August 12, 2022
Guodian Nanjing Automation Co., Ltd (also known as SAC) is the first high-tech enterprise of the state power system listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and enjoys the reputation of ”No.1 power high-tech share in China”. The company offers power grid automation, industrial automation for power plants, rail transportation, information security, and electronics. SAC aims to grow into an industry-leading and world-class high-tech listed company. It has about 5,000 employees in three campuses in Nanjing with an annual output value of over RMB 5 billion. SAC now has 300+ network devices to ensure its business.
CHALLENGES
SAC has three campus network systems, with more than 4,000 employees relying on network services, but only one engineer is dedicated to network maintenance. In the absence of network maintenance personnel and network monitoring equipment, network fault handling becomes extremely passive, wasting time and money. When a network device fails, the staff must inform the person in charge of network maintenance by phone, who will conduct field troubleshooting after confirming the specific failure. “For example, you have to check each of the five or six switches in a sub-server room and then go to the site for troubleshooting, causing a lot of trouble and inaccurate location of the failure, ” said Lin Zhaohui, head of the network department at SAC. Dealing with a single point of failure takes half an hour, or in worse cases, one to two hours.
Since Lin joined SAC, the company hasn’t deployed any visual monitoring tools. Network stability problems were addressed through hardware mechanisms such as increased redundancy of backbone network equipment and regular manual inspections. This approach, however, increased labor cost, led to inefficiency, and failed to detect certain problems in time. “For example, we generally could not see power supply fan alarms and high-temperature alarms for switches on site,” explained Lin.
From the internal staff management system and the financial system to the office system, SAC relies almost entirely on the network. A single point of failure affects the regular work of some employees, while a backbone problem affects the overall operation of the company. To solve problems such as tight network management personnel, passive lag in fault resolution, and long recovery time, Lin required a complete, high-performing, and user-friendly network management system to detect network failure in time, reduce recovery time, and simplify network maintenance management.
SOLUTION
As head of the network department, Lin focused on the stability and visualization of the entire network operation in SAC when choosing a solution. The primary requirement was a monitoring product to accurately locate and characterize network problems, eliminate network faults without delay, and better serve the network needs of employees and customers. “Without visualization, it was particularly difficult to troubleshoot congestion in the network, ” said Lin, who therefore expects the monitoring product can also timely detect network congestion.
With this in mind, Lin started looking for suitable network monitoring products. After evaluating SolarWinds and other products such as Betasoft, Lin finally selected SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA), SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) and SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) for their visualization capabilities, on top of SolarWinds excellent service and reputation, which promptly resolved the company’s human capital shortfall issue.
“SolarWinds offers a complete range of products with many users. Problems are solved without delay, and the prompt configuration services are also satisfactory,” said Lin.
BENEFITS
After deploying the SolarWinds solutions, Lin can identify, locate, and characterize network congestion problems through visualization, significantly contributing to network maintenance. SAC then expanded its network capacity due to business needs and increased network applications. “The expansion increased the wireless network throughout the company, and the size of the expanded network is at least three times greater than it was before SolarWinds was deployed, ” said Lin, “Problems used to occur every time we expanded the network, but this time everything went well, and as a result, no additional network maintenance staff is required.”
SolarWinds also helped SAC improve network stability and the overall level of operation and maintenance. “The company’s annual requirement for network availability is 99.5%, and we exceed 99.9% with SolarWinds,” explained Lin.
By clearly presenting network status, the visualization capabilities offered by SolarWinds allow network maintenance staff to identify and address network failures in an accurate and timely manner and identify and handle potential failures in advance, thereby reducing the need for additional network maintenance staff and effectively saving on labor costs. According to Lin, “A company like SAC requires three to five network maintenance staff. Assuming annual manpower cost of RMB 200,000 to 300,000 per person, we can save RMB 600,000-1,500,000 a year in labor costs with visualization by reducing the maintenance staff.”
"SolarWinds offers network visualization with very low maintenance costs, and there are corresponding upgrades every year, which is the best option for large-scale network management." — Lin, Head of the network department, SAC-China
Industry:
Power
Products Installed:
- SolarWinds® NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
- SolarWinds® Network Configuration Manager (NCM)
- SolarWinds® Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
