GBase 8a Successfully Replaces Foreign Integrated Hardware-Software Appliances
GBase 8a MPP Cluster, an analytical database independently developed by GBASE, has completed the initial phase of replacing foreign integrated hardware-software appliances in the data warehouse of a large state-owned insurance company, resolving challenges such as high performance pressure, complex architecture, difficult scalability, and high expansion costs. During the replacement process, GBase 8a proved superior to the foreign appliance in functionality, performance, stability, and availability, achieving a 100% migration success rate with controllable workload, demonstrating that GBase 8a MPP can replace foreign integrated hardware-software appliances across various application scenarios.
Project Background
The data warehouse of a large state-owned insurance company originally used a foreign integrated hardware-software appliance. In the original environment: high performance pressure, with the appliance handling many data warehouse businesses and heavy loads—daily reports could sometimes only be updated on a T+2 basis, and monthly reports often could only be released on the 15th; complex architecture, involving intricate data flows and reliance on complex scheduling for data synchronization between heterogeneous upstream and downstream databases; high costs, due to the use of foreign appliances with a closed architecture and tightly coupled hardware and software, leading to high operational and maintenance costs; and difficult scalability, as the data warehouse's storage capacity and processing performance had reached a bottleneck, making vertical scaling impossible, expansion required service interruption, and existing equipment could not be reused.
Implementation
Pilot first: ACRM business was used as a pilot, with migration testing carried out first. The first pilot migration project went live within 3 months.
Warehouse migration: The overall data warehouse business migration was carried out in phases based on business priority, and currently the first phase of data warehouse migration is essentially complete.
Building active-active clusters with Dblink and inter-cluster synchronization tools: An active-active backup system for the data warehouse and data marts was established using GBase 8a MPP Cluster's dblink and data synchronization tools.
Building a big data lake platform and constructing a new system based on GBASE architecture: A big data lake platform based on GBASE architecture was built to ingest data from upstream business systems.
Gradually offloading the primary warehouse business: Starting with data marts, the business load on the original foreign appliance's primary warehouse was gradually reduced, core businesses were migrated, and the process moved from parallel operation to step-by-step replacement.
Deployment scale: Currently, 8 production clusters with more than 100 nodes have been installed and deployed.
Migration Process
For the entire migration process, GBASE provides GBaseMigrationToolKit, a tool capable of migrating heterogeneous databases. It enables online full migration of source table objects and data to GBase. With sufficient personnel and a comprehensive migration plan that covers processes and risk response strategies, the migration achieves standards such as tool automation, process standardization, task simplification, and risk minimization.
In this project, GBASE deployed two clusters (A and B) to carry the main business. The total data volume across layers such as SGA, ODS, F, DW, and DM exceeded 200 TB, and over 1000 programs were migrated.
System Architecture
Results
After replacing the original foreign integrated hardware-software appliance with GBase 8a MPP, incremental execution time was reduced from 18 hours to 7 hours, with daily incremental base data available before 7:00 AM—a 2.5× improvement. Monthly report execution time dropped from 48 hours to 4.5 hours, allowing data to be published before the 3rd of each month—a 10× improvement. Full execution time was cut from 7 days to 16 hours, also a 10× improvement. Overall performance improved by 2 to 10 times.
GBase 8a MPP has been deployed and used by hundreds of customers both domestically and internationally, making it the OLAP database with the largest number of deployed nodes in China. It has been successfully installed and deployed multiple times in industries such as finance and telecommunications, which have massive data processing demands, effectively demonstrating its strong advantages in architectural advancement, cluster scale, high availability, scalability, and security.