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 funds and trusts industries, sharing customer stories and more insights into FSI digital transformation.
SmartX ECP in Funds
SmartX currently serves over 80 fund management institutions, with more than 1,100 nodes deployed. These deployments support a variety of use cases, including core funding application systems, databases, disaster recovery and backup scenarios.
Yingda Asset Management: Supporting Asset Growth with SmartX ECP’s Efficiency and Stability
The rapid growth of the business scale and the introduction of new business products and modules have continuously posed challenges for Yingda Asset Management.
Aiming to reach the 100-billion mark quickly with limited IT staff, the firm decided to deploy a hyperconverged architecture to upgrade its aging IT infrastructure across both the production and disaster recovery data centers, enabling efficient and stable operations with minimal staffing.
Now, the firm runs its core database applications and disaster recovery on SmartX ECP, achieving the same efficiency as traditional minicomputers. Under the strict requirements for the securities and fund industry, the SmartX ECP hasn’t experienced a single downtime incident during its three-year deployment. It also demonstrated strong self-healing capabilities during a previous POC downtime simulation.
By deploying SmartX ECP, the firm has been able to handle infrastructure construction and O&M with just a small team. The launch, distribution, deployment, operation, disaster recovery, and disaster tolerance of business products have also been greatly simplified.
SmartX ECP also improved the energy efficiency of the firm by reducing the previous 30 cabinets down to only 3 cabinets, which saves about 80% of energy consumption for the firm. The SmartX ECP helps the firm to replace the server room in only a week, which is impossible for traditional architecture.
In the future, Yingda Asset Management plans to collaborate further with SmartX to optimize resource utilization and architecture design to meet evolving demands.
>>More Resources: Yingda Asset Management: From 1.8bn to 100bn, the innovative IT infrastructure behind a booming business
Founder Fubon Fund: Streamlining Operations and Enhancing Reliability with SmartX ECP
Founder Fubon Fund, a cross-strait joint venture fund management company, replaced its outdated virtualization architecture, which suffered from storage failures and a complex DR plan, with SmartX ECP in 2017. Initially used for basic OA systems, SmartX ECP’s performance and stability led to its adoption for critical database clusters and DR clusters later on.
Traditional database solutions are expensive and hard to manage and scale. SmartX ECP offered Founder Fubon Fund a better alternative with its openness, flexibility, easy O&M, and lower TCO. The company used SmartX ECP to support eight multiple database instances, ensuring the reliable performance of CC, risk control, valuation, direct sales, UPRR, and other applications.
For DR, by using SmartX ECP, Founder Fubon Fund achieved a scalable storage pool for both main and backup databases. The ECP clusters ensured smooth operation of the databases with high performance and reliability. Costs were reduced by eliminating the need for separate solutions for database replication and DR clusters. The company also gained strong DR capabilities with fast recovery times, meeting regulatory needs and ensuring business continuity. The DR resource pool was also used for other tasks such as offering, transcoding, and exchange gateways, continuously increasing efficiency.
>>More Resources: Founder Fubon Fund: Database Disaster Recovery and Storage Resource Pool with SmartX HCI
Topsperity Fund: Replacing VMware with SmartX ECP to Run Core Business Systems, Including O32, TA, FA, and CC
After more than two years of testing and validation, Topsperity Fund selected SmartX ECP to support its core production applications.
Initially, the firm adopted SmartX ECP to host OA systems, website services, and Dev/Test environments. Upon verifying the performance and stability of the ECP architecture in the production environment, Topsperity Fund proceeded to build two production clusters based on SmartX ECP using the native ELF virtualization. These clusters support both ToB and ToC application systems, including core business systems and databases such as O32, TA, FA, CC, anti-money laundering, as well as order processing, websites, and direct market.
Through this deployment, Topsperity Fund not only upgraded its IT infrastructure but also successfully replaced its VMware virtualization.
SmartX ECP in Trusts
To date, SmartX has served nearly 20 trust companies with a total deployment of about 400 nodes. These deployments support a wide range of initiatives, including building private cloud foundations capable of hosting core business systems, shifting away from public cloud, enabling IT localization and containerization, and constructing resource pools for DR, Dev/Test, distributed storage, and more.
Huaneng Guicheng Trust: Replacing VMware with SmartX ECP to Support 10+ Databases and 20+ Applications
As one of the leading trust institutions, Huaneng Guicheng Trust is actively pursuing a comprehensive modernization of its IT systems, from the foundational infrastructure to upper-layer applications.
The firm initially adopted a 6-node SmartX ECP to replace its legacy VMware virtualization architecture, supporting inclusive financing applications. These included more than 10 databases such as MySQL and ClickHouse for online analytical processing, Java middleware, and ETL data ingestion services, totaling over 20 diverse applications. SmartX CloudTower has been used for cluster management.
After validating the performance and reliability of the SmartX ECP, the firm gradually migrated additional major production systems—including integrated business systems, big data platforms, and AI workloads—to SmartX ECP. This move not only enabled the replacement of VMware virtualization but also accelerated the cloud-native transformation of the overall IT architecture, delivering strong support for the company’s ongoing business growth.
A Trust Company: Replacing VMware vSphere and Tanzu with SmartX ECP, Achieving Dual Disaster Recovery Protection
To meet the evolving needs of flexible business development, a trust company initially deployed VMware TKG on SmartX ECP clusters (using VMware vSphere virtualization) to support containerized development, testing, and production workloads. However, with the growing demand for VMware replacement, the company needed to further upgrade its existing IT infrastructure and container platform.
Based on the proven stability of SmartX ECP clusters over several years, the company deployed a new SmartX ECP cluster with ELF virtualization on three Hygon-based servers to test SMTX Kubernetes Service (SKS). The results showed that SKS passed dozens of functional, performance, integration, and reliability tests. In particular, it demonstrated VMware-equivalent capabilities in key areas such as automated operations and maintenance, rolling updates, log management, and fault diagnosis.
Based on these results, the company redesigned and rebuilt its business architecture, replacing VMware virtualization with the SmartX ECP powered by native ELF virtualization and SKS. Both virtualized and containerized workloads are now hosted on this unified platform, with centralized management enabled through CloudTower. Containerized workloads are supported by SKS and cover four major modules: Trust Services, Equity Services, App Services, and Tooling Services.
The company also implemented disaster recovery protection at both the architecture and application levels:
- Architecture Level: Two SKS Kubernetes workload clusters were created within the ECP clusters at both the primary and backup sites, respectively supporting the production and UAT environments. The Control Plane and Worker nodes of these Kubernetes clusters are deployed through VMs, enabling flexible deployment, scalability, and rapid self-healing of the Kubernetes clusters. These Kubernetes clusters, created by SKS, are managed via the company’s Rancher platform, facilitating unified operations and maintenance for IT and development teams.
- Application Level: Dual Consul clusters were deployed across two data centers to form a federated cluster. This setup allows real-time monitoring of service health and enables automatic failover of specific business modules to the backup site in case of a failure at the primary site, without requiring a full-site switchover.
For more information on SmartX ECP, please visit our website and download SmartX ECP Product Portfolio Brief.
