Background and Challenges: Replace Physical Servers and Legacy Virtualization
ConnectWave is a leading e-commerce service and solution provider in Korea, formed through the merger of six companies specializing in shopping mall services, retail price information services, and overseas delivery services.
Following the merger, ConnectWave inherited IT systems from its predecessor companies. Most of their IT infrastructure was based on physical servers, without a separate storage system or a virtualization platform.
With limited O&M staff, ConnectWave found it difficult to manage the whole infrastructure efficiently as O&M engineers had to deal with numerous racks and individual systems scattered across multiple locations in two IDCs.
To enhance O&M efficiency and minimize IDC rental costs, ConnectWave decided to modernize IT infrastructure by embracing hyperconvergence (HCI), replacing physical servers and legacy virtualization.
Solution and Deployment: 16 Nodes to Support Up to 400 VMs
Initially, the company tried several solutions, but was unsatisfied with their O&M complexity and poor support services.
ConnectWave then turned to SmartX HCI for a 60-day proof-of-concept (POC) trial in November 2022 with the support of SmartX Korea. It turned out that the user was more than satisfied with SmartX HCI’s exceptional performance and top-notch local support. Additionally, the company was impressed by the various use cases of SmartX HCI in the e-commerce industry both in China and Korea, which demonstrated the product’s stability and reliability in enterprises’ production environments.
In early 2023, ConnectWave adopted SmartX’s HCI software SMTX OS (based on native virtualization ELF) and deployed one cluster with 16 nodes, supporting 300 to 400 VMs of shopping service systems, including Order, Payment, Stock Management, and Delivery Management. The entire deployment was completed in an hour. ConnectWave also efficiently migrated VMs from original VMware clusters to the SmartX HCI cluster with SMTX Migration Tool.
Currently, the whole system runs stably, and the company has been very satisfied with the performance.
Outcomes and Next Steps
Since deploying SmartX HCI, ConnectWave’s IT infrastructure has been strongly supported, with the following benefits:
- Integrate IT infrastructure management with a modernized IT infrastructure.
- Simplify IT infrastructure at O&M with a reduction of existing rack space by more than 50%.
- Reduce IDC rental and O&M costs while increasing IT system performance.
In the future, ConnectWave plans to expand the HCI cluster, supporting more application systems in the production environment.
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