Analysis of China Telecom Cloud Computing master plan two cloud three resource pools

No doubt, cloud computing has become the three major telecom operators to deal with the trend of ICT convergence, to get rid of the pipeline service providers. And for cloud computing investment, three operators are also unambiguous, from the lowest level of large-scale data center construction, to the top of the cloud computing resource management platform, to direct their own business and third-party users of cloud host, cloud storage and flexible computing and many other service patterns.

As one of the most resource-rich operators in the data center and the basic network, China Telecom set up a professional cloud computing company to manage the cloud computing business in all provinces of China after the first release of the full cloud computing strategy in 2011. Synchronized with the company's restructuring, China Telecom also set up a cloud computing research center at the group level to provide technical reserves and intellectual support for the follow-up development of the whole network.

Whether it is the cloud of its own business and IT support system, or the new large-scale cloud data center in the whole country, or also is specialized for mobile end user to open cloud storage service, this is a part of China Telecom cloud computing overall plan. As a carrier of hundreds of millions of-person home users and tens of millions of enterprise-class users, how can such a large number of players be cut into the focus of cloud computing.

At present, China Telecom has gradually clarified the overall planning of cloud computing development system, that is, the construction of two cloud, three resources pool, in the cloud computing practice has achieved some results, the embryonic form of strategic layout gradually protruding. "Two cloud" is the internal loading of various IT systems, business platform, ICT, operation and maintenance system of the "internal bearing cloud" and external to provide all kinds of public basic cloud services products and industry customers cloud "external services Cloud"; "Three resource pools" is it resource pool, business platform resource pool, cloud data center resource pool, The resource pool is composed of resource pool nodes distributed in different physical locations, which are managed by their own unified resource management platform respectively.

Internal and external repair: Build the Cloud ERA framework

China Telecom from 2009 officially began the cloud computing journey, hope to be able to use cloud computing and emerging business model, to achieve more business, more network, more terminal integration and value chain extension, to provide customers with convenient, rich, personalized, cost-effective comprehensive information services.

The classification of the public cloud and private cloud advocated by China Mobile is slightly different, and China Telecom is divided into the internal bearer cloud and the external service cloud according to the application scenario rather than the user group. "In fact, there is no difference in nature, mainly because different cloud and resource pools have different positioning, and there are some differences in the management platform and resource pool building." ”

Among them, the internal bearing cloud adopts the multi-redundancy model, which is composed of 1 resource pools (Shanghai, Beijing nodes) and N provincial resource pools to realize the pool of business platform by Group and province company, and to achieve intensive resources, and to realize the intensive resource scale with the core nodes in the province.

The external services cloud consists of 2 low-cost green cloud data centers and a core node cloud data center in 4 regions. Low-cost green cloud data center mainly hosts low-cost, non-localized cloud host requirements, the construction of China Telecom's Inner Mongolia data center base is the location, but China Telecom has not disclosed where another base will be spent; The regional core node construction, according to East China, South China, west, north four areas of deployment, Cloud host cloud storage business in the main hosting area.

Resource pooling: Reality and future considerations

In the overall framework of China Telecom Cloud computing, the business platform resource pool is undoubtedly the most forward. Because this is not only the future-oriented consideration, but also the current more urgent choice. The IT resource pool and the Cloud data center resource pool are also advancing simultaneously.

In the era of full business operations and mobile Internet, operators have unwittingly entered the ranks of the "Fast Company", every day has a new business on the line, but the traditional business support platform is difficult to meet this demand: the previous business system expansion process of a large number of processes, expansion cycle is long, even a few months, This has already missed the best time to do business on the line, and the provincial companies are expanding their business systems at peak capacity, leading to idle daily system resources. After resource pooling, not only can increase the utilization of IT assets significantly, but also enhance the flexibility of business deployment.

In the Service Platform resource pool construction, the group level platform chooses Beijing and Shanghai two nodes, mainly carries on the group level Business platform, the specialized company platform, simultaneously also carries on the pilot to carry on the partial provincial business platform, accelerates the whole network platform to the group resource pool centralism. "There is no specific business distinction between the node positioning, mainly according to the principle of the dependency of the corresponding business into the corresponding resource pool." For example, the animation base in Fujian and other base business will still belong to the resource pool in the province. China Telecom technical experts told C114 Chinese communication network.

"Group resource pool can provide resource-level disaster preparedness capacity, if some provincial companies do not build provincial resource pool, you can gradually integrated into the group-level resource pool deployment." The technical expert told C114 China Communication Network. "The construction of the resource pool is just the first step, but more critical is how to deploy a unified network resource management platform, according to the steps to manage the group and the provincial pool of resources to achieve decentralized division of management capacity, and finally achieve a unified network of resources into the management and deployment, to achieve an internal platform based on IaaS service system. ”

At present, China Telecom Group's resource pool construction has also made remarkable achievements, only in the business of Jiangsu Telecom as an example, its three years to continuously accelerate the application of the internal system of cloud scale, business cloud platform and it cloud platform intensive benefits highlighted, has accumulated savings of 280 million yuan investment. According to Jiangsu Telecom related sources, since 2009, Jiangsu Telecom Business Cloud platform began to test commercial, from the development, testing phase to cloud solution implementation and application phase. Business Cloud platform over the past 3 years has accumulated more than 130 sets of cloud platform resource deployment, equivalent to more than 3,500 standard virtual machines.

Eliminating islands: Building a cloud-ready network

In the construction of the single resource pool, China Telecom has accumulated rich experience. According to a number of technical experts involved in the construction of several projects, "Server virtualization technology has been very mature, VMware, Citrix and Redhat, but also some national manufacturers have been able to provide validated solutions." ”

"But we want to be able to get rid of the original ' Island Cloud ' model, but from the perspective of the whole network to the IT basic resources of the unified control and deployment." This requires us not only to have a robust network resource management platform, but also to be able to adapt to the cloud era of the Internet infrastructure. ”

Whether it is within the data center of the cloud interconnection, or the data center between the cloud interconnection, or cloud interconnection, network performance and IT management have different needs, the traditional single network technology program is bound to differentiate, for different network function characteristics and customer groups to optimize and integrate. The same is true, China Telecom in 2012, the Data Center switch (DCSW) independent of the centralized procurement.

As the biggest winner of China Telecom 2012 two DCSW collection, China three communications exclusive construction of China Telecom Group One-tier business platform resource pool, and successfully covered the national Telecom's new generation of data center, Provincial IPTV service distribution platform and ICT cloud Platform and other scenarios. Xu Quan, Vice Minister of China Telecom Systems, said in an interview with C114, DCSW is different from the traditional metropolitan area Network convergence Switch HJSW,DCSW in the product architecture, equipment exchange capacity, Wan port capacity and cloud computing virtualization characteristics of higher demand, must have Clos architecture, large cache, High density million trillion, multi-frame virtualization, sophomore-level expansion capabilities.

Technical experts told C114 China Communication Network: "In two cloud, three resource pools in the overall pattern, there will be many nodes, considering the virtual machine online business across node migration needs, we must build a multi-node wide-area two-tier network." In the Cloud data center realizes the sophomore layer network interconnection, supports the resource pool large data transmission and the disaster preparation service. ”

"In the resource pool equipment selection configuration, in the aspect of the export routing of each resource pool node, we tend to centralize the deployment of a unified export routing device, complete the export network demand of the internal hosting platform of the resource pool, and at the core switching equipment level, we will select a multi-level multi-plane switching architecture to realize the physical separation of control plane and forwarding The ability to support network virtualization is also considered. "he added. "In particular, the core layer of equipment, requires large capacity, high reliability, high scalability equipment, and must be in the early construction of the resource pool to build a good core network." ”

With the continuous construction of resource pool nodes, the higher requirement of cloud security is raised, not only to solve the conventional security problems, but also to realize the virtualization of the cloud can adapt efficiently and achieve the safe intelligent management. From the current point of view, the industry also appeared two construction models, one is the traditional network exchange and security equipment separation, and the other is in the network switching equipment integration of security plate. "From the current point of view, we are in the follow-up to both options, but the industry can achieve good integration of the manufacturers relatively few, but this is also a development direction." ”

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)