Case analysis of China Telecom Hicloud Cloud Platform

China Telecom is Taiwan's largest telecommunications provider, master the island more than 95% of the fixed network resources, in the use of cloud computing has a great demand. In a 2010 equity document, China Telecom was expected to launch the five-year cloud investment plan to build Taiwan's largest cloud operation and data center, estimated to be about 40 billion yuan over the next five years, and to boost growth for the next decade.

As you can see, China Telecom has a strong initiative in the expansion of cloud computing, mainly because of the increasing demand for IT resources from individual users and enterprise users, the need for more applications and resources, and the increasing demand for fast and flexible deployments. At the same time, China Telecom more and more in it investment, personnel costs are also improving, but the system equipment utilization is not satisfactory. They want cloud computing to save business it and people investment and reduce costs. In addition, also hope that through the provision of cloud services to expand business scope, enhance the competitiveness of enterprises. And in the provision of cloud computing services capabilities, it is clear that China Telecom also has adequate network resources to do support.

2010, China Telecom began to provide Hicloud CaaS (Compute as a service, computing as services) services, the use of virtualization technology development of Cloud server services, users can load a customized application environment, to perform their own network services to provide. Users can lease computing resources, memory and hard disk space on demand. To achieve the use of IT resources like water, electricity.

Hicloud Cloud Platform is also phased construction. To the first phase of July 2010, basic IaaS Services can be provided, mainly including virtual machine rental services. In this phase, can be based on the user's CPU, memory, hard disk and other hardware requirements orders. To January 2011 As the second phase, at this time can provide customers with VPDC services, including virtual firewalls, load balancing value-added services, so that users can x86 the architecture of the entire data center to the Hicloud platform. The first phase of construction focused on Cisco UCS, VMware Virtual operating systems, and NETAPP storage. The second phase is the introduction of the BMC Provisioning scheme, which enables customers to customize the desired virtual data center. The BMC BladeLogic Automation suite provides a complete end-to-end stack configuration in a secure network environment and operating system, and integrates with China Telecom's existing systems and processes to ensure smooth and responsive cloud service delivery. The BMC Atrium orchestrator helps integrate multiple technologies in a coherent workflow to ensure the sustainability of cloud service delivery.

Decryption cloud computing architecture platform and main technology

In the overall architecture of the Hicloud system, the cloud computing infrastructure platform is the foundation of the entire architecture. This platform does not directly contact the user, but the user's experience of the operation is closely related to this platform.

In the entire network architecture, Cisco Unified Data Center has played a very big role. Cisco's unified Data Center is one of the three major elements of Cisco's Cloudverse. Cloudverse is a cloud computing architecture that combines basic elements that enable an enterprise to build, manage, and connect to public, private, and mixed clouds. The Cloudverse Cloud computing architecture combines three core cloud elements, including a unified data center, a cloud intelligence network, and cloud applications and services to ensure that businesses can enjoy many of the benefits of the cloud. It also includes increased flexibility, higher cost-effectiveness, enhanced security, and a dynamic, high assurance experience.

In product usage, Cisco Nexus 7010 acts as a WAN router with core and convergence layer switches (shown in VDC1,VDC2 and VDC3), which are connected to SCE, FW, SLB and Nexus 1010/nam respectively, Let the network services required by the Cloud data center be connected. In the overall architecture, the use of FCoE in storage is also a major attempt. Although most of the storage access is still in the form of FC + MDS 9222i, the architecture also provides an end-to-end FCoE scenario where the storage Nic also supports FCoE. In the virtualization and sophomore network attempt, OTV (Overlay by virtualization) and Fabricpath are two key words.

Previous Hicloud network challenges include four main areas: the Operation and maintenance program is complex, the cost is high; the choice of interconnection path is not elastic, so it needs to go to the specific link to meet the requirement of the two-layer extension. Bandwidth is not effectively managed, the traffic in each data center can not be effectively from local access, resulting in bandwidth bottlenecks A single failure is not effectively isolated and backup assistance between data centers is not easy to implement. These problems have been solved well in OTV technology.

OTV technology is much easier to connect to multiple data centers than traditional methods. It is basically a two-tier network transmission technology, with software to update the network switch, connecting the data centers located in different regions. In Hicloud networks, it is necessary to connect data centers in three different places, where OTV plays an important role in helping to achieve application reliability and flexible workload migrations. OTV is a "MAC in IP" technology, by using MAC address routing rules, OTV provides an overlay (overlay) network that enables two-tier connectivity between dispersed two-tier domains while maintaining the independence of these domains, as well as the fault tolerance, sustainability, and load balancing advantages of IP interconnection. Compared to MPLS (Multiprotocol label switching) and earlier frame Relay and asynchronous transfer mode protocols, OTV technology does not need to redesign the network or install special services such as label switching in the kernel. OTV simply covers the existing network, preserving the independence of the data centers that interconnect on the second tier while inheriting all the well-designed IP network benefits.

Fabricpath is another innovative application in Hicloud network. In the process of the flow model moving from "north to South" to "East to West", STP (spanning tree, spanning trees protocol) is becoming a restricted point. The solution to this problem from the agreement is SPB and Trill two, Fabricpath is an extension of the Trill protocol, can be seen as a "enhanced version of the Trill", is the basic function of Trill and "session-based MAC address learning", "vpc+ multiple topologies" The collection of advanced features.

From the protocol level, Fabricpath defines a new two-tier address space called the Switch ID, which is uniquely identified as a switch and provides a basis for routing addressing between nodes. A two-level TTL field is defined, similar to the TTL mechanism in the IP protocol, to prevent data frames from being forwarded infinitely in the Fabricpath domain. Fabricpath introduces an improved is protocol as a control signaling, instead of relying on MAC address for addressing, and relies on switch IDs of switches to complete addressing, exchanging is signaling to build routing tables between nodes. "Session-based MAC address learning" means that only the source address in the data frame where the destination address is the local server is placed in the MAC address table of the network device, the network device only holds the MAC Address table entry with the local session relationship, which greatly reduces the MAC address table of the Virtual data center access device.

The combination of OTV and Fabricpath Technologies enables the future Hicloud group Cloud Data Center to truly achieve the goal of only a single virtual cloud room.

Inspection of the effect of implementation

After this network transformation, cloud Computing in the Hicloud value is magnified, mainly includes the following aspects: the effective use of resources, not only to save the use of server resources and maintenance costs, but also reduce the wiring and personnel costs, network resources centralized operation, reduce waste and reduce operating costs , improve real-time response capacity, no longer subject to regional and time constraints, dispersed throughout the staff and partners can read resources at any time to solve the problem of staff work together; high flexibility of system construction, users can expand or reduce virtual and physical equipment according to business needs, High compatibility is a good way to achieve investment protection needs. In addition, the overall ability of network security has been greatly improved.

In the process of deployment, fast is the goal that all users want to achieve. In the deployment of servers and virtual hosts, this problem is properly resolved and 80 virtual hosts can be deployed quickly within 10 minutes. In addition, when the host switches the system services, there is no need for additional network or storage device provisioning, and the server failover speed is also improved, while the absence of a single point of failure storage architecture is a good way to improve data security and system availability.

Cloud Future outlook

Cloud computing, as a major technology trend, has been rapidly infiltrated in the market and has been ranked among the top ten strategic technical trends in Gartner for several consecutive years. It opens up a new way for IT services to enable individuals and businesses to freely choose how to acquire or deliver IT services, and to reduce the impact of traditional software and hardware licensing mode limitations.

In the Cisco Global Cloud Index (2010-2015) report, Cisco speculated that global cloud computing flows would rise 12 times times from 130EB a year to 1.6ZB (Zettabyte) per year by 2015. The study also predicts that more than 50% computing work in the 2014 data center will be based on clouds. This puts forward the higher request to the cloud data center, the hicloud of Chunghwa Telecom will not be an isolated existence.