Background

With the rapid advancements in mobile Internet and 5G technologies, industries are experiencing explosive data growth. In the era of big data, digital transformation and upgrading have become key considerations in the competition among enterprises, and Internet service providers (ISPs) are no exception.

In recent years, China Mobile Jiangsu Branch, or Jiangsu Mobile, has gained momentum in its Internet business. It is increasingly difficult for its conventional databases to process massive amounts of data. Due to demanding requirements for underlying databases, the company has hosted its core systems, such as the operations and accounting systems, on conventional centralized databases based on high-end hardware. After more than ten years of development, its databases have become quite bulky, providing numerous services with complex business logic. To ensure data security, maintain business growth, increase efficiency at lower costs, and to meet the localization requirements of China Mobile Group, Jiangsu Mobile has partnered with OceanBase to jointly promote its database upgrade project.

Challenges

1. DisfloorBanners of conventional access control technologies

The rapid development of its online business has attracted more users to Jiangsu Mobile. However, the increasingly complex and large databases,  coupled with the drawbacks of conventional access control technologies,  have made the data access permission management as an increasingly challenging task. 

2. Higher requirements for data storage encryption

As more media are used for data storage, the number of malicious data breach cases continues to rise. Data storage encryption has become a significant concern for Jiangsu Mobile.

3. Difficulties in data security protection

Due to the exponential growth of its business system, Jiangsu Mobile has to store data across various types of media to cater to different scenarios.  This scattered way of data storage, especially on foreign database products, increases the risk of data breaches. Moreover, to ensure data security, most databases with a centralized architecture are deployed in primary/standby mode. This setup doesn't support automatic fault tolerance and zero data loss simultaneously, and it cannot ensure data security in the event of a major database disaster. 

Solution

1. Three IDCs across two regions

Jiangsu Mobile has deployed OceanBase Database in three IDCs across two regions. This architecture provides the following features:

(1) Two primary IDCs are deployed in Wuxi and the standby IDC in Nanjing. The three replicas in the primary cluster support both data read and write, and the data is synchronously transferred among replicas using the Paxos protocol.

(2) The data in the standby cluster is synchronized from the primary cluster through logs. Three synchronization modes are supported to ensure the maximum performance, maximum protection, or maximum availability. The standby cluster can contain one or three copies.

(3) Based on the resource scheduling for business tenants, the primary zone is deployed in Wuxi. Some read-only business modules are supported by the standby IDC in Nanjing. Client drivers access the destination domain name through OBProxy, based on the specified access policy. Supported modes are RANDOM, ROTATION, and SERVERAFFINITY. Data backups are stored in the Wuxi IDC to improve the recovery efficiency in the event of a disaster.

2. Secure and flexible DBaaS mode

The business architecture of Jiangsu Mobile consists of several production clusters. Each production cluster is hosted in a specific OceanBase Database tenant for different business systems. The resources of each tenant are isolated to ensure that the conditions of a tenant do not affect other tenants. Data security for tenants is ensured through permission control. These features, along with the powerful online scalability of OceanBase Database, guarantee a secure and flexible database-as-a-service (DBaaS) operation mode.

Benefits

1. High availability of databases based on a distributed architecture

OceanBase Database uses a shared-nothing architecture with multiple replicas to ensure zero single point of failure (SPOF) and system continuity. Jiangsu Mobile has deployed its core system database across three IDCs in Wuxi and Nanjing, with three replicas provided. In this architecture, OceanBase Database reaches a recovery point objective (RPO) of 0 seconds and a recovery time objective (RTO) of less than 30 seconds. This means that OceanBase Database has the level-6 disaster recovery capability, which is the highest level in the international standard for disaster recovery capabilities. 

2. Reduction in hardware costs by 80%

The previous core system database was built on an architecture using high-end minicomputers and storage media from HP. This architecture cost Jiangsu Mobile more than CNY 4 million for purchase and more than CNY 300,000 per year for hardware O&M. After the upgrade, the databases for the operations and accounting system are now deployed in an architecture featuring multiple 2U x86 servers. Additional servers can be added horizontally to scale out the databases and increase the computing power in response to the business performance requirements. The hardware investment is only 20% of the cost incurred by the previous solution. 

3. Significant reduction in storage cost

OceanBase Database uses LSM-tree-based storage engines and optimized encoding methods to effectively reduce data storage space without compromising the performance. For instance, 10 TB of data is migrated from the foreign-branded database for the CRM system, and it occupies only 1.5 TB OceanBase Database space - a reduction of more than 80%. Compared to the previous Jiangsu Mobile database, OceanBase Database saves at least 800 TB space when storing 1 PB of data, translating to an economic benefit worth tens of millions for the company.