Wanjiale, a household name of central water heaters in China, has leveraged SmartX Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) to build a modernized IT infrastructure to be fully geared for smart manufacturing and e-retail, as the digital transformation gains momentum.
Founded in 1988, Wanjiale has more than 30 years’ experience in the industry of central water heater and kitchen solutions. With more than 10 years’ efforts on informatization, Wanjiale hoped to embrace the industrial internet and smart manufacturing to gain more competitive edges in China market and globally.
Wanjiale has made the decision to invest in a major IT upgrade program to enhance the reliability, performance and capacity of its infrastructure, as its legacy IT environment brought Wanjiale unprecedented challenges and pressures.
Infrastructure Upgrade for Better Capacity, Scalability, Business Continuity and Less Management Complexity
Wanjiale planned to launch a new MES (Manufacturing Execution System) and migrate Oracle ERP to x86 architecture, so as to better manage the data flow from manufacturing operations.
However, with just 6 racks in its rack space, the IT resources were insufficient in terms of computing power and storage capacity. The legacy system was built with solo servers, which undermined its reliability and continuity.
Driven by the need to transform to smart manufacturing, we look to consolidate the siloed infrastructure onto a standard platform. My ideal infrastructure should be scalable, reliable, and easy to manage, to meet with the increasing needs from different business departments.
—— Mr. Dong Hui, Director of Information Technology and Operations Management of Wanjiale
With all the upgrading in plan, Wanjiale also wanted to eliminate management and maintenance difficulty for its IT team. Wanjiale’s IT team evaluated a wide range of options for the upgrade.
SmartX Halo 400, SMTX OS and SmartX Virtual Machine Services
From the PoC testing to a comprehensive comparison of different vendors, Wanjiale finally chose SmartX to build its IT architecture thanks to its proven performance, strong stability and ease of implementation and management.
Wanjiale is now running a wide range of mixed workloads on SmartX HCI’s core system SMTX OS, including MES and Oracle ERP, Building Management System, QS Lab Management System, as well as other general workloads on over 20 servers.
Fast and Easy Deployment, Strong Reliability, Investment on Demand and Lower TCO
SmartX HCI deployment was very simple. Immediately after completing the verifications, Wanjiale started to run its MES and EBS systems on SMTX OS thanks to its strong performance and excellent business experience. The distributed structure and flexible replication strategy have provided unparalleled reliability and business continuity.
SmartX HCI solution saved a large amount of investment, with total procurement cost reduced by 32%, energy consumption saved by 46% and an 8U server room capacity left for future use.
Last but not least, SmartX HCI allowed Wanjiale to track the usage with an intuitive and simple interface. Only 1 engineer is needed to manage the whole system and all the workloads.
“In the Internet+ era, we are actively embracing new technology for future growth. With SmartX HCI, we have obtained better agility, more operational efficiency and fast return on investment, which I aspired from an ideal IT infrastructure. Our IT team is also relieved from the system maintenance to focus on more innovative projects.”
—— Mr. Dong Hui
