Reliably powering mission-critical operations, GBase 8s shared-storage cluster enables State Grid to achieve 2,000 days of uninterrupted operation.
As the “energy artery” ensuring electricity supply for 88% of China’s territory, State Grid is facing the digital transformation challenges brought by the renewable energy revolution. This world’s largest utility must dispatch power demand from 1.1 billion users, while wind, solar, and other renewable sources have grown to rank first globally, overwhelming traditional IT architectures. Against this backdrop, GBASE General Data Technology, with its shared-storage database cluster GBase 8s, has become a critical pillar in safeguarding China's energy security.
The “Must-Answer” Question of Energy Sector IT Innovation
As the smart grid becomes the neural hub of the “Digital China”, three major pain points constrain dispatch efficiency:
1. Data Volume Demands
The dispatch system, acting as the grid’s brain, needs to share tens of terabytes of model data in real time across a three-tier architecture. With a fivefold increase in renewable energy plants over the past decade, the legacy architecture frequently suffered from “stuttering” during TB-level read/write operations.
2. Real-Time Scheduling Pressure
The intermittency and uncertainty of renewable energy impose higher demands on the stability and responsiveness of real-time grid scheduling.
3. Security & Disaster Recovery Standards
MLPS Level 4 requirements demand a “dual-redundancy” disaster recovery system spanning thousands of kilometers, achieving “zero data loss (RPO=0) and business recovery within 60 seconds”.
Seven Years of Collaboration, Three Major Upgrades
The partnership between State Grid and GBASE General Data Technology has been a process of gradual deepening and continuous co-creation:
2017: The first go-live adopted a “Beijing-Shanghai” dual-site architecture, with 2 SSC nodes and 2 CM nodes deployed in Beijing, and 1 RHAC node and 2 CM nodes in Shanghai. Full-duplex asynchronous log transmission technology effectively mitigated the latency over thousands of kilometers, establishing the initial domestic data foundation.
2022: To cope with the explosive data growth, the Shanghai node was migrated from a virtualized environment to physical servers. The physical reconstruction scheme significantly enhanced storage and computing power, easily handling massive real-time data processing.
2023: The seamless relocation of the machine room from Shanghai to Nanjing was completed. Leveraging the GBase 8s high-availability architecture, the migration involved zero business interruption and zero data loss, once again validating the stability of domestic databases in critical scenarios.
2024: The system entered a stable operational phase. It now supports over 350 microservices and 200+ applications, fully covering four core business areas: real-time monitoring, dispatch planning, security verification, and dispatch management, serving as the “invisible engine” of smart grid scheduling.
Four Core Capabilities, Tested by Energy-Grade Demands
GBase 8s database demonstrates robust capabilities in the following areas:
High Availability Architecture
Based on a hybrid architecture of SSC (Shared Storage Cluster) and RHAC (Remote High Availability Cluster), it achieves automatic failover within seconds, strictly meeting the energy industry standard of RPO=0 and RTO<60 seconds, ensuring dispatch data remains rock-solid and perpetually available.
High Capacity & Performance
Leveraging its Dynamic Scalable Architecture (DSA), GBase 8s effortlessly supports tens of terabytes of data storage — currently hosting 50 TB of State Grid business data, with a single instance containing 34 databases. Daily concurrent connections reach 1,000+, with peaks exceeding 2,000, and read/write throughput peaks at 850,000 operations per minute, perfectly meeting the real-time dispatch demands of renewable energy grid integration.
Ultra-Long-Distance Active-Active Deployment
It builds a cross-city active-active cluster between Beijing and Shanghai, enabling data synchronization over thousands of kilometers. In the event of a catastrophic failure at the primary site (Beijing), the disaster recovery site (Shanghai/Nanjing) can take over within minutes, ensuring grid dispatch services remain uninterrupted and seamlessly continuous, effectively guarding against cross-regional risks and providing a safety net for the nationwide power grid.
Full-Stack Compatibility & Enhanced Features
Fully compatible with the Chinese IT ecosystem including X86_64 servers, Huawei Kunpeng servers, and Kylin OS, it supports triggers, primary/foreign key constraints, UDR (User-Defined Routines), and more. It can enforce business rules such as “a plant’s decommissioning date must be after its commissioning date,” ensuring error-free, secure, and compliant scheduling data.
Real-World Results Validate IT Innovation Value
Today, the State Grid's dispatch model database has achieved over 2,000 days of stable, uninterrupted operation with zero major incidents, playing a critical role in ensuring stable grid dispatching and improving renewable energy integration efficiency. The full-stack domestic architecture reduces IT operation complexity, and long-term operational costs are significantly lower than those of foreign database solutions, delivering both enhanced security and business value.
This project not only validates the viability of domestic databases in core energy scenarios, but also offers a replicable IT innovation path for the industry. The reality of seven-year stable operation by the world’s largest utility, cross-country disaster recovery over thousands of kilometers, and 50 TB data capacity has proven the hard power of Chinese technology in mission-critical energy systems. From finance to energy, GBase database is leveraging successful cases in multiple demanding scenarios to drive the leap of domestic databases from “usable” to “reliable” and “optimized”.