Rural Credit Banks Funds Clearing Center Optimizes Operation With Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

Rural Credit Banks Funds Clearing Center Co., Ltd. was founded in Beijing in 2006, with the approval of the People’s Bank of China. It has 31 nationwide province-level rural credit union associations including rural cooperative banks, rural commercial banks and the Shenzhen Rural Commercial Bank. Based on the business principle of “service, specification, innovation and development,” Rural Credit Banks Funds Clearing Center uses internationally advanced technologies and devices, develops the payment and clearing system suitable for rural financial features and explores ways to improve the payment and settlement environment in rural areas to better serve agricultural areas and farmers.

Business development demands virtualization

When building its various information systems, Rural Credit Banks Funds Clearing Center pays attention to the role of technology in business development. 35% year-over-year growth within the organization presented high pressure on the server infrastructure that supported the information system operation. With such rapid business development, it became critical to take full advantage of system resources, save floor space and build a more green datacenter due to increased power consumption. The Rural Credit Banks Funds Clearing Center agreed upon virtualization as the optimal solution.

An optimal virtualization solution

The organization is a long-time supporter of open source products, having deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux in 2011. With high confidence in Red Hat technology, service and support, along with an in-depth industry analysis, it became obvious to the organization that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization was the most stable and scalable solution.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is a complete virtualization management solution for both servers and desktops, built on the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor and oVirt — an open source virtualization management platform. The solution’s core is Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers. The system uses a virtual guest to support the server OS.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3 combines new enterprise virtualization management features with performance and scalability within Linux and Windows workloads at a low cost. The management system is a Java application run on JBoss® Enterprise Application Platform on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The solution provides more than a thousand new features, enhancments and improvements.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization exceeds expectations

To make the system more convenient and efficient for future operation and maintenance, Rural Credit Banks Funds Clearing Center has been able to customize functions. The flexibility of the Red Hat solution enables entire system function deployments to be scaled dynamically with automated, one-button deployment, system backup and restoration, system security reinforcement, system  monitoring and alarming, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization management and database backup.


Reduced hardware, licensing, and maintenance costs

Due to the numerous benefits, the organization chose to migrate from VMware to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. The migration resulted in reduced hardware, licensing and maintenance costs, as well as dramatically improved utilization and flexibility.

“Selecting enterprise-level open source products allow us to be more proactive. There is no vendor lock-in and more importantly, we are guaranteed technical support,” said Yoa Chunyang, assistant general manager of IT Operation Assurance, Rural Credit Banks Funds Clearing Center.

Cooperation with experienced third-party service partners allowed for flawless implementation and helped the organization better manage customer demand. “We now understand virtualization standardization, security and efficiency, which makes us confident in Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization,” said Chunyang.

"Based on long-term cooperation with Red Hat, the use of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization in Rural Credit Banks Funds Clearing Center makes us feel very secure in our decision to implement Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. The Red Hat solution reduces our cost and increases the utilization and dynamic allocation flexibility. The project is characterized by one-button installation, security reinforcement and fast backup that ensures the virtualization platform and data are secure. The resource dispatching and policy-driven workload balancing optimize the entire virtual architecture and provide more effective system maintenance,” said Chunyang.