GAC R&D Center, founded in 2006, is the R&D and technical management center of GAC Group. It is responsible for product and technology planning and major R&D activities. In recent years, sales of independently-developed models have made much progress on China market. For example, Trumpchi GS8 ranked No.1 among all high-end midsize and large SUVs developed by domestic OEMs in the first half of this year.

At present, GAC R&D Center, with a total investment of RMB 3.8billion, has built several R&D bases: Guangzhou Panyu Center (headquarter), Guangzhou Wushan Center, Hangzhou Center, and overseas centers (ongoing). The North American market has become one of the new targets of GAC group.

For a R&D center that takes design capability as the core competence, data is the lifeblood. There is an urgent need to deploy a remote disaster recovery system that can avoid system failures and data loss due to natural disasters, infrastructure damage, human maloperation, etc.

Location of the disaster recovery system: Guangzhou Panyu Center (headquarter) and Guangzhou Wushan Center. The two centers hold a large proportion of R&D data and are the cornerstone of GAC R&D center. Besides, they lack disaster recovery capabilities and are likely to suffer from data loss and other risks due to accidents. It is decided to set up the remote disaster recovery system in both centers to ensure the safety of core data.

Previously, GAC R&D center tried to build a remote disaster recovery system between the two centers by using 2 devices for asynchronous copy. However, data synchronization was failed due to the problem of link and transmission mechanism. On the one hand, the centers could not satisfy the latency and bandwidth requirement of the previous disaster recovery plan; on the other hand, the plan didn’t support timing copy and automatic failover. This led to incomplete data transmission and a huge data gap between the two centers; therefore, data synchronization was impossible and data integrity was not guaranteed.

The new remote disaster recovery system aims to achieve high transmission efficiency, low latency, and replication at low bandwidth. The solution supports: regular remote data copy to ensure full backup, operation at low bandwidth (20MB/s), automatic failover to ensure uninterrupted storage, and disaster recovery for legacy data.

Challenges of this project are obvious: computer rooms of the two centers are distant (60km), low communication bandwidth between the two centers (20MB/s), small transmission cycle, large amount of variable data (up to 100G).

In response to the low bandwidth and large variable data volume, Inspur develops a remote disaster recovery solution with Inspur intelligent storage G2 as the core. AS5500G2 takes over the business of the previous devices. Inspur G2 series supports hardware-based real-time compression, asynchronous periodic remote copy, WAN optimization. At the 20MB/s link bandwidth, the remote disaster recovery solution can ensure data transmission efficiency, low latency, and data integrity, as well as complete the transmission of 100G variable data within a defined period.

At the early-stage of the project, a POC testing was jointly conducted by GAC R&D Center and Inspur to verify the performance and quality of the G2-based remote disaster recovery solution. Inspur solution passed all tests while being compatible with the previous storage devices. The success and efficiency of the solution boosted the confidence of the customer.

Now, GAC R&D Center is equipped with a sophisticated remote disaster recovery system that can fully protect the core asset of the center - design data. GAC Group, a leading brand in the automobile industry, can march forward to a higher goal without worrying about data storage. The project leader from the IT Division of GAC R&D Center said: “The success of the Inspur storage remote disaster recovery project shows the strength of Chinese storage vendors and we look forward to future cooperation.”