Yondenko Corporation’s Foundation for Innovation

Yondenko Corporation uses HCI to enable future innovation in Japan’s telecommunications and solar energy sectors.

At a glance:

  • Yondenko Corporation is a leading construction company that specializes in building electrical power transmission and distribution facilities as well as manufacturing, air conditioning, water treatment, drainage, surveillance, and public safety infrastructure.

  • The company saw that its traditional three-tier IT architecture lacked the scalability to support its long-term growth objective. Using Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), featuring 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and managed with Nutanix software, the company has improved operational efficiency and cut IT maintenance—freeing time and resources for innovative construction projects throughout Japan.

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Background

Headquartered in Takamatsu City, Japan, Yondenko Corporation is a leading construction company that specializes in building electrical power transmission and distribution facilities as well as manufacturing, air conditioning, water treatment, drainage, surveillance, and public safety infrastructure. Established in 1963, Yondenko Corporation employs more than 2,000 people and manages over JPY 3 billion (US$29 million) in capital investment.

Challenge

Yondenko Corporation has set out a strategic plan to bring its industry-leading expertise to the telecommunications and solar energy sectors. All the company’s activities are powered by digital platforms—and the new ventures are set to dramatically increase the volume and velocity of business data.

In the past, Yondenko Corporation relied on a traditional three-tier IT architecture to provide the compute and storage resources for its core business applications, from financial planning to HR and supply chain management. Over time, this infrastructure had become expensive to operate and required a significant amount of manual work to maintain. To support the projected increase in business data, the company decided to look for a new approach.

Mr. Masayuki Miyatake, Section Chief – IT System Promotion Office and System Development, Yondenko Corporation, comments: “Provisioning servers, storage and networking for new applications was a complex and labor-intensive process. Because we had a multi-vendor environment, troubleshooting issues required time-consuming conversations with several different providers, and we struggled to satisfy requests from the business for open-source tools.”

“To support our expansion into telecommunications and solar energy, we set out to transform our core systems. We see hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) as the most efficient and cost-effective way to achieve that goal.” —Mr. Masayuki Miyatake, Section Chief – IT System Promotion Office and System Development, Yondenko Corporation

Why Lenovo? Reliable, Robust, Flexible

To simplify system management and deliver seamless scalability, Yondenko Corporation decided to replace its legacy three-tier data center architecture with a flexible HCI solution based on Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series servers, powered by 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. Compute, storage, and networking resources are managed in a single pool with Nutanix Prism and virtualized using Nutanix AHV.

“We wanted to reduce complexity by moving to a single-vendor strategy,” says Mr. Masayuki Miyatake. “Lenovo technology stood apart from other solution providers, offering the performance, reliability, flexibility, and scalability to support a wide range of mission-critical workloads. What’s more, with Nutanix AHV virtualization software pre-loaded on the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series appliances, we were confident that they would make the transition to HCI quickly and easily.”

“Lenovo systems support a wide range of open-source applications, which was a big factor in our decision-making process, as we knew this would give us the freedom to adopt best-of-breed technologies now and in the years ahead.” —Mr. Masayuki Miyatake, Section Chief – IT System Promotion Office and System Development, Yondenko Corporation

Round-the-Clock Support

To strengthen business continuity, Lenovo suggested that Yondenko Corporation build a backup and recovery system, with near real-time replication of core application databases.

Mr. Masayuki Miyatake comments: “The Lenovo team was genuinely interested in helping us to build the most resilient and reliable IT infrastructure—their recommendation to create a separate backup infrastructure for our databases has greatly improved our ability to recover our most vital systems rapidly if we ever experience unplanned downtime.”

As Yondenko Corporation continues to enhance its infrastructure, Lenovo Services will provide ongoing support. Mr. Masayuki Miyatake explains: “We’re really impressed with the high-quality support that Lenovo offers. If we ever have a question or come across an issue, their expert engineers are always on hand to help us find a fast resolution.”

“With support from Lenovo Services, we were able to build a new state-of-the-art IT environment quickly and effectively, and minimize business disruption during the migration.” —Mr. Masayuki Miyatake, Section Chief – IT System Promotion Office and System Development, Yondenko Corporation

Results

After moving its HR, construction management, and other mission-critical systems to the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series platform, Yondenko Corporation has dramatically reduced the amount of system maintenance required to support its IT infrastructure.

“With HCI, compute, storage, and networking resources are virtualized and pooled in a single, high-performance management layer,” comments Mr. Masayuki Miyatake. “Adopting HCI has significantly reduced our data center footprint, which in turn has reduced energy consumption and cooling costs. And by standardizing on Lenovo hardware, we no longer have to navigate multiple support channels to get help and guidance. And our maintenance workloads are much lower, too.”

Crucially, moving to the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series platform has helped Yondenko Corporation better prepare for the future evolution of its core systems. Seamless scalability will support business growth in the years to come.

“By moving to the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series platform, we’ve been able to boost efficiency and productivity—helping us to deliver projects on time and on budget, and keep clients satisfied.” —Mr. Masayuki Miyatake, Section Chief - IT System Promotion Office and System Development, Yondenko Corporation

Mr. Masayuki Miyatake concludes: “As well as improving operational efficiency, the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series platform has given us a scalable, future-ready foundation on which we can evolve our core systems. With high-performance, reliable, and flexible HCI supporting our operations, we can now focus on supporting innovation in the solar energy and telecommunications across Japan.”
 

  • Reduces data center floorspace, contributing to lower energy and cooling costs
  • Supports business growth with easy scalability for critical systems
  • Cuts maintenance workloads, freeing time for innovation

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