Leading Chinese Automaker Halves Maintenance Cost with Solutions from Red Hat

With its new back-end solution operating efficiently and the legacy challenges addressed, one of China’s leading automakers can now confidently migrate any application to the flexible and adaptable Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform.

Increasing growth exhausts legacy platform

One of China’s largest automobile companies produces approximately 800,000 vehicles annually, while maintaining joint ventures with leading Asian and European car makers. RISC-based systems supported the company’s entire business, as running SAP applications is the core of their customer’s mission-critical applications. As the business continued to grow, however, this legacy system struggled to support user demands and lacked the flexibility and necessary agility for operational changes.

Compounding the issues affecting the legacy system was that business was rapidly growing. Constantly rising product demand corresponded with a taxing rise in data volume, while long term system performance degradation resulted in increased user complaints, sluggish daily performance, and costly overall operational inefficiency.

Aged, proprietary solution was not scalable

As the automaker worked to meet increasing demand, the limited functionality of the RISC-based systems hindered expansion and restricted the addition of new business capabilities. Restrained by the closed system, maintenance costs soared with a shallow return on investment (ROI), leading to fears that the company could not meet business continuity regulatory requirements without investing in an expensive hardware deployment platform.

With the problem now clear, the IT department began researching how to address these challenges and improve the enterprise system efficiency of business system operation. In the end, the company determined that an open source system based on industry standard hardware was the best course of action, and chose to migrate core SAP applications from the proprietary IBM Power System platform to a Red Hat® Enterprise Linux-based platform.

The Red Hat and Dell

To reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO), the automaker chose to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Dell PowerEdge Servers with Dell EqualLogic PS6000XVS Intelligent Virtual Storage.

The new system architecture consists of four separate systems: A development system, testing system, production system, and a backup and disaster recovery system. The migration to Red Hat started with the development and testing systems, followed by production and disaster recovery systems.

Better, faster, and lower cost

The transformation of the IT system has led to immensely positive results. Today, system performance is five times faster, improving staff productivity and enabling more efficient operations. In addition, reports can now be generated in 10 minutes as opposed to the two hours or more it took previously, translating into better and more accurate decision-making. Additionally, host task switchover now takes under five minutes and data backup efficiency has improved by 22 percent. Along with a 60 percent savings in initial investments, ongoing maintenance costs have also been cut in half.