Online Credit Lending Platform Shanghai PPDAI Deploys NetApp All Flash Storage

PPDAI Financial Information Service Co., Ltd., a Chinese online credit lending platform, has selected NetApp All Flash FAS AFF8020 to accelerate its loans and bidding transactions in China.

Founded in June 2007, Shanghai PPDAI is the first online credit lending platform authorized by the Chinese government. With over 16 million registered users, PPDAI provides a safe, simple, low-cost, convenient and beneficial alternative to both borrowers and investors.

The company has processed more than 2.6 million loan transactions and over 12 million bidding transactions.

“As the first pure-credit-based unsecured Internet financing platform in China, we needed a solution that would support our exponential growth and protect critical customer data while keeping cost down,” said Zhenya Luo, IT manager, Shanghai PPDAI. “NetApp has enabled us to transform our infrastructure without disruption. We can now scale to meet customer demand and stay competitive without jeopardizing the quality of our service.“

PPDAI’s production systems, including its core database and virtualization applications, ran on NetApp FAS2552 storage systems with HDDs with up to 8,000 IO/s. With continuing business growth anticipated and storage performance expected to reach 50,000 to 100,000 IO/s, PPDAI needed latency to remain extremely low. To that end, PPDAI had a pain point to address: how to further enhance its competitiveness, while optimizing and integrating storage systems to save money.

To address this challenge, PPDAI enlisted NetApp to provide a flash-based platform that included pairing All Flash FAS AFF8020 with NetApp Snap technologies. The solution, which uses clustered Data ONTAP architecture, can be scaled both in capacity and performance for non-disruptive operations. With NetApp SnapMirror, PPDAI benefits from added DR technology designed to protect their data in simple, economic and efficient way. With its solution in place, PPDAI can accelerate workload performance without affecting data deployment, management and security.

With NetApp flash platform in place, Shanghai PPDAI is able to:

• Accelerate transaction performance by up to three times
• Obtain latency of less than 0.7ms in peak hours
• Reduce cost by approximately 60 to 70%, compared to the costs of the legacy spinning HDD
• Protect data while saving money in space, power and cooling
• Address the IT department’s requirements for scalability and daily management
  

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