Xi'an Qinhua Natural Gas Boosts Customer Satisfaction With New Customer Service System

Overview

Challenge

• Meet business continuity requirements and improve performance to meet demands of new systems and services.

Solution

• Meet business continuity requirements and improve performance to meet demands of new systems and services.

Outcome

• Increased customer satisfaction.
• Improved business continuity.
• Greater performance.
• Cost savings through reasonable use of older systems.

Challenge

Xi'an Qinhua Natural Gas Co., Ltd., is a natural gas supply company within China. With a goal to continually improve customer services and satisfaction, the company wanted to develop and expand its customer service system. The company’s customer service system is a comprehensive platform system that consists of operations, billing, customer service and so forth. As Xi'an Qinhua Natural Gas looked at increasing the number of services it offers, the company determined that its infrastructure was unable to support the rapid expansion of its online business within the customer service system.

Increasingly stringent business continuity requirements for public service organizations from the government, along with more demand for online services, heightened the need for Xi’an Qinhua Natural Gas to guarantee 24/7 business continuity. Plus, the increasing volume of business was leading to a rising volume of data, so greater capacity and performance are required.

Solution

To meet its growing demand for storage and data protection, Xi'an Qinhua Natural Gas implemented the hybrid-flash Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G350, with active-active replication enabled by Hitachi Storage Virtualization Operating System’s global-active device feature. Hitachi Universal Volume Manager virtualizes the existing heterogeneous storage infrastructure and Hitachi Dynamic Tiering automates data placement by moving the most active data to the highest-performing storage tiers.

The service team efficiently migrated the data over to the new active-active solution within a shorter time frame than expected. The team also ensured efficient use of Xi'an Qinhua Natural Gas’ original storage and IT equipment, which now enables data cloning and snapshot protection.

Outcome

By utilizing the original storage combined with flash drives and dynamic tiering to create an efficient infrastructure, Xi'an Qinhua Natural Gas was able to reduce the amount of capacity it needed to purchase and ultimately cut the cost of the project as a whole.

The Hitachi solution improved the company’s storage performance, which, in turn, helped Xi'an Qinhua Natural Gas to continue expanding its customer service system. With a focus on continually improving customer satisfaction, the company plans to offer even more online resources to its customers in future.

Government guidelines that require greater business continuity are being met with the active-active functionality of global-active device. Xi'an Qinhua Natural Gas services with not be impacted in the unlikely event of an outage. The company’s customer service system and services will continue for Xi'an Qinhua Natural Gas and its customers.