CASE STUDYDENSO IT SolutionsGeoAPJIndustryTechnologyCompanyDENSO IT Solutions (DNITS)www.dnitsol.comUse Case•VMware® Private CloudDENSO IT Solutions is a wholly-owned subsidiary of DENSO Corporation, a leading global manufacturer of automotive parts. After years of repetitive capacity expansions of legacy storage systems that required downtime and complex management, the company turned to Pure Storage®for an efficient, reliable, easy-to-manage, and greener infrastructure that meets current and future user needs. Business TransformationDENSO IT Solutions (DNITS) is now able to provide a non-disruptive user experience with its private cloud infrastructure that supports the entire DENSO group while improving performance and operational efficiency. This transition meets their sustainability initiative by reducing space and power consumption.Challenges•Achieve high availability and resiliency for non-disruptive operations.•Eliminate forklift upgrades.•Avoid data migration.•Save power consumption and space requirements.Solution Benefits •Switching to FlashArray™ all-flash storage enabled the company to meetsustainability standards on power and space.•DNITS is prepared for future expansion and innovation by reducing the riskof forklift upgrades with the Pure Evergreen™ Storage solution.
CASE STUDYPrivate Cloud Provider for Global Automotive Parts ManufacturerDENSO IT Solutions, Inc. (DNITS), an IT solution provider, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of DENSO Corporation, which is a leading global manufacturer of automotive parts, headquartered in Kariya City, Aichi Prefecture of Japan. DNITS provides IT infrastructures including a private cloud environment called ALADIN (Attractive Landmark for All DENSO Infrastructure) for DENSO Corporation and its subsidiaries (DENSO). ALADIN helps DENSO improve the speed of their business and reduce cost as a secure, low-cost infrastructure. It also contributes to Green, a sustainability initiative as part of DENSO’s long-term commitment to 2030.“ALADIN has a virtualization infrastructure that is intended to run their virtual servers on VMware ESX. ALADIN provisions DENSO’s virtual servers for operating applications and provisions storage volumes for storing data. While the main production system is at the headquarters in Kariya City, a replication site is in the GTA (Greater Tokyo Area) for disaster recovery. In addition to providing standby operation, the GTA site provides production services with active/active configuration,” said Yoshitaka Tozaki, a member of the IT Infrastructure Development Office in the IT Services Department, who oversees planning, evaluation, and deployment.Since the first deployment of ALADIN in 2011, it has been regularly upgraded and expanded by several hundred terabytes annually and now in its sixth generation. Adding storage capacity to the legacy systems has been the main factor of expansion. As a result, the current capacity has reached several petabytes. Since 2016, the administrators have been facing the challenge of replacing the outdated systems originally installed from their first deployment.Choosing Pure Storage FlashArray™To add storage to ALADIN, DNITS deployed two Pure Storage FlashArray//M70 R2s (315 TB each) in 2017, and added another two FlashArray//X90 R2s (556 TB each) the following year. The storage is distributed in Kariya and the GTA for replication. “We had deployed Pure Storage’s FlashArrays for another system, and we were able to see their performance and usability through the experience,” said Yasuhiro Ishida, Deputy Director of IT Services Department and the head of ALADIN. “Pure Evergreen Storage enabled us to avoid a tremendous amount of risk associated with forklift upgrades to replace outdated storage. That’s why we selected Pure for ALADIN.” This solution was proposed by the systems integrator, ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation (CTC) who carries a large portfolio of products from various vendors. “CTC recommended Pure Storage as the most optimized solution for us.”In the automobile industry, the company has seen rapid advances in digital transformation — for example, innovation in design and manufacturing leveraging new technologies such as Digital Twin. There also is an increase in artificial intelligence (AI) use and a large amount of sensor data for practical implementation of autonomous driving vehicles. Under these conditions, the amount of data held in ALADIN’s storage and its ability to expand easily can turn into a game of cat and mouse — where storage upgrades for performance, capacity and features are constant to support the increasing demands for more data.“Data accumulated by the user companies has increased year by year, and we have been adding the storage capacity based on the prediction,” said Yoshitaka Tozaki. “The level of expectation for our operations is very high in terms of stability and reliability, and it is important that we can build, operate, and manage our systems while maintaining