Since the outbreak of COVID-19, contactless payments have soared and digital banking adoption has increased dramatically. In Q1 2020, MasterCard recorded more than 40% growth in contactless transactions globally. In the US, which has traditionally lagged other countries in digital adoption, 35% of customers have increased their online banking usage during COVID-19, and banks have reported all-time highs in the number of mobile logins.

In response to rapidly changing customer behaviors, banks around the world have significantly increased their focus and efforts on digital transformation, recognizing the importance of getting this right in order to remain competitive and gain or maintain their market share.

Financial institutions in Macau have followed suit with the trend at a time, some digital-first players are rapidly entering the banking space, further putting pressure on incumbents to adopt cutting-edge technology to stay relevant.

In the same fashion, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) (Macau), the largest locally incorporated bank in Macau, has been rapidly accelerating tech adoption, choosing Huawei’s OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage to support its digital transformation and booming online banking activity.

With its online banking business now growing exponentially, the bank has adopted Huawei’s OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage to support it with higher performance, reliability and business continuity in the midst of increased online activity.

ICBC (Macau) joins a rapidly growing group of banks and financial institutions that are putting their trust on Huawei to help them meet their tech needs in the changing financial sector. This client base includes more than 100 large financial institutions globally, including eight of the world’s top 20 banks.

To address the limitations inherent to its legacy storage system, including limited scalability and latency issues, ICBC (Macau) has deployed three sets of Huawei’s next-generation OceanStor Dorado 5000 V6 All-Flash storage to modernize its storage architecture across separate systems in one data center in Macau.

Two set are now supporting the bank’s reporting platform, featuring four sets of Oracle OLAP data analytics systems. The remaining set powers other hybrid requirements, including its Virtual Machine (VM) Farm with more than 300 VMs, five databases, file server, and its email system.

Prior to switching to Huawei’s OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage, ICBC (Macau) had to rely on a clunky legacy storage system with limited scalability capabilities that was clearly unfit to support the bank’s growth trajectory.

ICBC (Macau) said in a statement sent to Fintech News Singapore that the OceanStor Dorado is equipping the bank with “the superior performance, reliability and 24×7 business continuity we require to compete effectively in today’s ever-evolving financial services industry.”

The migration of ICBC (Macau)’s mission-critical data from the bank’s legacy storage system to the OceanStor Dorado All-Flash storage was carried out with zero downtime for 95% of the bank’s mission-critical systems and with less than an hour of planned downtime for the remaining systems. Deployment took less than a month across September and October 2020.

Tangible improvements

This upgrade to the all-flash storage system is allowing the bank to overcome data surges and reduce risks of performance delay. Reliability, flexibility, as well as higher performance and 24×7 business continuity are other key benefits brought in by the OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage.

Access delays have been cut by 90% and performance speed has increased ten times. With daily reporting brought down to three hours, reporting efficiency has improved by 100%, delivering quicker big data analytics for faster decision-making to increase customer satisfaction.

Total cost of ownership has been reduced across the board with the Huawei solution’s small footprint, more efficient operations and management, and other innovative capabilities.

Reliability has also been enhanced. Previously, the bank’s data redundancy was configured based on a local active/passive architecture with no geo-redundancy. Additionally, the system’s over reliance on Command Line Interface (CLI) made it difficult to operate, causing inefficiencies in deployment, day-to-day operations and troubleshooting. The new all-flash storage system has provided ICBC (Macau) with the needed flexibility to scale to an active-active solution with Disaster Recovery in geo-redundant mode.

But most importantly, the new system is providing ICBC (Macau) with a solid foundation for new innovative, digital solutions to be built upon, allowing the bank to be more agile, adaptive and innovative while ensuring 24×7 business continuity.

Huawei’s OceanStor Dorado All-Flash Storage is a high-end enterprise storage series designed to provide ultimate reliability and performance. It comes with a built-in artificial intelligence (AI) module, that allows it to intelligently analyze workloads in real time to optimize the cache prefetch algorithm and read hit ratio, ultimately boosting the system performance by 20%. According to the Storage Performance Council, it is currently the world’s fastest all-flash storage.

1,145 government customers from 114 countries are reportedly using Huawei’s all-flash storage for cloud and database applications. In the finance sector, customers include Bank V from Russia, Piraeus Bank from Greece, and Itaú Bank from Brazil.

Huawei’s OceanStor Dorado 8000/18000 V6 All-Flash Storage won the Grand Prize in Server and Storage at Interop Tokyo 2020 in June.