Haier Innovation Design Center (hereinafter referred to as Haier Design) was established in 1994 and currently has more than 400 designers, providing design innovation and model exploration for all products of Haier Smart Home's seven major brands around the world. Amazon Cloud Technology has provided four complete cloud solutions for Haier Design, fully replacing its own computer rooms and enabling the design center’s workflow to be fully cloud-based and automated. After going online, the application of the automated design system shortened the original project cycle by 30% and achieved great success.
Currently, the Amazon cloud technology services designed and used by Haier include: Amazon EC2, NICE DCV, Amazon Thinkbox Deadline, Amazon S3, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon EFS, Amazon DynamoDB, RDS, etc.
Opportunities : Efficient and innovative digital needs
"If an enterprise does not go through digital reconstruction, it will not be able to better serve users and establish better direct connections with users. This is an inevitable process." Previously, Haier Group Senior Vice President, Haier Smart Home In an interview with the media, Chairman and President Li Huagang talked about Haier Smart Home’s views on digital operations, and particularly emphasized that Haier Smart Home should realize the digitization of platforms, people, and capabilities to improve corporate operating efficiency.
Haier Design supports the design of more than 8,000 Haier products. Its digital transformation is a large and complex process. In the past, the traditional model development of large enterprises was mainly carried out by pipeline, waterfall, and series methods, emphasizing the completeness of the process. This model is equivalent to patching a huge system. While the system becomes increasingly bloated, it does not truly reflect the characteristics of digitalization. According to Haier Design, the digital transformation process of the design industry requires "four reconstructions" of processes, capabilities, tools and methodologies, and subversion of the existing product development and design process.
The continuation and transformation of existing businesses during the transformation process is like "changing engines on the fly." On the one hand, it requires maintaining rapid business growth, and on the other hand, it requires a lot of restructuring. In addition, upgrading is not just about hardware and storage upgrades, it actually includes a broader vision, innovative solutions, future-oriented layout design, etc. Therefore, digitalization must be combined with the latest industry applications and the most efficient allocation of resources must be achieved. These are two key points for Haier's design of digital transformation. In order to achieve these two key points, Haier Design has conducted a lot of exploration.
Before using Amazon Cloud Technology, Haier Innovation Center used a self-built private cloud system deployed in its own IDC. This private cloud system has resource preemption on the desktop system, the file storage system cannot save historical documents for a long time due to limited capacity, the rendering system requires long queues for rendering tasks due to limited resources, and the basic system maintenance is complex and cannot be elastically expanded. Many problems such as difficulties in business system innovation have a great impact on the business.
Therefore, Haier Design hopes to improve design efficiency through digital transformation while also obtaining new solutions and ideas to help design open up the market and better cope with global challenges. This is the main reason why Haier Design cooperates with Amazon Cloud Technology.
Haier Design explained the reason for cooperation with Amazon Cloud Technology: "Amazon Cloud Technology, as a world-renowned cloud service provider, has extensive and mature experience in traditional business upgrades, especially digital transformation. It helps enterprises reduce costs. , improve efficiency, including optimization of many development processes, optimization of the entire product portfolio, more agile manufacturing and end-to-end delivery, including logistics, warehousing, etc. They have their own unique insights and propose many excellent innovative solutions. These innovative solutions It is very helpful for us at Haier Design to face future market challenges, especially today when the world's current lifestyle and consumption patterns are undergoing huge changes. It is very helpful for us to maintain our leading position and provide better life solutions. "
Solution : End-to-end cloud industrial design solution
The specific migration process was incredibly fast. The migration of the original system will begin in October 2022, and all systems will be migrated to cloud servers on December 15, 2022. All personnel will officially start using the cloud desktop of Amazon Cloud Technology without any obstacles.
During the migration process, experts from Amazon Cloud Technology continued to provide customers with personal technical services, including solving network technical difficulties such as dedicated line connection and routing configuration, firewall adaptation, and completing the migration and deployment of more than 200TB of design drawings to Amazon Cloud Technology Ningxia District. And reconfiguration, the underlying architecture of the cloud desktop, rendering farm, and file sharing system was reconstructed based on Amazon Cloud Technology's native technology to maintain the user's original usage habits, etc., ensuring the smooth completion of the migration work.
The solution provided by Amazon Cloud Technology for Haier Design includes four parts: 3D cloud desktop system, rendering farm system, file sharing system and automated design system:
Cloud desktop completely solves resource problems: In the Qingdao office designed by Haier, the 3D cloud desktop system provides a convenient and easy-to-use desktop environment for more than 300 3D designers and graphic designers. Through the isolation and division of resources on the public cloud, Haier's design completely solves the problems of the original self-built IDC VDI solution such as "resource congestion causing lags, crashes or downtime" and "performance degradation when multiple people use it". It can achieve about 30% performance improvement, which can be said to serve multiple purposes with one stone.
Shared storage makes storage limits no longer exist: The file sharing system built on the features of Amazon S3 allows companies, groups and individuals to share storage. This unlimited capacity storage system that automatically tiers hot and cold data improves data security by three times. Previously, the self-built IDC allocated a maximum capacity of 500G per person, allowed only one backup per day, and retained settings for up to 7 days. Since then it has become history.
Rendering farm system, say goodbye to business queues: The rendering farm system uses Amazon Cloud Technology’s own rendering product Amazon Thinkbox deadline software and HPC clusters for image rendering. It has high performance and flexibility, allowing designers to get rendering results after submitting tasks. Figure, completely solve the rendering task queuing problem. When the load is low, it will automatically reduce the number of Amazon EC2 Spots and pay according to the actual usage time (accurate to the second), so there will be no more waste.
From 3 days to 10 minutes, the intelligent design system makes efficiency "fly": the automated design system/intelligent design rendering system runs automated design software through Amazon EC2, Amazon Thinkbox Deadline, Amazon DynamoDB, etc., and can automatically generate labor required data in 10 minutes The large-scale rendering renderings that can only be completed by a genius completely solve the computing power bottleneck problem of the original self-built IDC.
Business results: "Cloud and device" seamless cloud industrial design experience thousands of miles away
Haier Design has achieved comprehensive cloudification and automation with the help of Amazon Cloud Technology's rich products and services. The four systems customized for Haier Design Center form a complete end-to-end industrial design solution and become a sample example in the industrial design industry.
This solution provides a highly integrated product ecology for Haier Design. While it has complete functions and clear copyrights for various software, it also provides customized development for the unique needs of the enterprise. Although Amazon Cloud Technology has reconstructed the entire original infrastructure from the bottom of the technology, it still ensures that users' original usage habits remain unchanged, and almost achieves "zero awareness" of system changes from the application level.
In terms of geographical distance, although the cloud server used in the project is located in the Ningxia data center of Amazon Cloud Technology and is more than 1,500 kilometers away from Qingdao, where Haier Design is located, the customer actually uses it even though it is thousands of miles away. The 3D/2D design cloud desktop has excellent response speed and smoothness. After the system went online, the previously very time-consuming rendering cycle was shortened by 30%, bringing huge business value.
Haier Design commented that the cloud solution application of Amazon Cloud Technology allows employees to think about work processes in an international and global collaborative manner, and truly feel the impact of digital tools and virtualization tools on the work of a specific actual node. Influence, this is a good boost to employees' way of thinking.
In the future, Haier Design will continue to cooperate in depth with Amazon Cloud Technology in terms of AI and emerging field expansion. We hope to further leverage Amazon’s AI and machine learning capabilities and organically combine Amazon Cloud Technology’s computing power and algorithms with Haier’s design data to improve efficiency for designers and engineers through AIGC, thereby better designing and developing smart homes. New product.