Industry and manufacturing have gone through three revolutions: 1.0 mechanization, 2.0 electrification, and 3.0 automation. Today, the new generation of information and communication technology represented by the Internet is triggering a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation, leading the industry and manufacturing industry to move towards a large scale. The era of 4.0 intelligence driven by technologies such as data, Internet of Things, and cloud computing.
From an internal perspective, intelligence can help companies increase production capacity, save costs and improve profit margins. From the perspective of the macro environment, my country has successively introduced a series of strategic plans and policy measures in recent years to promote the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry, promote the continuous improvement of the digitalization level of my country’s manufacturing industry, and finally build my country from a “manufacturing power” into a “manufacturing power”. . Under the combined effect of domestic demand and external macro environment, almost all traditional manufacturing enterprises have realized the importance and necessity of digital transformation, but only a few enterprises have really taken the first step of digital transformation, and most enterprises are still in the “need to”. Don’t digitize? How to digitize?” dilemma.
What is the reason behind the predicament?
First, the manufacturing industry itself has certain complexities. Traditional manufacturing companies often have huge systems for R&D, production, and distribution. Each system has different business requirements. Therefore, there are many IT equipment deployed, complex interface forms, and different communication protocols. Large enterprises even have hundreds of systems, which are like “chimneys”, isolated, large and cumbersome.
Second, conservative rather than innovative, the subjective awareness of digitalization is not clear. Many companies still have reservations about digitalization in concept, and are not resolute and incomplete in transformation. At the same time, they are worried that the company will lose control, so they dare not make too big changes. Some companies even think that “machine substitution” is intelligent manufacturing, and deploying an information system is digital transformation. The imperfect and inaccurate understanding of digitalization also makes digital upgrading difficult.
Third, the operation and maintenance team has a huge structure and high operation and maintenance costs. The complex infrastructure has high skill requirements for IT operation and maintenance personnel, and the technical foundation of traditional manufacturing IT operation and maintenance personnel can often only meet part of the needs of digitalization. Therefore, most traditional manufacturing IT operation and maintenance teams are very large. . In addition, conservative thinking makes traditional enterprises think that IT operation and maintenance work must be in their own hands, so few enterprises will take the initiative to introduce the assistance of IT operation and maintenance experts.
Fourth, the structure of traditional IT systems is relatively scattered, and it is difficult to export a large amount of data easily, so it is difficult to implement unified and effective data management, so as to truly realize data-driven digital transformation.
Where should traditional manufacturing companies start?
To successfully take the first step of digital transformation, traditional manufacturing enterprises must first change their thinking, dare to break old thinking and old concepts, and at the same time choose technologies and solutions that match their own business development needs and IT system conditions.
Take Yantai Xinhe Group as an example. Founded in 1992, Yantai Xinhe Enterprise Food Co., Ltd. (Xinhe Group) is a traditional food manufacturing enterprise. It now has a variety of best-selling condiments and serves 40 million families around the world. In order to meet the rapidly developing business needs, Xinhe Group decided to transform to the cloud.
In the process of exploring cloud migration, Xinhe Group is faced with the common challenge of the traditional manufacturing industry in the process of transitioning to the cloud – the coexistence of “old, middle and young” three generations of data. Historical data is accumulated and can bring advantages to the development of enterprises; however, to a certain extent, historical data is bound to become a resistance to transformation. A large number of business systems of Xinhe Group have caused the problem of data silos. Therefore, a major challenge facing Xinhe Group is how to transform the core business system to the cloud platform, while maintaining the normal operation of the existing business system, so as to achieve business stability and efficiency. reliability, and the necessary conditions for data availability.
After multiple comparisons and in-depth discussions, Xinhe Group chose AWS and Commvault to jointly build a digital transformation and cloud project for it. A brief summary is to use the technical advantages of the AWS cloud platform to build a big data platform or the foundation of the business core to carry out the system transformation of Xinhe’s business; at the same time, combine Commvault’s decades of data protection and management capabilities in the industry , and jointly help Xinhe Group to build a unified data protection management platform both offline and on the cloud.
Based on the joint solution of AWS and Commvault, after Xinhe Group migrated most of the original systems to the AWS cloud platform as a whole, the Commvault server was built on the AWS cloud, and the overall big data strategic planning was carried out based on the AWS cloud platform. By deploying Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to replace the original local data storage, Xinhe Group only needs to restore the backup data to Amazon S3 for disaster recovery, using its on-demand capacity expansion and flexible pricing mechanism to effectively reduce storage costs .
Through the Commvault data backup, recovery and management software, Xinhe Group has handed over the data centers scattered in Yantai, Jinan, Beijing and other locations to the Commvault system, so that the data can be protected locally and then backed up to the cloud, using the cloud platform As the core data storage pool, the cloud platform is used as the core to realize the backup. Xia Jundong, senior manager of IT platform of Xinhe Group, said: “Xinhe Group chose Commvault because of the scalability of the Commvault architecture and the ease of use, functionality and automation of the software, as well as Commvault’s advantages in data management. Decades of technology accumulation in the industry and a business strategy to actively embrace the cloud.”.
After deployment, Xinhe Group’s various data scattered on various applications and IT platforms have been centrally managed and protected, enhancing the reliability of data backup and recovery, making key system RTO and RPO from 8 hours and 12 hours respectively. It is reduced to 2 hours, shortened by 75% and 84% respectively, and the core database backup time is also shortened to within 30 minutes, which greatly improves the data management ability. In addition, Xinhe Group also introduced Commvault ActivateTM for data analysis to maximize data value, providing strong support for business data growth, and laying a solid foundation for its bold attempts to face cutting-edge technologies such as the Internet of Things and big data. Base.
It is reported that Xinhe Group is currently adopting a hybrid cloud strategy. The cloud mainly carries 2B and 2C services, including traditional mailbox services, while SAP remains in the data center, and uses Commvault solutions to back up SAP core data systems to AWS. , making it a disaster recovery center. Under this architecture, once a problem occurs in the local data center, rapid recovery can be achieved through AWS, ensuring business continuity and data security. It can be said that Xinhe Group has achieved phased results in the process of digital transformation.
What kind of thinking can the case of Xinhe Group bring us?
At present, most domestic enterprises are in the middle and late stage of 3.0, that is, they have achieved complete automation and partial intelligence. These enterprises are bound to be in the transition period from complete automation and partial intelligence to complete intelligence for a long time. More and more traditional enterprises are embarking on digital transformation, and there are also more and more solutions in data protection and data management.
Commvault believes this is a healthy development for the entire IT industry, and it also confirms that data protection and management is still a booming industry. In fact, Commvault believes that the journey of digital transformation will never end, and the next transformation and upgrade will definitely come before the current transformation is 99.999% complete. Commvault has discussed this issue with many customers, so Commvault has always been based on helping customers to achieve on-demand cloud migration during the current digital transformation cycle, while ensuring stability and reliability.
Commvault has maintained close cooperation with AWS worldwide, and has begun to cooperate closely at the research and development level. It can provide customers with high-quality services from various perspectives such as reducing the complexity of data management, data security, and seamless integration. . Commvault software can be integrated with AWS’s Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon S3 & S3-IA, as well as Amazon Glacier, AWS Snowball, etc., to help enterprises meet data management requirements demand, reduce the cost of data management, improve the availability of data, and have the opportunity to mine greater value of data.
As a successful case of Commvault and AWS helping the digital transformation of traditional manufacturing, Xinhe Group has once again certified the value that Commvault and AWS solutions bring to enterprise customers. In the future, the two parties will maintain close cooperation and continuous innovation, work together to help traditional enterprises realize the important transformation from 3.0 automation to 4.0 intelligence, and jointly build a digital-driven intelligent ecosystem.
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