User talk: How do manufacturers view cloud computing?

Mei Steel: Cloud computing has limited impact in 3-5 years, and virtualization is the top priority

Baosteel Group Shanghai Meishan Iron and Steel Co., Ltd., director of Information Office of China, said: cloud computing on domestic manufacturing enterprises in the impact of information technology within 3-5 years is limited, from the application of the value and feasibility, the virtualization of the technical realization is the most urgent. Cloud computing in domestic manufacturing technology to achieve some limitations.

One is technology constraints: in the early days of cloud computing, the IT industry was more focused on public cloud services, trying to fully leverage new applications and architectures to meet business needs. Although it vendors have made a lot of effort in recent years, system equipment manufacturers have failed to break the cloud's technical requirements for system equipment manufacturing. At present, the main application system of large and medium-sized enterprises in manufacturing industry (production and marketing, logistics. Financial management, etc.) are built on the UNIX system platform, while the UNIX system device virtualization technology is far from the technical requirements of cloud computing: Do not say that you can build heterogeneous system equipment resource pool, even the same manufacturer of UNIX system equipment products, it is difficult to achieve the compatibility of different generations of products. Only by using technology such as VMware on x86 platform can we build heterogeneous system resource pools to realize resource sharing among different systems. This is limited in the usability of the Manufacturing cloud computing environment (the local cloud computing environment of the enterprise can be built).

Second, investment restrictions: the domestic manufacturing industry informatization to drive the industrialization of the technological transformation is only the beginning of this century, most of the enterprise production Management application information system has been in operation for more than 5-8 years, running for several years and through continuous investment and transformation, the system is currently in the application of mature period. If in order to realize cloud computing technology, now invest a large amount of funds to eliminate the main equipment of the original system, in order to build cloud computing system architecture, such development path is difficult to get the enterprise widely recognized, because very few enterprises will abandon the existing application because of the new architecture.

In the enterprise's view, "cloud is not a goal, but a way to perform the calculation." Cloud computing should be implemented either internally, externally or both, and no enterprise should abandon its accumulated IT investments and then start over, and only follow a gradual, non-destructive path of development to make the cloud truly fall.

Meigang's approach to cloud computing

Bearing Yao Hua said that with the expansion of the business scale and the gradual increase of various applications, the company's existing data center is facing a rapid expansion of data volume, low server utilization, energy consumption, lack of space, it operation and maintenance of high cost, business continuity capacity, a series of challenges. If the virtualization technology can be introduced into the information construction of Mei Steel, it is possible to solve the current business rapid development and limited resources and cannot use the contradiction effectively.

One of the first things to solve the problem is to change the infrastructure of the system by using virtualization technology, that is, to eliminate the independent physical platform pattern in the existing system as much as possible, to establish a regional virtual platform architecture shared by multiple business application systems, and to build a pool of regional (compute, storage, network, and So that the new and old business applications can be based on the need for a reasonable allocation of system resources; second, network technologies such as Sans are used to set up these building-culture (compute, storage, network, and desktop) resource pools into a computing cloud (private cloud) for the entire business application service of the company. To this end, Meigang needs to adopt VMware Enterprise-class infrastructure virtualization software VMware Vsphere4 (Enterprise Edition) gradually to the data centers, such as platform structure transformation, the realization of system virtualization, the establishment of a regional resource pool. VMware Virtualization Architecture software delivers comprehensive virtualization management, resource optimization, application availability, and operational automation to virtualize servers, storage, and networks, allowing multiple unmodified operating systems and their applications to run independently on virtual machines while sharing physical resources.

First, virtualization brings the high availability of application servers to your company. As a whole, the application of Meigang x86 platform has already surpassed the level of UNIX platform application. For PC servers and blades, the physical architecture is difficult to ensure high availability of hardware. But now, with virtualization technology, you can virtualize these servers as a single resource pool, and when a hardware failure occurs, you can move the entire virtual machine running from one server to another in an instant, avoiding downtime, ensuring continuity of service, and integrity of the process. In this way, whether it is a burst or planned downtime, the impact on the application is very small, even transparent.

Secondly, virtualization realizes the unified centralized management of the x86 server and the rapid and flexible deployment. Meigang on the x86 platform Application server has Windows, Linux and many other operating system platform. And a lot of versions, it is difficult to use a unified interface for all of these operating system platform centralized management. Through VMware vcenter, all application servers can be controlled, monitored, managed and maintained in a unified view, while the virtualized server system can be cloned, and a few minutes to complete one or more application Server system deployment, greatly improve the server management and maintenance efficiency.

Third, the virtualization technology can make the old application of the plum Steel can run on the new hardware. Because of the characteristics of the steel manufacturing business itself, some departments of the company to keep some of the operating system on the lower version of the old application systems, through virtualization deployment, you can build a virtual machine to run the old applications, without discarding the original software investment. In addition, because of the application of virtualization technology, software developers can develop software on virtual machines, and can replicate the virtual machine environment at any time to facilitate the final software debugging. More importantly, through virtualization technology, companies build a platform for enterprise IT architectures with high availability, scalability, and flexibility.

Xugong: To build a fiber-optic metropolitan area Network, first do a good job of server integration

Xugong Group CIO Zhangqiliang that: At present, cloud computing wave is surging. Services provided through the cloud computing platform users only need to use the Internet to submit business requirements to the cloud computing platform, the platform to complete the task, and then feedback the results to users, from the cloud to deal with the complexity of the data, so whether it is a common personal computer, or a mobile phone with a browser, as long as the internet can be turned into can also be part of a supercomputer, to take on more or less decomposition tasks. Cloud computing is seen as an industrial revolution in the IT industry. It will bring about fundamental changes in working methods and business models, especially China, which is now in the midst of the rapid development and integration of the Internet, and believes that the changes that cloud computing can bring will be enormous.

Cloud computing can be divided into public and private clouds, depending on the range of services it serves. These two different solutions, respectively, corresponding to the different areas of application. For companies that offer Internet software Leasing services, they may be more inclined to adopt a public cloud solution. And the group wants to deploy cloud storage devices for their own use within the group, will adopt a private cloud solution. However, the public cloud and private cloud are now not very strict standards, most still depends on the definition of the enterprise's own solutions.

Specifically to the Xugong group, our next step is to do a good job of server integration, that is, based on Xugong's fiber-optic metropolitan area Network, will be distributed in each subsidiary of the hundreds of servers, through the virtual sharing of resources computing mode, so that storage and computing resources can be dynamically deployed on demand, dynamic optimization, dynamic recovery, building a private cloud, build a " Green Data Center.

On the other side, we will "divide (virtualize)" from the server farm to a number of "PC" machines that meet the needs of users for remote and independent use. Through virtual computing, virtual storage and virtual networks, users can experience the same personal computer in traditional mode, and achieve centralized management, flexible access and data security requirements.

In short, through the construction of private cloud, the aim is to realize data security, convenient management, flexible application, stable and reliable, energy saving and emission reduction.

China Power Investment: cloud computing is the general direction, active preparation, serious attempt

China Power investment Ningxia Qingtongxia Energy Aluminum Group Co., Ltd. Science and technology Information Center Xu that: in the traditional way of implementation, enterprise development and deployment of computer application system has a certain risk. Deployment of applications, the number of purchase servers is not OK, too much waste, too little impact on the application of the system; Moreover, the application may fail at some stage of the development process, or the deployment of the server cannot keep pace with the increase in workload, then the large amount of funds invested in the server will be wasted. When an enterprise deploys an application into the cloud, scalability and the purchase of the infrastructure become problems for the cloud operators. The private cloud of the enterprise can take advantage of the public cloud to handle the transaction in the peak situation of the dedicated cloud workload, which can reduce the investment of the enterprise's infrastructure. In addition, the application of cloud technology makes the enterprise's hardware resources no longer scarce and can better meet the resource requirements at a lower cost, thus better deal with application lifecycle management issues, but also save the investment of software funds.

At present, the goal of implementing informatization in CLP is to build a unified software application platform, unify various departments and units, and form the information system of company integration. The unification of software application platform will lead to a large demand for computing resources, hardware resources and functional resources, and a great deal of information interaction needs. In order to meet these problems, we should actively study the application of cloud technology in the process of informatization, consider setting up own private cloud, rationally configure computer resources, and realize the business demand by virtualizing many servers into a whole cloud service.

But enterprises to implement cloud computing, to improve efficiency, reduce waste of resources as the goal. The process of informatization is consistent with the change process of Internet resource allocation. The first is a C/s architecture of the information system, that is, client/server structure, resources in the client and server are stored. Now progress to B/s structure, that is, browser/server structure, the resources stored on the server, the main task is borne by the server. This causes the server to appear the blowout phenomenon, each unit is buying the server. Service types are also diverse, there are mail servers, data servers, security servers, video servers, a large number of server purchase, deployment led to the server hosting, the emergence of data centers, computing centres and so on. At present, a large number of servers, many systems, server management, user management more and more complex, the server is the Mae, the waste of resources is serious. Cloud computing technology is to solve the problem derived from the solution, so, the realization of reasonable use of resources is the basic goal of the study of cloud computing technology in the CLP.

From the point of view of Enterprise informatization, cloud computing, as a new technology embodying information technology integration and network trend, is bound to be the future direction of Enterprise informatization, but there is not a unified definition of cloud computing, there is no clear cloud computing standard, and there is no known cloud computing product. All cloud-computing vendors are on their way to developing and promoting their products. Ningxia Energy Aluminum Industry in the cloud computing project decision is also actively research, grasp the opportunity, deep analysis of the implementation of cloud computing cases, the application of its prospects, development costs, the expected effect of a reasonable assessment, combined with the actual enterprise to make the right judgments.

Baosteel Stainless Steel: From virtualization to start, gradually transition to cloud computing

Baosteel Stainless Steel Branch is responsible for informatization of Shi Jichang that: With the adjustment of China's industrial structure and the improvement of information, in the enterprise's product costs, management costs accounted for more and more. In the composition of management cost, the cost of acquiring information, analyzing decision-making, coordinating and buying and selling process is the main part. How to build an efficient information system, reduce the cost of enterprise products, improve the operational efficiency of enterprise management, consolidate the market competitive advantage of enterprises, is placed in front of many business operators an important task.

In the advent of cloud computing as a representative of the next generation of information technology, the domestic enterprise information construction is usually to build an application system to buy a set of servers, with the increasing application system, the server is constantly expanding, upgrading and updating, and enterprise application of the characteristics of the operation of the server resource utilization is not high Server long-term inefficient operation, system resources can not change with the application of flexible adjustment.

The emergence of a new generation of information technology "cloud computing" provides us with the corresponding technical means and solutions, and cloud computing represents a new-type IT business service model, its advantage lies in the intensive use of resources and powerful dynamic computing ability. For large groups of companies that already have huge computer resources, the introduction of cloud computing will help improve resource utilization.

An important feature of cloud computing is the use of virtualization technologies. With the help of virtualization technology, the heterogeneous computer software and hardware resources are formed into a resource pool, the resource pool is provided to different application systems through the basic service, the multiple application systems are integrated into a system resource pool, and the scattered computer rooms are merged into a centralized data center room. In order to achieve the efficient operation of system equipment and green environmental protection purposes.

Metallurgical enterprises to apply cloud computing technology, the key lies in the management of innovation and management process standardization, metallurgical enterprises in the application is different from commercial applications, it is oriented to the internal specific management model and management process, if the simple merging of computer room into a centralized data center room, Application services are simply provided to an enterprise unit, and the basic elements of cloud computing (different applications that require computing power, storage space, and information services depending on their use) will not be met.

As early as 2006, Baosteel Stainless steel division in the construction of equipment systems, the use of cloud computing in the key technology "virtualization" technology. The System Foundation platform selects the HP Superdome minicomputer server, through virtualization technology created two virtual partitions: one partition for data storage services, one partition for the application of computing services. Using cluster technology, the production and marketing system of the stainless steel department and the system resources of the equipment system are balanced, and a resource pool with a set of servers and centralized storage system is formed for different applications. The Oracle WebLogic Middleware is used to form a three-tier architecture system platform. In the process of application development, we follow the unified management mode and management process of equipment management business of Baosteel stock, and adopt the point verification and repair system of equipment management. Because the equipment code, the spot inspection standard, to the grease standard, the maintenance operation standard and the maintenance technical standard is the application system Cross organizational unit Reuse Foundation, therefore, these codes and the standard also follows the joint stock company's technical specification, causes the equipment management system to become a standard, the transparent management business platform. Through the internal network system of the stock company, the network point checking operation is realized, and the equipment state information and diagnostic information of different organizational units are shared. While providing a common platform, the equipment maintenance cost and financial information basic data involving different organizational units will be sent by the equipment management system through the unified information exchange platform based on s0a, and in real time to the financial management system of different organizational unit production and marketing management system.

Stainless Steel division in the development of equipment management system, with the application of "virtualization" technology and unified management mode and management process, the device management system is built into a "private cloud" within an enterprise, and the application of computer cluster technology, load balancing technology and centralized storage technology can help enterprises to centralize all information resources. In the construction of computer system, we break the model of different application system planning, achieve the different application of unified planning investment, unified construction, centralized maintenance, thus significantly reducing the total input cost, improve the efficiency of resource utilization, and the unified standard management process has been solidified and promoted. Internally, can support the rapid expansion of enterprises, the enterprise management process and management system to extend to the new organizational structure, external, but also through a safe and low-risk information Service system, so that enterprises "private cloud" gradually become a "public cloud" society.

In the 2010, Baosteel Group proposed the development strategy of "digital Baosteel" based on the "information sharing in the system, the process in the system, the collaboration of the business in the system, the utilization of resources in the system, the control of power in the system and the inheritance of knowledge in the system". The realization of "digital Baosteel" must be based on information construction. The construction of information system and data center based on cloud computing technology can acquire powerful and flexible operation and storage ability with relatively small expenditure, and build the Strong "brain" of "digital Baosteel".

(Responsible editor: Duqing first)