Boosting Business Efficiency with Rapid Information Integration: A Case Study on Canon Marketing Japan Inc.
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Database Management & Storage
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Industries
- Cement
- Electronics
Applicable Functions
- Quality Assurance
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Construction Management
- Infrastructure Inspection
Services
- System Integration
- Testing & Certification
About The Customer
Canon Marketing Japan Inc. is a subsidiary of the Canon Group, established to oversee the electronics giant’s worldwide marketing activities and develop solutions combining Canon’s products and IT services. The company is responsible for managing and operating mission-critical business applications used daily by approximately 4,000 of the 18,000 employees across various Canon Group companies. The company's IT headquarters is tasked with the management and operation of these applications, which are essential tools in the business activities of the company, supporting management tasks, daily operations, and marketing.
The Challenge
Canon Marketing Japan Inc., a subsidiary of the Canon Group, was grappling with the challenge of improving employee productivity and satisfaction by enhancing response times for crucial information systems. The company's IT headquarters, responsible for managing and operating mission-critical business applications used daily by approximately 4,000 of the 18,000 employees across various Canon Group companies, was facing increasing wait times due to the concentration of large volumes of transactions. The company had created a mechanism to utilize mission-critical systems as data warehouses, but the processing of data extracted through SQL queries was time-consuming, especially for complex commands. The system load gradually increased from January to December, with the last three months of the year experiencing particularly severe deterioration in response times. Despite regular system upgrades, the response times during peak periods started to deteriorate sooner than expected due to data and transaction volumes far exceeding estimates.
The Solution
Canon Marketing Japan Inc. deployed a software-defined storage infrastructure based on IBM technology, aiming for a tenfold increase in data processing speed. The company adopted IBM FlashSystem all-flash storage, designed for high performance, to enable data to be read from databases at much higher speeds than traditional storage, thereby significantly improving the performance of the infrastructure as a whole. The company also implemented IBM Spectrum Control™ and IBM Spectrum Virtualize™ solutions to manage its new FlashSystem and existing IBM Storwize storage devices. This allowed the company to implement IBM FlashSystem with minimal changes to the existing configuration. The company divided the 40 TB of data to be migrated into two parts, with preparatory migration steps carried out over a month, and the main stages over just two days.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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