lcfc ensures continuous operations with help from lenovo

2016 Lenovo Internal. All rights reserved.

Lenovo customer case studyLCFC ensures continuous operations with help from Lenovo

CASE STUDY MANUFACTURING

LCFC ensures continuous operations with help from LenovoLCFC (Hefei) Electronics Technology Co., Ltd. was founded as a joint venture between the Hefei municipal government – the capital city of Anhui Province in eastern China – and Lenovo. Funded by Lenovo and Compal Electronics, the company manufactures state-or-the-art Lenovo laptops and PCs for the global market. LCFC’s annual production capacity is expected to soon exceed 10 million units.

Round-the-clock operationsTo keep production lines running smoothly, LCFC needs its custom-developed, mission-critical manufacturing execution system (MES) database to be available 24 hours a day. But without any specialized data backup or disaster recovery processes in place, the company was concerned that any storage system downtime could result in data loss and interrupt production.

Overview Manufacturing company LCFC (Hefei) Electronics Technology Co., Ltd. needs its production processes to run reliably all day, every day. To prevent unexpected downtime from interrupting operations, LCFC worked with Lenovo to design and implement an active-active data center architecture. Today, fully automated failover between sites means that systems keep running in the event of disaster and production lines keep rolling.

LCFC’s existing IT architecture could not meet demand for round-the-clock operations. Previously, making even minor changes to the architecture would result in at least 30 minutes of MES downtime, sometimes much longer. Running one server for each MES subsystem also meant that if any server were to fail, the entire MES would go down – bringing production grinding to a halt.Furthermore, faced with ever-increasing production volumes, LCFC recognized that its existing IT architecture could not meet growing demand for capacity, performance and scalability. To ensure that it could meet both current and future demand – and keep its core MES running uninterrupted 24x7x365 – the company sought a new, sustainable IT architecture solution.Rock-solid solution from LenovoLCFC decided to overhaul its IT architecture. The company implemented one Lenovo/EMC VPLEX Metro with VS2 array at both of its geographically-remote data centers in Hefei. Connected by fiber channel technology and running as an active-active cluster, failover is fully automated – enabling operations to continue as normal in the event of disaster at one site.The company also implemented three Lenovo ThinkServer RD640 servers at its secondary data center as the basis for an Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC). By connecting the RAC to its existing servers in the main data center, LCFC’s Lenovo servers support the new active-active configuration.LCFC then worked with Lenovo to converge all of its existing storage arrays to a single virtualized storage system running on Lenovo/EMC VNX5300, providing increased storage capacity, better load-balancing and improved disaster recovery capabilities.Zero downtimeWith the Lenovo solution, LCFC has significantly reduced disaster recovery times. Instant failover between data centers means that the company’s recovery time objective and recovery point objective are now zero. LCFC’s mission-critical MES simply continues running as normal in the event of unexpected downtime at one data center, ensuring that there is no data loss and no interruption to production.


Solution components

Hardware Lenovo ThinkServer RD640 Lenovo/EMC VPLEX Metro with

VS2 Lenovo/EMC VNX5400 Disk

Array Brocade 300E Fiber Channel

Switches

Thanks to the easy scalability of the Lenovo/EMC VPLEX Metro solution, LCFC can now quickly and seamlessly scale its data centers to meet growing performance and data capacity demands. With a single converged, virtualized storage system, LCFC can make the most use out of its existing storage arrays, protecting investment. The VPLEX Metro solution also enables LCFC to scale or replace the underlying storage devices as and when needed, giving the company the flexibility to respond to changing business needs.By transforming its data center architecture with Lenovo technology, LCFC can be sure that production lines keep rolling, no matter what.

For more information To learn more about Lenovo Data Center Systems solutions, contact your Lenovo Sales Representative or Lenovo Business Partner, or visit: lenovo.com/systems


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