Gan & Lee Pharmaceuticals

Gan & Lee Pharmaceuticals, a leading enterprise in China’s insulin industry, partnered with ZStack to address business growth and compliance challenges anticipated in the next three to five years. Through a VMware-to-ZStack transformation, the company built a high-performance, highly available, easy-to-manage, and scalable private cloud platform, seamlessly migrating its business systems from traditional architecture to the cloud. This migration ensured uninterrupted operation of all core systems while significantly improving resource utilization, reducing operational costs, and realizing automated IT management — providing a valuable reference for digital transformation across the biopharmaceutical sector.  

Industry Leader in Insulin — Gan & Lee Pharmaceuticals

Founded in 1998, Gan & Lee Pharmaceuticals is a high-tech biopharmaceutical company integrating R&D, production, and sales, with over 5,500 employeesworldwide. Headquartered in Beijing, the company operates an industrial park covering approximately 200,000 square meters.  

As the first company in China to master large-scale production technology for recombinant insulin analogs, Gan & Lee Pharmaceuticals leads the domestic diabetes market in research and production of biosynthetic human insulin and insulin analogs. Guided by its scientific and excellence-driven corporate culture, Gan & Lee is committed to providing high-quality products and services to diabetes patients around the world.  

Overcoming Legacy Architecture Bottlenecks and Compliance Challenges

Gan & Lee’s traditional IT architecture faced multiple challenges: aging hardware, single points of failure, and non-isolated fault domains led to frequent risk of system downtime. Resource allocation was unbalanced — some servers remained idle while others were constantly overloaded. Meanwhile, data was fragmented across local disks and isolated arrays without unified encryption or access control. The lack of city-level disaster recovery raised the risk of permanent data loss in the event of ransomware or hardware failure, directly violating GMP compliance requirements.  

To address these issues, the company needed a private cloud platform that could pool compute, storage, and network resources while ensuring zero business interruption during hardware failures. The platform also had to support horizontal scalability for future global expansion and enable local and city-level disaster recovery, ensuring zero data loss and rapid recovery. This transformation represented a strategic upgrade from a “cost center” to a “value engine.”  

A Three-Phase Path to Modernization — ZStack Builds the Cloud Foundation for Gan & Lee

ZStack designed a three-phase deployment plan tailored to Gan & Lee Pharmaceuticals’ needs for system modernization, resource optimization, automated operations, and data protection.  

Phase 1: Core Cloud Infrastructure

ZStack supported the construction of the new data center, including servers, storage, and network infrastructure. After deploying ZStack Cloud, the existing VMware clusters were brought under unified management, forming a single resource pool for heterogeneous resource integration and unified O&M — laying a strong foundation for subsequent migrations.  

Phase 2: Business System Cloud Migration

Business systems were migrated from legacy architecture to ZStack Cloud, enabling elastic expansion and automated resource scheduling. A new distributed storage architecture was implemented to optimize resource utilization, solve performance bottlenecks, and prepare for future disaster recovery linkage.  

Phase 3: Disaster Recovery Architecture Planning

ZStack guided the construction of both local and city-level disaster recovery systems, including processes, procedures, and emergency mechanisms. A disaster recovery operation and management platform was built to enable continuous data protection, application-level recovery, visualized monitoring, and one-click switchover.  

After the successful deployment at Gan & Lee’s Beijing headquarters, the standardized architecture can now be replicated across branch sites, ensuring consistency in processes, data management, and system design. As AI-assisted drug R&D expands, the next stage will focus on building a GPU computing pool with ZStack AIOS, advancing from “cloud-enabled operations” to “AI-driven innovation.”  

Tangible Business Benefits — Transforming from a Cost Center to a Value Engine

1. Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)  

Permanent licensing model ensures long-term usage without annual renewal fees.

Resource utilization exceeds 75%, dramatically reducing idle capacity and minimizing new hardware purchases.

2. Accelerated Business Deployment  

System deployment cycles shortened from days to hours, enabling faster rollout of new clinical research systems and accelerating time-to-market for new pharmaceuticals.

Fault detection and resolution times reduced by 80% with intelligent monitoring and alerts.

3. Enhanced Operational Efficiency  

Unified cloud management platform automates daily tasks such as inspection, resource provisioning, and patch upgrades — freeing IT teams from repetitive workloads and paving the way for intelligent operations.

The standardized architecture enables rapid replication for new production lines and branch facilities, maintaining consistent governance and data management.

4. Scalable to Support Future Growth

As Gan & Lee continues to expand, ZStack Cloud’s scalable architecture allows the company to flexibly extend resources without disruptive reconstruction. The platform also provides enhanced disaster recovery and backup capabilities, including cross-region private cloud nodes and cloud backup services, ensuring business continuity and data security in the face of natural disasters or equipment failures.  

Through its collaboration with ZStack, Gan & Lee Pharmaceuticals has successfully built a robust, automated, and scalable cloud foundation that not only supports current operations but also drives innovation and global competitiveness in the era of intelligent biopharmaceuticals.