Climbing mountains and chiseling stones meet jade, Haitong Securities joins hands with Huawei to achieve innovative practice of IPv6+network in the securities industry

The challenges faced by traditional securities networks
Before the renovation, Haitong Securities adopted the traditional two location three center deployment architecture. However, with the expansion of business and digital development, the network traffic between data centers has surged, and the traffic structure has become more complex. In addition, the widespread application of virtualization and cloud technology in data centers has made resource scheduling and operation environments between data centers more complex. Traditional securities backbone networks are facing new challenges:

Insufficient network flexibility: All business traffic in the backbone network needs to be forwarded through the main data center, and the network lacks flexibility to adapt to changes in traffic; And the access structure of branch offices, subsidiaries, and overseas sites is relatively complex, which cannot meet the demands of future cross data center business deployment and agile business deployment.

Low bandwidth utilization rate of backbone network: The rapid growth of business drives massive data to interact rapidly between multiple data centers and sub institutions, resulting in a sharp increase in overall traffic of the backbone network. However, the backbone network traffic uses traditional BGP routing for load sharing, and the load granularity is not fine enough, which easily leads to instantaneous traffic congestion problems, resulting in instantaneous peak differences between different lines in the current network exceeding 50%, and link bandwidth cannot be fully utilized.

Unable to achieve fine-grained traffic engineering: With the diversity of business types, the network not only needs to meet the low latency forwarding of business, but also needs to meet the high bandwidth requirements of market trends, data warehousing, and other businesses. The traditional BGP routing protocol can only manually adjust the routing strategy when traffic peaks, and cannot finely adjust the forwarding paths of critical and non critical services. The experience of critical services cannot be guaranteed.

Joining hands with Huawei for comprehensive cooperation, exploring new practices for the transformation of IPv6+backbone networks in the securities industry
Faced with the above challenges, Haitong Securities has conducted research on industry ecology and technology ecology in combination with the needs of future multi center deployment, taking into account technological innovation and typical cases in the financial industry. It has clarified the technical route of "network architecture optimization+IP protocol evolution" for the backbone network with two locations and three centers, and adopted technologies such as SRv6 (Segment Routing Version 6) and flow detection to build a next-generation backbone network for future business multi center and multi active deployment.

After more than four months of scheme demonstration, the consistency between practical effects and theory was ensured through a three-step approach: firstly, the feasibility of the scheme was verified in the local deployment environment to ensure compatibility with the existing network; Subsequently, a full-scale environment was set up in the laboratory to conduct fine-grained validation of the effectiveness of traffic optimization and operational visualization capabilities; Before the official launch of the business, based on the simulation of real traffic on the existing network, sufficient security verification was carried out for each link, and the business isolation ability of the scenario was deeply tested. After more than a year of theoretical research and practice, it was finally launched in December 2023, successfully exploring a path that is in line with Haitong Securities' digital transformation direction. As the first domestic securities firm to carry out full cross data center business based on the SRv6 backbone network, it provides demonstration guidance for the construction of backbone networks in the securities industry.

The new generation backbone network forms a modular deployment architecture with two locations and three centers, which has the following advantages:

SRv6 new backbone network architecture comprehensively enhances business flexibility

The standard modular new generation backbone network with two locations and three centers enables efficient interconnection among the three centers, eliminating the need for a single main data center for business traffic. Additionally, other paths can be used as backup paths for business, greatly improving flexibility. Branches, subsidiaries, and overseas sites can efficiently and reliably access the backbone network, improving the agility of business deployment.

Intelligent traffic scheduling to improve the efficiency of line resource utilization

The new generation backbone network achieves intelligent scheduling of business traffic through SRv6 and flow detection technology, building the backbone network into an efficient load balancing backbone channel, completely solving the problem of uneven link usage before. The instantaneous peak difference between the four different lines in the current network has been reduced from 50% to less than 20%, and the link bandwidth has been fully utilized.

Refined traffic engineering to ensure critical transaction business experience

The new generation backbone network is based on the SRv6 Policy bearer technology. When the traffic paths of transactional and non transactional services overlap and become congested, the low priority non transactional service paths can be adjusted based on the priority of different service tunnels, ensuring that critical transactional services are forwarded normally on the original path without affecting latency and bandwidth, and guaranteeing the ultimate experience of critical transactional services.

Summary and Outlook
Haitong Securities has achieved IPv6+basic network upgrade by building a new generation backbone network architecture with two locations and three centers, greatly improving the reliability, stability, and business experience of its services. Other branches, subsidiaries, and overseas sites can also flexibly and reliably access the backbone network in the future, comprehensively improving the company's business agility deployment capability.

In the future, based on the modular new generation backbone network architecture of two locations and three centers, Haitong Securities will continue to conduct innovative technology research and forward-looking design exploration. Through innovative technologies such as APN6, iFit, traffic compression, and network digital maps, we continuously enhance our digital capabilities, network visualization, and automated operation and maintenance capabilities, making new contributions to the company's transformation and high-quality development of the industry, and leading the securities industry to accelerate its digital transformation.