Building Dual-Architecture Private Clouds for Agile Business Needs

China Baowu Steel Group operates a vast network of steel plants across many places. These facilities are often geographically dispersed and remote, making it difficult to station professional IT administrators on-site for operations and maintenance (O&M). Constructing branch data centers using traditional models would introduce complex architectures and a wide variety of hardware, creating significant management challenges.

During the selection of a modern architecture, Baosight recognized that HCI significantly simplifies the overall stack, reduces O&M complexity, and lowers the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). This aligns perfectly with the urgent needs of branch steel plants for centralized management, simplified maintenance, flexible scalability, and cost efficiency.

Following product evaluation and validation, Baosight selected a leading HCI vendor and SmartX ECP as HCI suppliers for the construction of new steel plants. SmartX ECP powers the IT systems across newly built steel plants in multiple cities.

Depending on workload requirements, each plant utilizes an HCI cluster of only 4-6 nodes to support core production systems, including ERP, MES, industrial networking, equipment management, and integrated management. Regarding operations and maintenance (O&M), as SmartX ECP supports the existing virtualization platform, the O&M team in Shanghai can achieve unified management and maintenance for all dispersed plant locations.

To replace the legacy centralized storage in original production clusters, Baosight deployed SmartX distributed storage across both ITAI environments (ARM hybrid flash and ARM all-flash) and non-ITAI environments (Intel), conducting performance benchmarks against NetApp in the production environment. While the ARM hybrid flash environment utilized the H3C CAS virtualization platform, all other environments were based on VMware.

The results demonstrated that in most scenarios, the performance of SmartX distributed storage in both ITAI and non-ITAI environments was on par with NetApp, with even superior performance observed in specific scenarios.

Baosight has established multiple core storage resource pools based on SmartX distributed storage, including both all-flash and hybrid-flash configurations. These pools utilize a diverse range of CPU architectures—including AMD, Kunpeng, and Intel—to support mission-critical production applications, development and testing environments, and data backup services, effectively meeting diverse infrastructure requirements. To date, Baosight’s SmartX distributed storage resource pools have operated stably for over four years, managing a total data volume reaching the petabyte (PB) scale.