Schneider Electric China Empowers Its Business

Overview

Challenge

• Keep up with the higher demands on core service reliability and processing power imposed by rapid business expansion.

Solution

• Gain a data platform for 100% data availability with enterprise flash arrays and flash modules from Hitachi Vantara.

Outcome

• Reduced database latency, increased storage response speed by 150%.
• Saved storage space without sacrificing performance, reduced costs.
• Delivered high performance, enabled "cold-hot" data management.

Challenge

An expert in global energy efficiency management and automation, Schneider Electric (China) is taking advantage of the acceleration of technological change to transform its business with innovative thinking. As it rapidly expands and transforms its business, the company was challenged to meet the needs of business development with its existing systems. The reliability and response speed of key services (such as the core system databases) were lagging, slowing the pace of innovation.

Schneider Electric, an expert in global energy efficiency management and automation, is transforming its business with innovative thinking. As Schneider Electric grew, it found the diversification of its business and the rapid growth of data volume was gradually decreasing the response speed of its databases. Its business users started to experience reduced reliability of devices due to the increased usage time of the core storage platform.

The company’s growing business scale and data volumes also increased the size of its backup systems, adding to database performance issues. In addition, data life-cycle management of systems and deployment rationality were becoming increasingly complex. The company needed a more powerful and efficient back-end IT infrastructure support platform.

Solution

Hitachi Vantara provided Schneider Electric (China) with a highly reliable high-performance storage platform solution that uses the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) G series, and offers 100% data availability.

The company’s Beijing Data Center uses VSP G900 systems to provide 100TB of flash modules (FMD) space and 100TB of high-performance SAS disk space. This configuration uses 80TB of FMD space for the core system databases. It employs 20TB FMD space and 100TB high-performance SAS disk space to build an automatic tiered storage pool for the virtualization platform’s core application systems.

The company’s Wuhan Data Center uses VSP G400 systems to provide 60TB of flash space and 90TB of high-performance SAS disk space. It uses 40TB of flash space for databases to ensure high performance and low latency. In addition, 20TB of flash space and 90TB of high-performance SAS disk space are used to build an automatic tiered storage pool for virtualization and other applications.

Outcome

Hitachi Vantara helped Schneider Electric build a data storage solution with high reliability, improved performance and a rapid return on investment. This solution allows the company to optimize business processes, enhance the user experience and accelerate business innovation.

VSP offers the industry’s only 100% data availability commitment, ensuring data platform reliability. FMDs enable acceleration that reduces database latency and increases storage response by 150%. FMD performance, with its lossless compression, can more than double storage space without sacrificing performance, significantly reducing storage procurement costs.

Hitachi Dynamic Tiering (HDT) provides a policy-based, real-time, intelligent, flexible, automated tiering function to deliver high performance. At the same time, HDT enables the user to make life-cycle "cold-hot" management decisions to optimize data governance. Hitachi Universal Volume Manager storage virtualization technology, combined with Hitachi Thin Image, enhances protection for the user’s core data.