SmartX ECP: Powering Global Smart Manufacturing and Key Production Lines

With global manufacturing operations, Hon Hai Precision Ind.Co..Ltd. (hereafter referred to as “Foxconn”) relies on standardized MES and other informatics systems as the "brain" of its branch factories, making IT infrastructure construction and O&M a top priority. Moving away from a traditional three-tier architecture of VMware virtualization, SAN networking, and standalone SAN storage—which suffered from complex O&M, low management efficiency, and high costs—Foxconn is re-engineering its enterprise cloud strategy to simplify operations, reduce costs, and achieve unified management.

Foxconn's original private cloud based on OpenStack+Ceph was architecturally complex, requiring a minimum of 20+ nodes for deployment, which led to high costs and O&M difficulties. Recognizing that the SmartX ECP, powered by HCI, offered a streamlined architecture, simplified O&M, and superior elasticity—proven by numerous mission-critical production use cases—Foxconn conducted a POC evaluation. The results exceeded expectations: despite reducing server nodes by more than half, the SmartX ECP architecture still outperformed the in-house solution in both IOPS and latency.

Now, Foxconn has deployed over 40 SmartX ECP infrastructure nodes across branch factories in the mainland and Taiwan of China , Southeast Asia, and North America. At each site, enterprise cloud clusters support production systems—including MES, ERP, and integrated production management—across both DMZ and internal zones, alongside development, testing, and VDI environments. For internal clusters, users have replaced VMware with ELF virtualization and retain the flexibility to select their preferred server hardware. Furthermore, clusters across multiple global sites are centrally managed via CloudTower, significantly enhancing O&M efficiency.

In its development and testing environments, Foxconn leverages the SMTX Kubernetes Service (SKS) from SmartX ECP to provide flexible and efficient resource support for agile applications, including GPU-based workloads, while enabling unified O&M for the K8s platform. In DMZ zones, Everoute, also from SmartX ECP, is deployed to provide micro-segmentation-based protection, meeting critical requirements for data security and network isolation.

Foxconn has also deployed HCI-based stretched clusters across multiple production data centers to provide high-availability protection for MES, Oracle RAC databases, SFC (Shop Floor Control), and integrated production systems. This architecture achieves cross-datacenter RPO=0 and minute-level RTO, ensuring that even in the event of a datacenter-level disaster, services automatically recover within minutes with zero data loss.