Astra International Improves Decision Analysis Efficiency with Huawei’s All-Flash Storage

Established in 1957, Astra International is one of the largest conglomerates in Indonesia, encompassing 192 subsidiaries, with over 210,000 employees, and an annual sales revenue of approximately US$16 billion. Astra's core business concerns the manufacturing and sales of Daihatsu, Isuzu, and Toyota automobiles.

Key Challenges

With an increasing market share thanks to ongoing business success, Astra is now the leading automobile and motorcycle manufacturer in Indonesia. Astra's Business Intelligence (BI ) system is key to its success, providing data that supports efficient production and process planning, dealer sales analysis, and market forecasts.

Yet, as the conglomerate continued to grow, its storage system — including data processing and report analysis systems — began to suffer high latency issues and performance problems, particularly during peak business hours. At the end of each month, the report system experienced high levels of Central Processing Unit (CPU) use, resulting in sluggish response times and even periods of downtime. In response, when Astra attempted to migrate hotspot data from a heavily loaded storage system to a lightly loaded one, further service downtime during data migration was inevitably triggered.

Although a change was clearly necessary, any significant modification to existing processes would adversely impact the business. Therefore, while the storage system had to be upgraded, existing Information Technology (IT) system architecture needed to be kept unchanged.

Huawei Solution

Deploying Huawei's OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage solution was the natural choice for Astra International. Since deployment, system performance has been significantly improved, with downtime slashed to zero. In addition, legacy devices have been re-used and applications retained, allowing for a simplified IT system upgrade, minimizing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). No changes to business processes or applications have been needed, ensuring that business operations have remained stable and uninterrupted.

Significantly Improved Performance with Zero System Downtime

Replacing Astra's legacy storage system with Huawei's OceanStor Dorado all flash storage solution — incorporating Solid State Drives (SSDs), advanced cache management, and an Input/Output (I/O) scheduling algorithm — has significantly improved performance. Cutting the number of disks required by nine tenths, disk access latency has been dramatically reduced.

While data processing and report analysis systems now respond far faster to user requests. OceanStor Dorado's active-active solution means system downtime at the end of the month is now a thing of the past. With all systems responding faster to hotspot data access requests, the user experience has also improved substantially.

Re-Used Legacy Devices to Lower TCO

Huawei conducted comprehensive testing in its largest storage interoperability lab to ensure full compatibility between OceanStor Dorado and the existing HP storage system, the Windows operating system, and SQL server databases. Huawei's solution migrated hotspot data from the HP system to OceanStor Dorado, maintaining cold data in the legacy system without any change to upper-layer applications. Huawei's key focus was to keep TCO as low as possible, reusing the HP system to do just that.

Retained Applications and Simple Integration with the Existing IT System

Using standard, open Storage Area Network (SAN) architecture, OceanStor Dorado was smoothly integrated into Astra's existing IT systems without the need modify the original architecture, migrate applications, nor change the system's operations processes. OceanStor Dorado leverages volume mirroring technology to migrate data without any changes needed to the existing database and upper-layer applications.

Customer Benefits

By deploying the OceanStor Dorado all-flash solution, Astra not only eliminated data processing downtime during service peaks, but also advanced the processing efficiency of its BI system. The solution was easy to deploy and business processes and applications have remained unchanged, ensuring stable business operations.

"Just as we expected, Huawei's all-flash storage solution helped us overcome data surges during business peaks, improved the timeliness of the analysis system, and enhanced our overall decision-making efficiency," the supervisor of Astra’s IT department said.