By Wang Jiaxin from Huawei

On October 11 2017, the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership (LowCVP) announced BYD Auto as the 2017 Low Carbon Champion. BYD Auto won the “Low Carbon Heavy Duty Vehicle of the Year Award” and, in partnership with Transport for London (TfL) and Go-Ahead London, won the “Grand Prix” – or winner-of-winners-award – for launching London’s first all-electric bus routes (the 507 and 521). These awards specifically noted BYDs incredible efficiency in terms of delivering the vehicles, operational capacity, and building infrastructure for the London project.

Founded in 1995, BYD engages in IT-related and automobile business for traditional fuel-powered vehicles and vehicles powered by new types of energy sources. With 30 production centers established around the globe, BYD is the only vendor worldwide that owns power battery and vehicle technologies in the new energy field.

Stretched ERP System of Unclear Causes

The ERP system is a core system that supports BYD’s three product lines (IT, automobile, and new energy). The original legacy ERP system could not deliver the necessary stability and performance to meet growing business expansion requirements, for example, the number of employees more than doubling, factory orders growing by 10% every quarter (reaching 185,000), and concurrent connections to the ERP system exceeding 60,000. To make matters worse, the ERP system took more than 1 hour to query financial cost control-related reports and the system would occasionally breakdown during monthly settlements, severely affecting the operating of the production line.

Troubleshooting with Huawei

As a leading global ICT solutions provider, Huawei offers end-to-end solutions that cover networks, cloud computing, servers, databases, and storage. BYD decided to team up with Huawei, a company with extensive experience in IT solutions, to analyze server memory, CPU utilization, networks, and disk response times. The team discovered that over 200 GB of storage data that was bottlenecking service access performance was generated in the ERP’s production system every month. In addition, the team found that the I/O latency was reaching 50 ms on the live network.

The original and outdated HDD-based storage devices in the ERP system delivered poor access performance. BYD wanted to improve its business performance by 100% without changing the existing ERP system architecture. Smoothly migrating applications without disrupting application systems was a challenge for Huawei.

Huawei OceanStor Dorado leads to a three-fold increase in BYD ERP performance

Based on the requirements and analysis results of BYD’s live network, Huawei provided the OceanStor Dorado all-flash acceleration solution which leverages all-flash storage. This allows the seamless replacement of existing HDDs, accelerating read and write I/Os of the ERP and BW systems and improving system efficiency. This solution does not change the architecture, database, host, ERP software, or O&M mode of the live network. The minimal change translates to minimal risks.

To prevent system upgrades from affecting services, the Huawei data migration team provided a set of data mirroring migration solutions by using host volume management software. These solutions migrated data from legacy storage to OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage without affecting ERP services. In addition, Huawei recommended that BYD run development and test systems, such as sandbox, on the legacy storage system to ensure return on investment (ROI).

ERP system networking

After the ERP system switches to Huawei OceanStor Dorado, the latency is reduced to less than 1 ms. With the query condition design and upper-layer platform of ERP, the data extraction time for BW data warehouses is reduced by 66%. Additionally, the report output speed of the MM, PP, SD, and FICO modules sees an increase of more than 200%. The time required to query material documents is reduced from 14 minutes to 4 minutes.

ERP system improvements

Legacy HDDs are configured with RAID 10 groups and both SAS disks and SSDs are deployed. To meet service capacity and performance requirements under these conditions, 40 U cabinets are required. Huawei OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage uses RAID 6 groups and all-SSD configurations, requiring only 20 U cabinets. This saves 50% on cabinet space and O&M manpower costs, while significantly reducing electricity and cooling costs. In addition, the estimated three-year OPEX can be slashed by more than 70%, ensuring competitive advantages for all-flash storage compared to traditional HDD-based storage.

Huawei OceanStor Dorado has now been running stably for more than half a year in the ERP system on BYD’s live network. BYD has seen noticeable improvements to service performance and reductions in maintenance costs. The IT system reconstruction has surpassed all of BYD’s expectations.

Inspired by the successful reconstruction of the ERP system, BYD once again chose Huawei’s Dorado all-flash storage to upgrade and revamp its DMS system. Dorado’s superb performance and robust stability have once again impressed BYD. It is expected that BYD and Huawei will further their cooperation through the smart manufacturing of “Made in China 2025”.

The post BYD Auto Becomes a Leader in New Energy with All-Flash Storage appeared first on Huawei Enterprise Blog.

Source: Huawei Enterprise Blog
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