithms (SM series) based on SmartX ECP. The firm’s online trading system typically uses account credentials and identity authentication codes, with data encrypted and transmitted via SSL gateways that support national SM cryptographic algorithms.
To optimize the cost and flexibility of cryptographic services, the firm verified the compatibility of SmartX ECP with commercial cryptography cards from Fisherman Information Technology and Sansec Technology, as well as the Hygon HCT (Hardware Cryptographic Technology). By virtualizing cryptography capabilities, virtual SM cards are mapped to different business virtual machines, significantly improving resource utilization and encryption efficiency. This helped Guotai Haitong Securities to advance its data security and IT localization simultaneously.
>>More Resources: Case Study – Guotai Haitong Securities
China Securities: Deploying Over 600 SmartX ECP Nodes to Modernize IT Infrastructure
As a leading large-scale securities firm in China, China Securities Co., Ltd. (abbr. China Securities) has undergone multiple phases in its IT infrastructure modernization and faced several key challenges:
- Limitations of traditional architecture: In the early stages, the firm adopted a conventional “x86 servers + virtualization + SAN” architecture, which resulted in complex deployments, limited scalability, and high operations and maintenance costs, making it difficult to meet rapidly evolving business demands.
- Ineffectiveness of early HCI attempts: The firm previously experimented with HCI solutions from other vendors, but with unsatisfactory results. In some cases, cluster outages occurred, compromising business stability.
Since 2018, China Securities has adopted SmartX ECP to provide a stable, high-performance IT infrastructure foundation for its Cloud Management Platform (CMP) and cloud portal, with deployments exceeding 600 nodes. The CMP centrally manages a variety of IT infrastructure resources—including the SmartX ECP, traditional storage, other HCI solutions, and public cloud resources—enabling unified management and orchestration across heterogeneous environments.
China Securities also built the first production-grade private cloud based on the “Kunpeng + domestic HCI” architecture using SmartX ECP in the securities industry. The entire system not only supports the ARM architecture but also enables a transition to a distributed architecture and an upgrade to a software-defined infrastructure.
Following this, the firm leveraged SmartX’s independently developed OS migration tool to perform an online migration of over 40 CentOS-based ECP clusters to openEuler-based versions, without interrupting business operations or shutting down the cloud platform. This marked the industry’s first successful implementation of the domestic transformation of core IT infrastructure software without downtime.
Caida Securities: Reshaping IT Infrastructure with SmartX ECP to Meet Agility and Stability Demands
As a leading securities firm in China, Caida Securities Co., Ltd. (abbr. Cinda Securities) has consistently focused on leveraging innovative technologies to drive business growth. In recent years, to meet the increasing demands for both agility and stability, the firm has reshaped its IT infrastructure with SmartX ECP, maintaining a leading position in digital transformation.
Since 2019, Caida Securities has chosen SmartX ECP, valuing its distributed architecture, lightweight and cloud-native features, as well as the outstanding performance demonstrated during POC testing, particularly in I/O performance, which outperformed traditional centralized storage. The professionalism and dedication of SmartX engineers also played a key role in establishing the partnership.
To date, Caida Securities has migrated most of its application systems, excluding core databases, to the SmartX ECP platform and has built a small-scale ECP-based private cloud in its DR center to support critical services such as critical trading and online trading.
Later on, Caida Securities also upgraded its ECP clusters to active-active clusters after a systematic test. By simulating a variety of failure scenarios, including host failures, availability zone (data center) outages, and network disruptions, the firm verified that the ECP-based active-active clusters could immediately trigger risk mitigation strategies under all tested conditions. For monolithic business systems, services could be restored within three minutes; when combined with the database active-active architecture, the solution achieved zero RPO and zero RTO.
Ultimately, Caida Securities built active-active clusters using SmartX ECP across data centers in the same city, enabling cross-site data protection and disaster recovery, thus providing strong assurance for financial data security and business continuity.
>>More Resources: Caida Securities: Transforms IT Infra to Meet Service Agility and Stability Demands with SmartX HCI [Interview]
Zheshang Securities: An Ex-User of VMware and Nutanix HCI Embraces SmartX ECP
Zheshang Securities originally used Nutanix HCI (with VMware virtualization) to modernize IT infrastructure. However, considering Nutanix’s service adjustments within mainland China, the company decided against expanding its existing Nutanix cluster. Instead, they aimed to meet future business requirements by adopting an alternative solution with equal capabilities but lower TCO. As a result, they conducted a systematic evaluation of various enterprise cloud solutions.
In particular, during the trading-order-simulated test, the database performance and stability based on SmartX EPC were comparable to those in the Nutanix HCI and vSAN environments. As a result, Zheshang Securities eventually chose SmartX ECP as an alternative solution to Nuatnix, supporting multiple Dev/Test and production services. This includes online transactions, customer relationship management (CRM), accounting, AI-powered customer service, online account opening, bond duration management, etc.
Currently, after multiple expansions, Zheshang Securities has deployed 100+ SmartX ECP nodes across two data centers. These nodes support various trading business systems, internet business systems, and GPU resource pools, improving IT infrastructure capabilities and cost efficiency.
>>More Resources: Zheshang Securities: An Ex-User of VMware and Nutanix HCI Embraces SmartX HCI
Shenwan Hongyuan Securities: Leveraging SmartX ECP to Secure Data Storage and Transmission Security
As one of China’s leading integrated securities firms, Shenwan Hongyuan Securities Co., Ltd.(abbr. Shenwan Hongyuan Securities) is committed to enhancing service capabilities and business resilience through technological innovation. Faced with the challenges of traditional infrastructure, including operational complexity, scalability limitations, and resource inefficiency, the company has restructured its IT architecture in phases using SmartX ECP, and built a highly cost-effective remote DR system to improve overall infrastructure agility and availability.
In the first phase, Shenwan Hongyuan focused on modernizing infrastructure for core systems such as asset management. After comprehensively examining SmartX ECP, DELL VxRail, and Nutanix, the company decided to deploy one SmartX ECP cluster and another DELL VxRail cluster respectively to run its asset management system. The high performance and stability of SmartX ECP strengthened the user‘s confidence in the domestic solution.
Later on, when building its remote DR center, Shenwan Hongyuan continued to adopt SmartX’s solution and constructed its DR resource pool with 40+ SmartX ECP nodes, providing backup for major trading systems, inquiry systems, and Dev/Test systems. The cluster used a 10 GbE network instead of an additional SAN switch, while the DR cluster’s performance reaches 58% of business systems in the production environment.
So far, Shenwan Hongyuan has expanded its ECP clusters to 120+ nodes, scattered across data centers in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong, to support more business applications and use cases.
SmartX and Shenwan Hongyuan Securities also jointly conducted the research project to verify SmartX ECP’s micro-segmentation capabilities based on domestic-CPUs. The project comprehensively verified the capabilities of Everoute, including network traffic visualization, micro-segmentation access control, security protection under simulated cyberattacks, network performance with Everoute enabled, architectural reliability, policy import/export functions, policy follow-up mechanism, and upgrade/maintenance features.
It turned out that Everoute passed all evaluations, fully meeting the VM access control strategy requirements specified in the “Cybersecurity Classified Protection Standards 2.0” – Secured Computing Environment section.
>>More Resources: Shenwan Hongyuan Securities: An In-depth Transformation From Legacy Virtualization to Hyperconvergence
SmartX ECP in Futures
Currently, SmartX has served nearly 60 futures firms, with over 750 nodes deployed to support core production applications, databases, disaster recovery for the main trading system, cloud-native transformation, and other business scenarios.
Guotai Junan Futures: Deploying Over 130 SmartX ECP Nodes to Support Core Trading Systems and Its Cloud-Native Data Service Platform
Guotai Junan Futures, a wholly owned subsidiary of Guotai Haitong Securities, has been rated AA in the futures industry for several consecutive years. The company has independently developed its internal business management system, digital office platform, and an integrated customer service app providing market data, trading, and financial information. To support these technology systems, Guotai Haitong Futures sought to modernize its traditional IT infrastructure, aiming to enhance both performance and reliability. Ultimately, it chose SmartX ECP as its cloud foundation.
To date, Guotai Junan Futures has deployed over 130 SmartX ECP nodes to support a wide range of production systems. This includes CTP disaster recovery, heterogeneous FEMAS main trading platform, exchange front-end, middle-office production, simulation environments, asset management, bank-futures connectivity, relay systems, and databases. The entire platform has been running stably for more than six years.
In addition, Guotai Junan Futures is actively exploring IT localization by deploying over 60 SmartX ECP nodes on servers powered by Hygon and Kunpeng CPU. These nodes have been gradually used to support OA and main trading disaster recovery systems, and since 2023, they have been fully applied to critical production systems, including the database management platform.
Guotai Junan Futures has also built a self-service cloud-native data service platform based on SmartX Kubernetes-native storage and a domestic RDS database cloud platform. As a result, the delivery speed of data services has improved dramatically, from previously taking days to now being completed within minutes or even seconds. SmartX ECP not only ensures the efficient delivery of services to meet application demands but also enhances the overall reliability and availability of the architecture through multi-replica data protection mechanisms.
Orient Futures: Replacing VMware Virtualization with SmartX ECP to Support the Majority of Business Systems
At Orient Futures, much of the existing IT infrastructure devices’ warranties had expired and required a complete overhaul. At the same time, the company was planning the construction of a DR center. The key priorities of this transformation were cost-effectiveness, stability, and a smooth migration process.
To meet these requirements, SmartX recommended deploying three SmartX ECP clusters to support the CTP main trading system (including production and historical core databases), the simulation system, and the trading DR system. VMs originally running on standalone ESXi hosts were seamlessly migrated to the ECP clusters using SmartX’s proprietary SMTX Migration Tool.
Before the upgrade, the IT infrastructure included dozens of ESXi hosts and physical servers, resulting in high management complexity. After the transformation, the majority of business systems were consolidated onto just 13 nodes across three SmartX clusters, and a new DR center was established, achieving the transformation goals.
Minmetals Futures: Achieving IT Infrastructure Dynamic Upgrade and Cross-Cluster Management
Minmetals Futures Co., Ltd. is one of the first futures companies established in China. With rapid business expansion, Minmetals Futures not only needs to build its own data center in its new office building in Shenzhen, but also to rent IDC for futures trading in Dongguan, Shanghai, and Dalian to meet clients’ demand for rapid access to systems.
The company‘s previous IT infrastructure was based on the traditional three-tier architecture with high cost and poor scalability. To solve these problems, the company introduced OpenStack, which, however, turned out to be difficult to operate and maintain, making it unsuitable for the company’s new business systems.
After a thorough investigation of various architectures, Minmetals Futures decided to adopt hyperconvergence architecture and finally picked SmartX ECP as its main IT infrastructure. So far, Minmetals Futures has expanded capacity 13 times with a total of 50+ nodes deployed, all based on SmartX ECP. The application scenarios have also been expanded to mission-critical systems such as institutional withdrawal (global trading system), asset management system, mobile apps, exchange testing environments, custody system, simulation system, DevOps system, and Dalian Commodity Exchange market-making system.
In particular, benefiting from SmartX ECP’s flexible scalability and support for heterogeneous hardware, Minmetals Futures used SmartX’s native hypervisor ELF to scale out 3 times (from 4 nodes to 10 nodes) and upgraded hardware through a rolling mechanism. The whole upgrade didn’t cause any disruption to mission-critical services.
>>More Resources: Minmetals Futures: Achieving IT Infrastructure Dynamic Upgrade and Cross-Cluster Management Through HCI
For more information on SmartX ECP, please visit our website and download SmartX ECP Product Portfolio Brief.
