Evolution market and technology trend of cloud computing in China

On November 26, 2014, the chief analyst of the Bridge participated in the "Royal Cloud -2014 NetApp Online storage" conference, and in conjunction with 2014 years of analysis of the Chinese user market research data, and we shared a story about "China cloud evolution Market and technology trends" Keynote speech.

Cloud becomes the focus of Chinese users ' it investment

From the Chinese user IT investment focus statistics (Figure 1) can be judged, for enterprise users, 26.1% cloud computing as the focus of investment, and 27.4% of SMEs more inclined to choose Software Definition Data Center for the next 12 months of investment focus. From another set of research data (Figure 2), the trend in China's future cloud computing market is that 40.8% of enterprise-level users will deploy cloud computing over the next 24 months. In contrast, 34.1% of SMEs have plans to deploy cloud computing. Combined with figures 1 and 2, it can be seen that Chinese enterprise-class users spend more on cloud computing (including public, private, and mixed clouds) than SMEs.

Figure 1. Chinese Users IT investment focus

Figure 2. China's cloud computing investment continues to grow

Hybrid it and hybrid cloud become mainstream

The cloud has become the focus of Chinese users. However, we often hear about three different forms of cloud in public, private and mixed clouds. So what kind of cloud do Chinese users prefer to use?

China Bridge analysts believe that, first of all, from the overall market trend, private cloud and mixed cloud acceptance is much higher than the public cloud. The public cloud business model, the lack of economy, and the public cloud and security are the main reasons for the low acceptance of the public cloud in the Chinese market. For companies, given the importance of data, the security of the data is ranked first in the way the cloud is considered, so companies tend to consider a hybrid cloud of private clouds, or a combination of public and private clouds, to achieve data security and reduce IT spending simultaneously.

From another set of surveys (Figure 3), referring to the future it mainstream of the enterprise, traditional data centers are still the mainstream it form of Chinese users ' business support, because the first major focus of many enterprises in China is how to run the existing data centers. In the second place is a mix of data centers and any cloud forms, which in the Chinese market are called "mixed it" forms. The third is the mixed cloud.

Here, you can see a "mixed it" noun is presented. Why is it that in China the data center and any form of cloud mixing are called "mixed it"? What does it have to do with the cloud? The China bridge analyst explained that more than 80% of the country's cloud computing is now independent of existing data centers, according to a deep visit to more than 30 CIOs. This kind of independent table now, one is in the management way, there are two completely independent forms of management of the cloud and existing data centers, and the other is that the virtualization maturity of many existing data centers has yet to be improved, as Chinese users are lagging behind in virtualization maturity, limiting the migration of workloads between the cloud and existing data centers. This has led to the emergence of hybrid it as a very characteristic form in the Chinese market. But in the end, hybrid it will evolve rapidly towards a mixed cloud, and the maturity of virtualization directly determines the speed with which the Chinese market blends it to the hybrid cloud. In the next 12-24 months, mixed it and hybrid cloud rose to the first to second it form, becoming the mainstream it form.

Figure 3. Rapid change in data center it patterns

Technical considerations in cloud Construction

After learning about the evolution of cloud computing in China, how can companies build a cloud? Here, the bridge analyst from the architecture and storage in two aspects to analyze cloud computing construction process need to pay attention to the problem.

Architecture Considerations

First of all, Chinese users to cloud computing in the process of evolution presents three typical forms: 1, through the virtual decoupling of the gradual transition to the cloud, 2, to application-driven, for an application to build a small cloud, 3, Super scalable public cloud. This evolutionary process presents new challenges to traditional it architectures. With the development of business and the diversification of applications, the longer the deployment and tuning of the application IT infrastructure, the lower the utilization of the resources used for purchasing at the core and the more resources it manages to consume. Application deployment and performance optimization are the key to the lag of the IT to the business response, while it's slow response to the business also affects the troubleshooting cycle and business stability, continuity, and the delivery of the entire IT service, which adversely affects the business development of the enterprise. These negative factors drive the rapid growth of the fusion architecture.

Storage considerations

Look at the storage again. According to the survey of the Middle Bridge, in the process of selecting storage, the storage resource optimization of virtual environment, the horizontal expansion of capacity and performance, and the performance requirement of storage satisfying high virtual confidentiality are listed as the three important factors to choose storage when deploying cloud computing. In the cloud computing environment, how to effectively integrate the existing heterogeneous storage resources and effectively centralize and unify the management to meet the requirements of different application load and application performance is directly related to the long-term cost performance of cloud computing. In addition, in the cloud computing environment, the capacity and performance of the horizontal expansion of flexibility to meet the needs of users, and significantly reduce the user's procurement costs and total cost of ownership. Finally, the cloud environment is a highly virtualized environment with thousands of virtual machines, which require storage with high IOPS to meet the needs of virtual machines, as well as virtual machine migration and load balancing across platforms to meet business needs.

Central Bridge View

Cloud computing not only brings about changes in it patterns, it also triggers changes in IT services. Enterprises and users only need to pay attention to the data is their own, and the data for the calculation of storage methods, efficiency, the use of cloud services to achieve and upgrade. China Bridge analysts believe that cloud computing in the country will continue to grow strong trend, the next 12-24 months mixed cloud become the mainstream of China's it, and from which to drive the rapid growth of the integration architecture. For storage, implementing dynamic QoS configuration and management at the virtual machine level, as well as high scalability and resource optimization, are key points in ensuring the continuous and steady operation of the cloud computing process.