China’s Largest Online Supermarket Deploys Brocade Data Center Infrastructure

China’s largest online supermarket, Yihaodian, has turned to Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) for a high-performance data center networking solution to cope with explosive growth in customers and orders. The company, in which Walmart raised its stake to 51 percent earlier this year, had 2011 sales of Rmb2.7 billion (US $429M), 335 percent higher than in 2010. The Brocade® networking solution will give the retailer an infrastructure that will enable it to meet current customer demands, while providing a blueprint for future growth.

Today, China has over 193 million online shoppers compared to 170 million in the US, more than double the number in Japan and five times that of the UK. By 2015, the size of China’s e-commerce market is expected to rival that of the US, with e-commerce accounting for as much as eight percent of the total Chinese retail market.

Yihaodian’s success mirrors the country’s appetite for e-commerce. The company was only founded in 2008, but already has logistics centers in five of China’s largest cities – Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Wuhan and Chengdu – that stock more than 270,000 products and provide same-day and next-day delivery services. While Yihaodian’s customer base tripled from 2010 to 2011, last year’s average daily order volume was six times higher than 2010’s.

The Brocade MLXe-4 Core Routers deployed by Yihaodian each have 1.92 terabit per second switching fabric capacity, ensuring that all the 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) connections to the network core are handled at wire speed. The Brocade MLXe-4 routers are linked over multiple 10 GbE connections using Multi-Chassis Trunking (MCT) to create a single logical switch that dynamically load-balances traffic from access layer switches with multiple connections to the core devices.

To handle the high-volume traffic between the core and the data center’s Internet-facing demilitarized zone (DMZ), Yihaodian has deployed Brocade ICX® 6610 Switches that offer chassis-like performance and reliability in a stackable form factor. Each Brocade ICX 6610 has 48 1 GbE access ports, and are linked into a single logical switch using dedicated 40 GbE connections. Multiple 10 GbE uplinks to the core enable a highly scalable solution designed for non-stop availability.

In addition, Yihaodian has deployed Brocade FCX Series Switches to provide wire-speed 1 GbE access to its application and database servers. As with the core and DMZ networks, these switches are combined into a single logical device with up to eight Brocade FCX 648 switches providing 384 access ports and multiple 10 GbE uplinks to the core.

The Brocade ICX switch family is compatible with Brocade HyperEdge™ technology (planned for general availability in the first half of 2013), which will enable customers to employ single-point management to simplify LAN operations while mixing and matching switches as they expands their access network stacks in the future.

Comments

Nowadays, supermarkets and hypermarkets are receiving welcome in China. Foreign giants like Carrefour , Walmart and Lotte Mart are widely accepted by chinese consumers. Also, China's native supermarket companies like Hualian are also gaining their market. This is an article I wrote about supermarkets and hypermarkets in China.
http://daxueconsulting.com/supermarkets-and-hypermarkets-in-china/
Hope you can read it and we may exchange ideas.