The technological transformation of a public listed company in the postal services sector has been making an on-going effort to integrate cloud computing. This initiative aims to empower the company's core businesses, establishing a secure, reliable, intelligent, and efficient postal cloud. One that is a high performance but also secured. The resulting platform offers cutting-edge cloud services tailored to the postal and logistics industries. However, the adoption of a self-service application service model, encompassing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS), presents three significant challenges to the underlying storage architecture.

Challenge 1: Seamless Integration with the Postal Industrial Cloud Platform The data storage system must seamlessly connect to the postal industrial cloud platform, enabling unified management of data storage resources. This integration is crucial to reducing the complexity and cost associated with operation and maintenance.

Challenge 2: Performance Requirements for core database and concurrent access The storage system must meet the performance demands of the core database and handle concurrent access by numerous virtual machines without distressing data storage resources which will result in slower performance.

Challenge 3: Ensuring Reliability for the Postal Industrial Cloud The storage architecture must ensure the long-term stability, data consistency and reliable access of applications deployed by multiple users within the postal industrial cloud.

During the Proof of Concept (POC) stage, the company rigorously evaluated products from various storage vendors and ultimately selected the AccelStor's NeoSapphire all-flash array as the storage foundation for the cloud platform.

Hardware Configuration: Each NeoSapphire all-flash array is equipped with forty-eight 3.84TB SSDs, connected to redundant storage area network switches via sixteen 10Gb NICs. This setup facilitates high-speed 10Gb interconnections with all upper-layer cloud nodes.

Software Integration: At the software level, the NeoSapphire all-flash array seamlessly interfaces with the storage management module of the cloud platform through a cinder driver. Storage resources are allocated on-demand and automatically managed, leading to a significant reduction in operation and maintenance costs.

Deployment Strategy: While edge or extranet applications are deployed to the public cloud, critical applications with stringent security, performance, and reliability requirements within the postal industry cloud.

• 3-5x Improvement in Database Performance: Migrating Oracle, MySQL, and other database applications to the industrial cloud platform based on AccelStor's NeoSapphire all-flash array resulted in a remarkable increase in database performance, soaring from 200K-300K TPM to over 1 million TPM.
• 5x Efficiency Improvement for High-Concurrency Web Application Services: In high-concurrency application scenarios, such as user orders and parcel processing, efficiency surged from over 2,000 transactions per second to tens of thousands per second, achieving a 5x increase in processing efficiency.
• Zero Business Interruption and Zero Data Loss in Extreme Hardware Failure Scenarios: NeoSapphire all-flash array ensures the availability of postal industrial cloud resources from the architecture, storage, and SSD levels. The system's data reliability reaches an impressive 99.9999%. Adopting a "non-shared symmetric active-active architecture" mitigates hardware single points of failure, resulting in zero business interruption and zero data loss even in extreme failure scenarios.