Case Study: Aokang Group achieves unified, agile cloud storage and doubles storage utilization with Hitachi Vantara

Cloud Storage Pool From Hitachi Data Systems Transforms Aokang’s Storage Silos Into Agile Storage

Aokang Group, a major Chinese shoe designer and manufacturer with 20,000+ employees and thousands of retail outlets, was struggling with storage silos created by rapid growth: data scattered across IBM, EMC and HP arrays, poor storage utilization, degraded core sales-system performance, and rising management costs. Aokang engaged Hitachi Vantara for a cloud storage and virtualization solution, leveraging the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP), Hitachi NAS Platform and associated virtualization, migration and replication services.

Hitachi Vantara virtualized Aokang’s heterogeneous arrays onto a unified VSP storage pool, used Hitachi Universal Volume Manager and ShadowImage for replication and migration, and built a cloud storage pool with unified management and partitioned cache for key systems. As a result, storage utilization improved from 30% to 60%, storage silos and bottlenecks were eliminated, core-system performance and manageability increased, and Aokang reduced future capex and simplified ongoing storage operations.

Aokang Group

Xiao Zhong

Director, Information Center