China UnionPay Co. Ltd. has selected Cisco® storage area network (SAN) solutions for the integration of its disaster recovery and data backup systems in Shanghai and Beijing.

The integrated system will ensure business continuity, while improving disaster recovery and data backup. The new data backup network will provide a high level of security and easy access for hundreds of thousands customers.

China UnionPay deployed six Cisco MDS 9509 Multilayer Intelligent directors - two in Beijing and four in Shanghai - in the system integration. The integrated network facilitates real-time data replication between the company’s headquarters and its remote disaster recovery center. In this way, China UnionPay can protect its information assets and continue serving customers in the event of any external threat, including natural or man-made disasters.

The award-winning Cisco MDS 9509 Multilayer Director is a multiprotocol system that can concurrently support a number of SAN protocols, including Fibre Channel, IP storage (Fibre Channel over IP and iSCSI), as well as mainframe transport via Fiber Connection (FICON). Its architecture and innovations such as Virtual SANs (VSANs) allow integration with future, higher-performance storage protocols, and provide an open platform for hosting network-based virtualization and replication.

China UnionPay is the sole organization responsible for all bankcard transactions nationwide and it designs and manages a unified information exchange network for national inter-bankcard transactions. It offers processing, transfers, authorizations, error management, inquiries, and reporting of cross-bank and cross-country transactions to its organization members.