Case Study: State Grid Corporation of China achieves lower IT costs and freedom from vendor lock-in with OpenStack

USER STORIES How State Grid Corporation of China cuts IT costs, eludes vendor lock-in with OpenStack

State Grid Corporation of China, the world’s largest electric utility, needed a way to modernize its massive IT environment while reducing high licensing and service costs, easing scalability issues, and avoiding vendor lock-in. Its legacy proprietary storage, middleware, and database stack supported more than 100 IT systems across 26 states, but it limited control over data and made growth expensive. OpenStack and EasyStack were used to help build a self-controlled private cloud.

OpenStack helped State Grid Corporation of China transition from Unix-based systems to an open, flexible cloud platform, using projects such as Nova, Neutron, Glance, Keystone, Ceilometer, Swift, and Cinder. The company was running over 200 physical machines and more than 1,000 VMs on OpenStack, with near-automated operations that freed staff for other projects. OpenStack also gave SGCC full control of its data and a 100% open solution, with plans to scale to more than 50,000 nodes over five years.

State Grid Corporation of China

Huanyu Zhao

Database Administrator And OpenStack Operations Team Leader