Since its establishment in 2015, GAC Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Sales Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "GAC Fick") has become a "top soldier" in the post-joint venture era of the automotive industry with its outstanding performance.
According to the latest statistics, following the successful introduction of three domestic new cars in 2016 and the initial completion of the network integration layout, in 2017, GAC FCA ushered in an all-out attack on market performance and brand enhancement, with sales of 222,332 vehicles throughout the year. The sales volume ranks first among the Jinyu auto brands, achieving year-on-year growth for 25 consecutive months since December 2015.
The ancients said: "The last thing, the first thing, this is the most important technique to use the military." Obviously, GAC Fick has interpreted this concept to the extreme. Behind this, in addition to the strong product competitiveness of GAC FCA's domestic models such as Liberty Light, Liberty Man, and Compass, its courage to innovate and innovate in IT infrastructure platforms and new applications is also its success. one of the factors.
Undoubtedly, as one of the earliest companies in the domestic auto industry to use public cloud and hyper-converged technology platforms, and to use public cloud plus hyper-convergence to build a hybrid cloud model, GAC FCA's practice has proved that in the era of digital transformation, new The understanding and in-depth application of technology is an iteration from technical tools to thinking awareness, and it is also the general trend of industrial upgrading and evolution.
Behind GAC Fick's hand in hand with Nutanix
It is understood that GAC FCA is headquartered in Shanghai. The company is mainly responsible for the related business of all domestic and imported vehicles of the Jeep, Fiat, Dodge and Chrysler brands in China, including product planning, product sales, marketing, channel construction and other aspects. . For this newly established joint venture, although there is no "burden" of any traditional infrastructure before, it has a greater degree of freedom and more choices in the selection of IT infrastructure, but still faces challenges. with many challenges.
As the person in charge of the infrastructure of the Information Technology Department of GAC FCA said: "We are building a brand-new architecture, so we must not only solve the current needs as soon as possible, but also consider the future computing and storage capabilities of the infrastructure. A mid-to-long-term plan of five years.”
First, from the perspective of demand, although GAC FCA is a young joint venture company, most of its IT technicians are still transferred from traditional auto manufacturing OEMs. Therefore, many people's experience is traditional experience, and their thinking is also stuck on the traditional automobile manufacturing industry.
However, in this process, the "rigid need" to realize business online is not waiting for anyone. If you still prepare according to the selection method of traditional infrastructure, then both in terms of staffing and the launch time of the infrastructure , it is difficult to complete the business launch in a short period of time.
Second, from the perspective of cost, GAC FCA is headquartered in Shanghai, and the team works in an office building. It is also difficult to build a data center with high disaster recovery performance and high load capacity in the office building. Not only cost, but also environmental constraints.
In fact, GAC Fick currently owns more than 400 servers. If a data center of this scale is placed in a conventional office building, it may be a large amount, which is really difficult to implement. Not only that, considering the increase in business in the future, the number of its servers will continue to increase, and the amount of data will also increase, so how to manage these servers in a more scientific or simplified way in the future also needs to be done in the long-term. arrangement and consideration.
"In general, the challenge we encounter is actually how to simplify the entire IT, because the complex IT infrastructure will inevitably lead to an increase in the overall cost and a reduction in the efficiency of business response, so the simplification is endless. This challenge It existed in the past and will be the core of our work in the future." said the head of infrastructure of GAC FCA's Information Technology Department.
Under this circumstance, the Nutanix solution has entered the "line of sight" of the Information Technology Department of GAC FCA, especially the "software-defined" solution of Nutanix based on the hyper-converged infrastructure, which brings a brighter feeling to the eyes. . After going through a series of strict comprehensive evaluation system, Nutanix has become the company most in line with GAC FCA's plans and expectations for the future of IT infrastructure.
At the same time, Nutanix also participated in the whole process of GAC Fick's evaluation and evaluation, solution selection and final deployment and implementation, which really helped GAC Fick's new IT system to be successfully launched. As a result, GAC FCA has also become one of the first users of the hyper-converged technology platform in China's auto industry to "try out early adopters".
Hyper-convergence becomes a cost-cutting tool
Since the deployment of the Nutanix solution, GAC FCA has felt the huge benefits brought by the hyper-convergence mechanism. Not only is the delivery time of the infrastructure shorter than before, but the management efficiency has also been greatly improved. More importantly, the hyper-converged architecture also greatly reduces the huge cost of GAC FCA, specifically:
First, in terms of delivery time, Nutanix has a unique hyperconverged infrastructure that can scale infinitely horizontally. For example, after GAC Fick successfully completed the initial node launch, it increased node deployment by 4 times, and achieved smooth expansion in the process.
In the opinion of the person in charge of the infrastructure of GAC Fick's Information Technology Department, the advantage of horizontal expansion is that if the system resources are found to be insufficient, the technicians only need to superimpose the equipment, because the computing power in the background of the system is still the storage capacity, all of which are connected. Getting through means that as long as the infrastructure is online, it is also very easy to deliver resources later.
"This year's internal assessment shows that the average delivery time for basic resources of our business system is less than 30 minutes, which is unmatched by traditional servers. Therefore, even if more nodes are added in the future, Nutanix can smoothly support this process. It’s a very simple job, for us, we just need to put the device on the shelf and connect to the power supply and network, and use the Nutanix system to recognize the new device and add it to the resource pool.” He said.
Secondly, in terms of cost reduction, the benefits are more obvious. It can be seen from three dimensions. On the one hand, it is based on the reduction of investment in machine construction and peripheral systems based on the entire IT architecture. In other words, for GAC FCA, it no longer needs a large-scale data center room. In addition, due to the simplicity and efficiency of the Nutanix Prism management system, GAC FCA has reduced a lot of investment in peripheral system management software.
On the other hand, it is the saving of data center electricity bills. The hyper-converged architecture can condense all the servers, storage devices, and network switching devices in dozens of cabinets in the original data center into a hyper-converged integrated machine the size of half a cabinet, which can be said to save a lot. room space and electricity bills.
Not only that, Nutanix enterprise cloud operating system software also greatly reduces the investment of operation and maintenance personnel. The person in charge of the infrastructure of GAC Fick's Information Technology Department recalled that when he was working in a car company, the number of servers he managed at that time was about 200, and more than 6 operation and maintenance personnel were used, but now the number of servers under management is 400 Compared with the previous one, the number of operation and maintenance personnel has indeed been greatly reduced.
Now, through Nutanix's products and solutions, GAC FCA's hybrid cloud architecture supports 50 business systems and manages more than 400 servers, while the annual investment is greatly reduced. This is the digital transformation of GAC FCA. And technological innovation has undoubtedly laid a solid foundation.
Inspiration from GAC FCA
Obviously, the hyper-converged architecture, with the characteristics of "safety, reliability, efficiency, flexibility, and ease of use" that is superior to the traditional IT architecture, can be said to have played a good role in promoting the digital transformation of automobile enterprises.
In this regard, the person in charge of the infrastructure of GAC FCA's Information Technology Department felt the same way, "From the beginning of my understanding of the technical characteristics of Nutanix to the actual use, my own feeling is that this hyper-converged architecture will definitely replace the traditional SAN architecture. And 100% will replace.”
In this process, the super-strong I/O performance released by the hyper-converged architecture far exceeded his expectations. In his original words, that is: "When I showed the performance of Nutanix to the group peers, It really shocked their jaws, and I was quite surprised, because after the deployment was completed, no one expected that the I/O performance would be so powerful.”
It is understood that the production environment of all business systems of GAC FCA currently runs in the Nutanix environment, including SAP, sales system DMS, virtual desktop, mail system, data warehouse, DBC, etc. Such a huge system application only occupies Nutanix solution. The scheme uses 50% of the system performance, leaving a lot of space for the system performance required for disaster recovery redundancy. In addition, Nutanix's solution has high availability, even if any two nodes are interrupted and two physical servers are down at the same time, the business system operation will not be affected in any way.
"In the original expectation, we hoped that after all the services were launched, the system performance would be good if the remaining 30% of the system performance was left, but 50% of the system performance was not expected but not used. Therefore, after all the deployment of Nutanix, the operation and maintenance pressure brought to me, It's really much smaller, and I'm very satisfied with it." said the person in charge of the infrastructure of GAC FCA's Information Technology Department.
Epilogue
In general, GAC FCA's deployment of the Nutanix enterprise cloud operating system software has brought a revelation to the industry, that is, with rising costs, intensified competition in the industry, and mandatory popularization of new energy, the automotive industry is facing an ever-increasing number of challenges and pressures.
However, the promotion and application of hyper-converged infrastructure can be said to bring unprecedented possibilities to the automotive industry, so that various challenges and problems can be easily addressed. From this perspective, Nutanix enterprise cloud operating system software does provide an optimal choice for the automotive industry to achieve digital transformation and improve business efficiency in the "Internet +" era.
Shen Yao's Science and Technology Observation was founded by Shen Yao (WeChat: shenyao) , a cross-border technology media person . He has 15 years of media work experience and has experience in self-driving on 100,000 kilometers of highways in China and the United States. Column, dedicated to the observation and thinking of the technology industry, here to understand the technology industry, know the trend, and win the future!