Cowell Health
Industry: Healthcare
Core Business:Medicine
Products
ECS
SFS
VPC
VPN
Contact Sales
+852-800-931-122

About Cowell Health

Founded in 2017, a subsidiary of Hillhouse Capital, Cowell Health is focused on strategic investment and streamlined operations for the healthcare industry. Whether it comes to operations or investment, Cowell Health is a powerful player.  And when Cowell health partners up, they focus on building an industry platform together. Cowell’s pharmaceutical business is expected to grow rapidly. Cowell has already acquired more than 1,000 pharmacies, and that the number is expected to reach 30,000 by the end of 2019, and 60,000 by December 2021.

Challenges

Cowell Health is expanding fast, and they are in urgent need of a unified platform to integrate services for the entire business group and quickly respond to market changes. They needed a plan for digitalization, but it is hard to say what their precise needs will be.

If traditional offline deployment is used, a large number of servers will be left idle. They will be wasted resources, and rapid capacity expansion will still not be possible. A traditional deployment will be unable to keep up with the rapid growth in services, and all stores will require network access. Traditional E2E leased line deployment is too expensive and too difficult to implement.

Cowell Health major concerns include:

Integration: There was insufficient integration between services, data, and processing.

Security: Application, network, and data security is critical.

Efficiency: The healthcare industry is always evolving and changing, and they need to be able to keep up.

Agility: IT needs to be highly responsive to market demands. New functions need to be introduced quickly.

Costs: In-house data centers are too expensive.

    Solution

    VPN connections were used for secure access to the cloud-based ERP environment. Local users could access it from private IPs and interact with other local service systems. Functional modules were deployed on ECS instances on different subnets but in the same AZ. SAP applications and databases were deployed on different production systems to ensure high availability and flexibility, and HANA database backups are periodically themselves backed up to an SFS file server, with a HANA database backup in a disaster recovery zone kept current in real time.

    Beijing was selected as the main site. Shanghai was selected as the disaster recovery site, and a VPN or Direct Connect (DC) connection was used to connect a local data center at Cowell Health headquarters to their VPC.

    Why HUAWEI CLOUD

    Service

    HUAWEI CLOUD was able to provide Cowell with enterprise-level services backed by professional delivery teams and dedicated service managers. A SAP certified, automatic O&M management tool from HUAWEI CLOUD allowed Cowell to improve IT O&M, which freed up resources for Cowell to focus more on innovating new services.

    Price

    HUAWEI CLOUD also offered competitive pricing on long-term reserved instances, which reduced the total cost of ownership (TCO).

    Reliability

    The multiple HA solutions for HANA systems ensure service continuity and backup disaster recovery (DR). Cowell get automatic VM fault recovery and automatic failovers for a single-node HANA or for clusters.

    Benefits

    Better Integrated Applications and Better Data Flow

    HUAWEI CLOUD Internet and healthcare solutions help Cowell unify store management and data analysis. Cowell deployed SAP on HUAWEI CLOUD to integrate production, supply, marketing, and enterprise management applications. They streamlined data flows, eliminated information silos, and are continuously improving the quality of their data so they can keep a handle on market dynamics in real time, improving market insight for more informed decisions.

    Safety, Efficiency, and Agility

    Thanks to the joint efforts of HUAWEI CLOUD and Jingtong (which was acquired by Guangzhou Sydney), the cloud-based deployment architecture and WAN access of Cowell Health SAP have been comprehensively optimized for efficient, stable operations, and better security. In addition, on-demand cloud services have made the IT systems more agile and more responsive to the various service modules of the healthcare industry.

    Reliability and Service Continuity That Won't Break the Bank

    Service continuity is typically limited by the hardware and by the physical environment of the data center. It is difficult to ensure high service continuity just using your own data center. It is expensive and difficult to build geographically isolated disaster recovery centers. The HUAWEI CLOUD infrastructure, deployment of multiple availability zones, both synchronous and asynchronous replication and snapshot technologies have greatly improved the availability of their service systems.

    Learn More

    To learn about the SAP on HUAWEI CLOUD solution, see SAP on Cloud .