Hyperconverged Infrastructure Accelerates the Development of Innovative Applications

To support the development of business applications on its private cloud, Bank of Tianjin needed to provide a large number of virtual desktops to its developers—ensuring both timely delivery and the protection of sensitive data. The bank evaluated two possible approaches: expanding its existing Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environment or building a new underlying platform to support the virtual desktop workload.

Bank of Tianjin’s original virtual desktop environment was built on x86 servers with centralized storage and delivered 100 virtual desktop instances for traditional application development through the Citrix platform. After running comprehensive tests, the bank recognized that SmartX’s ECP offers high availability, strong performance, and flexible scalability—capabilities that make it far better suited than the traditional architecture for supporting the new wave of virtual desktop workloads.

Bank of Tianjin first adopted SmartX ECP in late 2018 to provide the underlying infrastructure for its virtual desktop environment. After two rounds of expansion, the deployment has grown into three HCI clusters with more than 30 nodes in total. Built on SmartX ECP and integrated with the Citrix virtualization platform and VDI software, the environment enables a single HCI node to support up to 44 virtual desktop instances. By 2020, these three clusters were collectively supporting more than 1,200 virtual desktops across a wide range of development scenarios, providing developers with the resources needed to continue building applications for the bank’s private cloud and enhancing existing business systems.