Case-sharing: Everbright from virtualization to private cloud

At the 2010 Dell Efficient Enterprise summit in Sanya on October 24, Dell unveiled its architecture and management solution for the next generation of data centers: Virtual Integrated System (VIS, virtual integration systems) for "efficient Enterprise", "Cloud migration" A new set of strategic approaches has been prepared. At the same time, Everbright Life Insurance Co., Ltd. Information Technology department's integrated Operations Service room manager Zhang Jun at the meeting to introduce the company's successful implementation of the Server virtualization project experience, and after the meeting with Dell Greater China Enterprise Customer Department solution director Zhiping and so on to receive media interviews.

▲ Everbright Life Insurance Co., Ltd. General Operation Service Room manager of Information Technology Department, Zhang Jun

When it comes to Everbright's server virtualization project, Zhang Jun says, the main reason is that the company's IT infrastructure is becoming more complex and facing multiple challenges as the scale of business needs grows and business changes become flexible. For example, on the one hand 70% of the server resource utilization is less than 30%, waste is more serious, on the other hand, 10% of the server utilization is higher than 80%, become the bottleneck of business development. In addition, the new business system procurement and deployment cycle is too long, the reliability of stand-alone operating business is poor, a large number of data dispersed storage in the local disk can not be effectively managed, data center room saturation can not further expand and so on.

To this end, with the support of Dell's cooperation, Everbright Sun, a year ago, launched a virtualization project, 6 servers composed of high availability and resource dynamic allocation cluster system, the deployment of production and testing of 2 virtual resource pool, the implementation of resources on demand, to ensure the high priority of the production machine, and eventually 35 physical machines migrated to the virtual machine, 31 virtual machines were created at the same time. Zhang Jun told reporters, estimated down, Everbright's server consolidation ratio reached 1:11, the number of servers reduced by 90%, new business deployment time from 3-4 weeks reduced to 1 hours, the engine room area also province out of 8.73 square meters. In finance, the 3-year direct TCO savings reached nearly 1.3 million yuan.

Although today, Everbright Life of the virtualization project has undoubtedly achieved good success, but in the testing and implementation of the project, but not peer-optimistic, because at that time the insurance companies in the production environment to use less virtualization, many people on the data security, information security is very worried. However, as early as in 2007 in a manufacturing company exposed to virtualization Zhang Jun Heart know that virtualization technology is actually very mature, the key is to maintain an open mind.

In the interview, Zhang Jun shared some of his experiences in leading the team in implementing the virtualization project and some insights from virtualization to the private cloud.

1 Training Team through virtualization project

The impact of virtualization and cloud computing on the professional careers of traditional enterprise IT maintainers. As virtualization, cloud computing platforms achieve centralized management and monitoring of hardware, software, networks, and storage, and automated installation and dynamic deployment, there is an objective reduction in the need for it maintenance personnel. Those who only understand the original IT system maintenance methods may face unemployment.

In this respect, Zhang Jun says, virtualization does make it work simpler, but it also offers new opportunities. "By implementing virtualization projects, we've got two good by-products, one for team workouts, including project management and technical talent, and another for optimizing the company's IT processes." In fact, the new projects we are going to implement next year are planned by the team itself. ”

2 Promote business innovation with it

In the general enterprise, it often only plays the role of technical support. In fact, statistics show that 80% of enterprise IT investments are spent on IT operations, while only 20% can be used for business innovation. One of the purposes of Dell's "efficient enterprise" strategy is to liberate IT departments through standardization, simplification, and automation, and to use the savings in operational and maintenance spending for business innovation.

However, in Everbright, it and the relationship between the business is different, one of the key factor is the strong support of the company's top. For example, Everbright Sun Jie Zhichun, chairman of Everbright Securities before the CEO, has personally witnessed online trading sales from only 5% to 80% of the big change, so the importance of it technology is very clear.

"In fact, in Everbright, not it in the impact of the CEO, but the CEO in the IT department assignment." Zhang Jun says the power from management forces the IT department to survive for business innovation. He also talked about the fact that it drives business innovation, and that there is a lot to be said for the insurance industry. For example, the introduction of mobile Internet, insurance agents through hand-held terminals for customers at any time to promote and deal with the business, or, for example, in the insurance claims business, can be 3G mobile phone scene to take photos or video, greatly reduce the behavior of insurance fraud insurance. The introduction of it new technology, not only can greatly improve work efficiency, but also can enhance corporate image, enhance business competitiveness.

3 Consideration of virtualization from both risk and cost

For an application business system to deploy virtualization, with a public cloud and private cloud services, Zhang Jun says it depends on two main factors: risk and cost. On the one hand, as an insurance company, Everbright's risk control and business compliance requirements are very high, this is also a point repeatedly emphasized by the company leaders, so there are still many uncertain factors of the public cloud is not considered. On the other hand, in building a private cloud, as an emerging insurance company, Everbright is more cost-efficient than its older predecessors, trying to save money for the company.

However, he added, the metrics of different companies would vary, even in different stages of the same enterprise. Some big banks and insurers, for example, are more concerned with the reliability and usability of the system than with the cost.

In addition to the risks and costs, Dell provides a number of reference standards for technical aspects prior to its system migration, such as analyzing the potential resources and costs of a virtual machine based on CPU, memory, and I/O network bandwidth usage, and then measuring it. Dell Greater China Enterprise Customer Department solution director Zhiping told reporters that the specific application can be virtualized, how much resources are required, not by one or two factors, and therefore not across, but need a series of tool support, Dell also provides a dedicated assessment services.

▲ Zhiping solution Director, Greater China Enterprise Customer Department, Dell

Zhang Jun also said that Dell provided a number of services at the beginning of the project, including understanding the status of IT business, understanding detailed requirements, holistic framework discussions, virtualization solution comparisons, Dell Virtualization Validation (POC), Dell Virtualization Assessment Services, and Dell's overall solution.

4 from virtualization to private cloud "the virtualization of the PC server is only the first step, and the next step is to virtualize the data center and the desktop side." "Zhang Jun said.

Zhang Jun said: "Very interested in the VIS architecture for virtualized and private cloud environments launched by Dell at the 2010 high-Efficiency enterprise summit." And I hope that Dell can arrange the technical experts to communicate with them face-to-face as soon as possible.

However, he also proposed that for the time being, it's not realistic to turn the application into a large scale deployment, so it starts with a non-mainstream, test environment, and hopefully Dell can help solve some of the new technical challenges, such as how to secure data in a test environment, develop code, and algorithms that don't leak out? How to improve network traffic bottleneck ? If the management process is streamlined and so on.

For the above issues, Zhiping says virtualization is seen by many companies as the first to second step toward cloud computing. While Vis can automatically manage the physical and virtual resources under heterogeneous environment, it can help users analyze and plan the application load and capacity requirement in advance, so it can solve some problems in the planning stage.