Laying a Solid Foundation for the Window of Poland
Established in 1997 in Poland, the All Windows Factory is today a leading manufacturer of building materials and systems, specializing in the production of façade systems, insulation systems, and plastering systems for both residential and commercial buildings. The company has over 800 employees and 960 partners serving 18 countries across Europe, with 32,400 square meters of enormous production space that provides high-quality products and innovative solutions from windows and sliding doors to external blinds and glazing. The company also offers a range of services including technical support, training, and consulting to help customers achieve the best results with their products.
Having increased its production space, and with further future plans to expand into markets beyond Europe, the company realized that it was time to upgrade its IT facilities, in particular, storage and processing, as well as its partner network, scattered as it is across Poland and Europe.
All Windows has always focused on automation, with autonomous high-storage warehouses and semi-automatic logistic lines. Most of the machines are controlled by integrated software, while many of them require continuous access to services, in order to increase the continuity of the system operation, so the company was looking to make a fresh round of investment in its production facilities. Indeed, efficiency — in terms of communications, logistics, management, and data security — is key to the operations of any large company, and a lack of modern IT facilities inevitably holds development back.
Given its already increased capacity, allied to ambitious aims, the company's new IT system needed to be able to handle the most demanding scenarios. It was also critical that the system offered the highest levels of security and stability, to ensure the availability of data and services around the clock, all the while providing sufficient processing power to handle rapidly growing and evolving needs.
Understanding All Windows' unique challenges, Huawei offered a metro cluster solution, consisting of Huawei OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage arrays with HyperMetro, Huawei's active-active storage solution. The metro cluster combines storage cluster technology with synchronous mirroring, ensuring stable operational continuity and data loss resistance. With the solution, instead of building two data centers: primary and backup, they only need one data center with the A-A solution. During the unplanned power outage back in 2022, All Windows has maintained uninterrupted business continuity.
Such a solution is highly secure: it not only protects against data loss due to system errors but also serious failures — such as physical destruction from flooding or fires — thanks to the use of stretched cluster technology, each of the distribution and network sites is connected simultaneously to two separated geographical data centers. As a result, failure of any one of the data centers will not cause any system downtime or data loss. In short, HyperMetro guarantees the availability of data with a zero Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and a near-zero Recovery Time Objective (RTO) after a failure.
As a key part of the solution, OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage covers the performance and storage requirements for databases connected to the purchasing platform and warehouse facilities. Supporting the doubled storage capacity for the introduction of three-shift work. Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe), and the intelligent FlashLink® algorithm, provide a record-breaking performance of up to 21 million Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) and up to 800 GB of bandwidth. Achieving the heavy workload of production automation that run 24 hours a day without an interruption.
The solution is also powered by a wide range of energy-saving technologies, including Dynamic Energy Management Technology (DEMT), component hibernation, automatic power on and off, fan speed tuning, and an active/standby mode. Together, these energy-efficient technologies offer significant savings while slashing the company's carbon footprint.
Impressed with the metro cluster solution's reliability, automation, and performance when it was first tested in 2019, All Windows decided to go further in its partnership with Huawei and upgrade its network equipment as well. Aware of the company's precise needs, Huawei recommended S6700 Series core switches, S5700 Series access switches, and servers from the FusionServer family. With these new additions, Huawei provided a complete end-to-end infrastructure revamp, consisting of all-flash arrays with native NVMe architecture — guaranteeing super quick response times — high-performance rack servers for virtualization, and switches with leading Internet Protocol (IP) technology. The system's increased reliability and speed translate into concrete savings for the company. Employee productivity, to take just one example, has been boosted thanks to OceanStor Dorado's ultra-fast response times.