Manufacturing private cloud case: EasyStack hyper-convergence helps Coca-Cola's bottling operation system to upgrade steadily

With 133 years of history, Coca-Cola has always been a master in marketing. From the curved bottle that looks like a skirt to the lyrics bottle and the urban modern can, Coca-Cola has always tried to add value to the small bottle while selling beverages. For this reason, the work of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company has become extremely important.

Data shows that 1.7 billion people around the world drink Coca-Cola products every day, and about 19,400 bottles of beverages are sold every second. In China, Coca-Cola provides consumers with 17 brands and more than 60 beverages. Among them, Coca-Cola Bottling Company Management Services (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as: Coca-Cola Bottling Company) has more than 20 beverage production lines, mainly producing Coca-Cola's "Minute Maid", "Queer" juice drinks, "Powerade" fruit-flavored nutrient drinks and other beverages. Behind such a huge production and sales volume, Coca-Cola Bottling Company must not only ensure the stable operation of the entire assembly line operation system, but also flexibly support order peaks. To this end, Coca-Cola Bottling Company upgraded its IT infrastructure to a fully symmetrical distributed microservice architecture to strongly support the integrated management and control of product production and sales.

Challenge

As the world's largest beverage company, Coca-Cola is also an industry leader in information technology. Coca-Cola Bottling Company has already completed the construction of production information technology and achieved integrated management and control of product production and sales. Due to the limitations of early technical capabilities, its business system is still carried out through bare metal. A large number of discrete bare metal resources lead to high management costs, low IT resource utilization, and the lack of flexible architecture also makes it impossible to build a standardized IT service process.

On the other hand, for complex business systems, once they suffer unpredictable failures, the business recovery time is much longer than other systems, and a lot of manual intervention is required in the recovery process, which greatly increases management costs and operation and maintenance risks.

Limited by the traditional IT infrastructure, the information development process of Coca-Cola Bottling Company has slowed down. The introduction of new technologies and new functions involves a lot of transformation work and high risks, and IT resource utilization and management costs have repeatedly been challenged. The exposure of these IT problems has become a bottleneck in the development of Coca-Cola Bottling Company.

Solutions

In early 2017, Coca-Cola Bottling Company started a plan to transform its infrastructure. After careful needs analysis and sorting, Coca-Cola Bottling Company hoped to achieve the following improvements: 1. Business system robustness and rapid recovery capabilities; 2. Intelligent operation and maintenance to improve IT management and utilization; 3. Improve IT system elasticity and quickly implement new application systems.

After multiple rounds of communication, demand research and analysis, Coca-Cola Bottling Company finally decided to adopt EasyStack's ECS Stack (ECS Stack) to unify the resources of nearly 100 business systems and office systems such as the existing enterprise management system, finished product warehouse LED, quality management, etc., and encapsulate applications in the form of a service catalog to enable the transition from traditional operation and maintenance to operations, accelerate business launch, improve service efficiency, and ultimately achieve gradual cloudification.

During the implementation process, the "out-of-the-box" feature of ECS Stack ensured the business continuity of Coca-Cola Bottling Company. In addition, the on-demand expansion capability of ECS Stack also effectively alleviated the cost pressure of Coca-Cola Bottling Company at the beginning of the project.

EasyStack helped Coca-Cola Bottling Company build a new IT infrastructure that is stable, efficient, simple and easy to manage through ECS Stack. The system has been running stably to date, and its horizontal and vertical scalability also provides unlimited possibilities for the future IT development of Coca-Cola Bottling Company.

From the O&M perspective, the intelligent O&M, comprehensive monitoring, and seamless upgrade capabilities of ECS Stack greatly reduce the workload of O&M personnel.

From a resource perspective, ECS Stack has made a significant leap forward for Coca-Cola Bottling Company in terms of comprehensive pooling and unified management of IaaS resources. Soon after the first phase of the project was highly recognized by Coca-Cola Bottling Company, the second phase of the project was launched.

In the second phase of construction, the multi-copy feature of ECS Stack distributed storage ESS has increased data availability to 99.999%. Through the high integration of backup components with ECS Stack, ECS Stack components can be called to automatically perform backup work without manual intervention;

Moreover, once an unpredictable disaster occurs, the backup component can restore the virtual machines hosted by the original ECS Stack to the newly expanded ECS Stack, which undoubtedly enhances Coca-Cola Bottling Company's ability to deal with platform-level failures or disasters.

Values

• A standardized IT service process is built to quickly launch businesses, realizing automated orchestration of basic resource pools.
• ECS Stack's fully symmetrical distributed microservice architecture enables smooth online system upgrades.
• The decentralized design of software and hardware can achieve no single point of risk.
• It realizes automatic backup and one-click recovery of virtual machines, and lays the foundation for platform-level disaster recovery.