Cheers to Smart Moutai!

Moutai (or Maotai) is known as the "national liquor" in China. At Kweichow Moutai Co, Ltd, the country's most famous baijiu (Chinese spirits) distillery, it is made from a grain called red sorghum. Moutai is served at all national banquets in China and is often presented as a diplomatic gift.

Digitalization is becoming a new mode of production, and digital transformation is becoming a trend for all industries to achieve high-quality development. For Kweichow Moutai Group, it is one of their most important agendas to leverage on digitalization to lay out the future of smart development.

• Existing server and storage resources are no longer sufficient to carry large-scale business systems, an efficient and reliable IT infrastructure resource pool is urgently needed.
  
  
• With the continuous launch of new businesses, development and testing are indispensable. The development and testing environment need to be consistent with the production environment, yet remains independent.
  
  
• Network security lacks systematic planning and management. As internal and external situation constantly changes, it is necessary to build a comprehensive security protection system that is visible, capable to link and cover all layers.

By building a simplified two-tier network structure, more than 50 core business systems such as the financial system, OA system, raw material platform and budget system, can all run efficiently. At the same time, the horizontal scalability of the HCI resource pool provides a reliable infrastructure for rapid business development and realizes on-demand deployment of the test environment.

After solution deployment, the Moutai data centre has capabilities of security visibility, continuous detection and coordinated defense. While ensuring business continuity, it greatly reduces the difficulty of network troubleshooting and the workload of security O&M, and focuses on the protection of core businesses to achieve "business-driven security."

A Firm Informatization Foundation for the Intelligent Future

• Efficient Operation Reducing Energy Consumption
  
  After the completion of the Moutai HCI resource pool, the hardware is composed of 20+ physical commodity X86 servers and switches. Nearly 500 virtual servers run on it and it can manage more than 200 third-party virtual servers at the same time. It fully replaced the traditional IT architecture of up to 170 physical servers + shared storage devices.  The server room space and energy consumption alone have been reduced by 85%.
  
  

• Unlimited Expansion and Cost Reduction
  
  The use of distributed virtual storage architecture breaks the construction model of conventional data centre shared storage. Unlimited horizontal linear expansion can be achieved, and the cost is at least 20% lower than traditional shared storage solutions. In addition, through the SSD+HDD hybrid hot and cold tiered storage mode, the IOPS of the HCI resource pool can reach more than 2 million, and the throughput performance can reach more than 20GB/S, which is 5 times the performance of traditional architecture. The access efficiency of Moutai Group's large-scale application systems such as finance, OA, and overall budget has been effectively improved, and the user experience has also been improved.
  
  

• Strategic Linkage to Simplify O&M
  
  The construction of network security enables security protection strategies between various security domains within the company's network to achieve centralized information sharing and strategic linkage, which solves the problems of isolated protection of security equipment. The fully web-based cloud management platform has simplified O&M, "What You Draw is What You Get" business logic and real-time monitoring of business operation through the embedded application performance monitoring module. The number of O&M personnel has been reduced by 2, business launch time reduced from one week to one day, and Dev/Test environment construction time reduced from one day to 30 minutes.