Building a Distributed Enterprise Cloud with 1800+ Nodes to Support Multiple Core Business Systems

Guotai Haitong began developing its own mobile internet applications as early as 2015. The rapid expansion of these agile, fast-evolving services required IT resources to be provisioned quickly, as well as the deployment of related systems across multiple IDC sites nationwide to enable local access and fast, multi-site response. At the same time, for stable, business-critical workloads—such as centralized trading systems and wealth-management platforms—the underlying infrastructure needed to consistently deliver high performance and high reliability.

Recognizing the advantages of hyperconverged infrastructure—agile deployment, elastic scalability, a compact footprint, and simplified operations—Guotai Haitong initially adopted an international HCI solution in 2016 to support POC environments and selected production workloads. As domestic HCI technologies matured and the national initiative to promote the use of domestic IT platforms progressed, the company conducted a comprehensive evaluation of several local vendors in 2017 and selected the SmartX ECP architecture. Its strong compatibility with the bank’s existing cloud-management platform significantly reduced integration complexity.

Since late 2017, Guotai Haitong Securities has steadily expanded its SmartX ECP clusters to support both core trading systems and other workloads. The platform has since entered a phase of large-scale growth, with continuous upgrades to cluster configurations, including mixed deployments using high-performance servers from multiple hardware vendors within testing and simulation environments.

During the process of replacing its OpenStack environment, Guotai Haitong leveraged the flexibility of the SmartX Enterprise Cloud Platform, which supports both hyperconverged and disaggregated compute-storage deployment models. This enabled the company to introduce two differentiated architectures under a unified cloud platform, meeting distinct requirements across business scenarios and achieving meaningful improvements in cost efficiency and operational effectiveness.

Today, the SmartX Enterprise Cloud Platform is deployed across multiple data centers nationwide, with more than 1,800 nodes supporting a wide range of mission-critical workloads—including core trading systems. At the same time, Guotai Haitong is gradually adopting the SmartX native virtualization platform ELF as a replacement for VMware to enhance technological autonomy and control.

To align with national initiatives promoting the adoption of domestic technologies, Guotai Haitong Securities built a private cloud platform that supports multiple domestic chip architectures and operating systems. This unified platform has been deployed at scale across clusters running on domestic hardware and OS stacks, gradually replacing previous solutions and enabling a more consolidated and centrally managed technology environment.

Guotai Haitong has also set a clear strategic direction toward fully embracing cloud-native architecture. The company established a joint innovation lab with SmartX to collaborate in areas such as cloud-native storage, high-performance computing, and security, laying a strong technical foundation for future business growth. For example, the firm has combined SR-IOV with domestic cryptography acceleration cards to enhance both security and performance for trading workloads.