Featured content from our partner, Lenovo.
Background
Founded in 1992 in Guangdong Province, China, Country Garden Group is a property development company specializing in the development and management of everything from self-contained residential communities to entire smart cities. In 2016, Country Garden’s residential property sales exceeded USD43 billion, covered approximately 37 million square meters, and ranked among top-three real estate enterprises globally.
Country Garden and its subsidiaries aim to build green, high-quality, affordable housing for the benefit of the whole world, complete with rich public facilities, beautifully landscaped grounds, and safe and comfortable residential properties.
Challenge
Growing rapidly, Country Garden has developed more than 3,000 residential, commercial, and urban construction projects to date, and now offers its services to more than 4.5 million property owners globally. In addition, the company is diversifying into a range of additional sectors, including robotics, agriculture, restaurants, and hospitality.
Managing a large, complex, and tightly integrated operation demands careful control over both human and IT resources. As well as relying on SAP ERP business systems for the day-to-day running of its back-offices, Country Garden is also pushing data-driven solutions into its front-of-house operations. For example, the company’s subsidiary Qianxi Robot Catering Group recently opened FOODOM, a restaurant complex operated entirely by robots. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, voice interaction, and natural language processing are used to optimize interaction between customers and robots.
In the past, the group operated a traditional three-tier architecture, comprising many heterogeneous server and storage platforms hosted at on-premises data centers. With the volume and velocity of its business data accelerating year-on-year, and demanding new digital projects continually flowing in from across the business, the company’s IT team decided to look for a more scalable, future-ready approach.
We knew that moving from an on-premises information architecture to a cloud-based approach—powered by the latest Infrastructure-as-a-Service solutions—would be an effective way to increase our agility and drive our ongoing business transformation. To achieve that goal, we looked for an expert partner to support us on our journey."—Spokesperson, Country Garden Group
Why Lenovo? Always-On Performance at Scale
With data volumes rising fast, the clock was ticking for Country Garden to find a new infrastructure platform that could meet its long-term requirements. In addition, the group needed to switch over to the new infrastructure with minimal disruption to its core business services.
After considering a range of potential solutions from multiple leading vendors, Country Garden selected a hyperconverged infrastructure solution from Lenovo and Nutanix as the platform for its growing business. Based on 24 Lenovo ThinkAgileHX3721 Certified Nodes with high-performance 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors housed in a Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Enclosure, the new solution offers outstanding levels of reliability, availability, and scalability in a compact data center footprint.
Unlike traditional three-tier solutions, the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX platform consolidates compute, storage, and virtualization software into a central pool of resources. Using Nutanix Prism and Lenovo XClarity software, Country Garden’s IT management team can rapidly spin up new environments to support innovative services for the business, and efficiently manage existing resources with one-click analytics insights, patching, and firmware updates.
Our company cooperates with many IT technology enterprises. What set Lenovo apart was their strong reputation in the field of enterprise servers, and their excellent track-record for hyperconverged infrastructure solutions."—Spokesperson, Country Garden Group
Seamless Transition
Working with an expert team from Lenovo Professional Services, Country Garden successfully switched over to the new ThinkAgile HX platform with minimal impact on its business users—helping to ensure a seamless transition to the new hyperconverged infrastructure. Today, the company runs all its core SAP ERP applications on the Lenovo and Nutanix platform.
Thanks to integrated management tools in the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX platform, we can manage our entire hyperconverged architecture with minimal manual effort. The new approach significantly reduces our maintenance requirements, enhances our efficiency, and helps promote excellent service levels for the business."—Spokesperson, Country Garden Group
Results
By embracing a hyperconverged infrastructure platform from Lenovo and Nutanix, Country Garden has created a robust, highly available, and performant foundation for continued business expansion. The solution offers significant headroom for projected future growth in data volumes, as well as the flexibility to quickly and cost-effectively scale out compute and storage as the business evolves.
Crucially, the new information architecture offers Country Garden an efficient and low-risk path to the latest cloud innovations, enabling it to augment its on-premises software with IaaS capabilities. Improved compute performance and reduced storage latency will also facilitate Country Garden’s planned move to the next-generation SAP HANA data platform—opening the door to near-real-time, in-memory analytics in the future.
- Boosts compute and storage performance and capacity.
- Enables highly efficient and automated infrastructure management.
- Lays the foundation for future IT innovations.
Our hyperconverged Lenovo and Nutanix solution helped deliver on our urgent need for extra compute resources to support our key business systems, including SAP ERP. After more than a year with the new solution, it has never let us down—and we’re delighted with the stability of the platform."—Spokesperson, Country Garden Group