China Mobile IT Support cloud process: Pooling work has been carried out

In a recent public occasion, Zhang Tongji, deputy Dean of China Mobile Design Institute, said that for telecom operators, cloud computing is the way to the future. But in the intricacies of cloud computing technology and applications, the most urgent is how to achieve the cloud of existing assets of large it.

In his view, the operators ' It assets are huge, the utilization rate is very low, the deployment period is long, the operation dimension is difficult, and the construction of the IT support cloud can evade and solve the above problems effectively. As the pioneer of the carrier's IT assets cloud, Zhang Tongji details the latest progress and evolution path of China Mobile in this field, and also put forward his expectation and perplexity.

Problem

"For operators, we all have a huge IT infrastructure, and we've maintained a fast-growing situation, and even a single business system with a provincial division needs more than thousands of servers." "Zhang Tongji said. "It assets are huge from a full network perspective." ”

In this behemoth, it resources of the island phenomenon is relatively serious, "most IT systems still use the traditional silo construction mode, resources can not be shared across systems, the utilization rate is very low; Although the peak of the business is not in a piece, but still cannot play the role of peak. ”

At the same time, because the resources can not be shared, resulting in uneven system pressure, only passive procurement, the introduction of a larger capacity of equipment to meet business growth needs of the expansion. Heterogeneous storage and computing environments also make data impossible to share.

The bigger challenge comes from the long system deployment cycle and operational difficulties, "for IT systems, especially servers, there are some differences in our ability to estimate and actually run, which often occur in advance, and the need for flexible matching of IT assets. In the aspect of operation and dimension, there is also the phenomenon of being exhausted. ”

"So we want to be based on low cost, efficient construction of IT system needs, in infrastructure and applications, such as the implementation of system architecture innovation, to build services to the internal application of the support system cloud; From a technical facility perspective, the resource pool form to support the IT system's resource requirements, with the ability to allocate resources and flexible expansion as needed, In application systems, multiple-tenant forms are used to achieve a relative concentration of several IT systems. ”

Situation

From the current situation of China Mobile's cloud practice, it consists of three major works: first, to do the virtual resource pool, to realize the unified management of the three dimensions of Saas/paas/iaas; the second is to introduce virtual desktops and transfer more capabilities to the network; In view of the closed and high cost problems of traditional minicomputer, China Mobile has also carried out some beneficial practices in distributed computing and large data storage.

"By supporting the construction of the cloud, we also have some problems: there is a relatively small amount of work done at the IaaS level, less virtualization at the PAAs level and at the SaaS level, followed by improvements in the standards and functionality of the cloud management platform, as well as the standardization and manageability of the resource pool equipment. "Zhang Tongji said.

"The third aspect is that the resource pool construction also has the decentralized construction, lacks the resources and the ability exchange and the sharing, the resource pool Cross-domain technology is not very mature, the virtualization sharing geographical distribution and the engine room condition limit is also relatively big." In addition, the distributed technology is currently limited to a few open source architectures such as Hadoop. ”

In Zhang Tongji's view, the IT support cloud needs to be started, pooled, cloudy and optimized in four stages to be mature.

"The current start-up phase has passed and the pooling of work has been carried out. For example, in terms of technology, we have adopted some virtualization technology to expand some applications, in planning, we can carry out a number of small-scale decentralized construction of resource pools. The current goal to achieve is how to transition from the pool stage to the cloud phase, from the technical more standardization and security, in the planning of the gradual formation of large-scale pooling of resources, so that resource sharing and dynamic deployment can be more efficient and convenient. ”

"In the resource pool construction, we need to make some changes in the organizational structure, the establishment of the application and resource pool interaction process methods and systems; From the maintenance point of view, we have to make each level of interface gradually standardized, unified resource management." "Zhang Tongji said.

In the next article, we will give you a detailed introduction to mobile it cloud methodology: through the standardization and customization of hardware, software standardization and templating, the implementation of the system platform load migration; Then, through consolidation across application domains and admin domains, the centralized it cloud is eventually implemented.

(Responsible editor: Fumingli)