Background

On September 16, 2022, a fire broke out in the Telecom Tower in Changsha, Hunan, causing a large-scale disruption of business operations and significant losses. Similarly, Hunan Agricultural Credit Guarantee Corporation (referred to as "Hunan Agricultural Credit") in Hunan, which was also located nearby and felt the potential risk of such an incident, began to focus on optimizing its existing business continuity protection plan. In its new round of IT planning, disaster recovery on the cloud was prioritized to further reduce the risks associated with on-premise disaster recovery. Hunan Agricultural Credit's disaster recovery plan covers several key business systems, including big data budgeting databases and financial accounting systems. After comparing multiple options, it selected HyperBDR, a cloud disaster recovery tool from OnrePro Cloud, to implement a disaster recovery solution to Tencent Cloud.

Hunan Agricultural Credit is the largest agricultural guarantee institution in Hunan Province, serving all counties and districts. It focuses on solving the problems of financing difficulty and high financing costs in agriculture, promoting system construction, product development, process optimization, and cooperation between government, banks, and guarantees. It has provided guarantee loans to 31,200 new agricultural business entities.

Challenges

1. Disaster Recovery from  VMware to Tencent Cloud Requires Specific Tools

After comparing multiple options, the customer chose Tencent Public Cloud as the disaster recovery target. This required a disaster recovery tool that could support Tencent Cloud, and there were few tools on the market that could fully support automated disaster recovery to the public cloud.

2. High Business Continuity Requirements

According to the "Disaster Recovery Management Standards for Banking Information Systems," some core business systems fall into the second category of information systems, requiring RTO < 24H and RPO < 2H, which are relatively high-level disaster recovery requirements.

3. Limited Disaster Recovery Budget

The project had a limited disaster recovery budget and could not afford the high costs associated with traditional disaster recovery approaches that required 1:1 resource allocation for host resources. However, the customer still required business continuity to meet minimum standards.

Solution

1. Deep Integration with Tencent Cloud for Automated Disaster Recovery

HyperBDR has completed API integration with Tencent Cloud, helping customers automate disaster recovery from VMware to Tencent Cloud, improving disaster recovery efficiency.

2. Agentless Mode on Source End to Enhance Security

When the disaster recovery source is VMware, customers do not need to install agents on the source hosts, preventing intrusive operations. This reduces security risks and also improves disaster recovery efficiency.

3. Custom Snapshot Strategy + Boot in Cloud Technology to Ensure Business Continuity

Customers can set custom snapshot intervals for report databases and financial accounting systems to 2 hours, while non-core databases such as new business databases and big data budgeting databases can have a 4-hour snapshot interval. In the event of a disaster, HyperBDR will restore business from the most recent snapshot. The unique Boot in Cloud technology helps businesses quickly recover operations to the login screen on Tencent Cloud, reducing RTO.

4. Hostless Synchronization Technology to Make Disaster Recovery More Accessible

HyperBDR uses a hostless data synchronization mode to perform disaster recovery. During the backup phase, source data is directly backed up to Tencent Cloud's object storage, significantly reducing the cost of disaster recovery storage by over 90%.

Customer Benefits

1. Meeting Financial Industry Disaster Recovery Standards and Addressing Security Risks in Agricultural Credit Business

HyperBDR fully meets the customer's RTO < 24H and RPO < 2H requirements, continuously protecting the integrity and continuity of the customer's business data. It helps the customer enhance its agricultural credit protection system and drive major innovations in rural financial reform.

2. Low TCO Cloud Disaster Recovery, Excellent Value

HyperBDR enables disaster recovery from VMware virtual machines to Tencent Public Cloud. By replacing traditional 1:1 host disaster recovery with object storage, it reduces disaster recovery storage costs by over 90%, allowing the customer to meet high-level disaster recovery needs within a limited budget.