From virtualization to private cloud cloud computing Suisse

In the financial circle, the asset management industry is an extremely rapid development of the subdivision area. In these seven years, the rapid development of the business needs of the Suisse it has to "speed up", but the company's professional IT staff has been very limited. In order to resolve this contradiction, they began to attempt to virtualize, and then to the "private cloud."

From the beginning of several small and rack-type servers, Suisse currently has more than 60 small machines and more than 200 Intel Xeon E7 processor-based x86 servers, more than 6,000 information points ... 7 years, hundreds of times times the increase in data volume has led to the work of the bank Credit Suisse data Center for many extensions. The company was first set up, the system data volume is only 600GB, but now this number has become 200TB, and next year will break through 300TB in the first quarter. But within the company, there are only 12 professional engineers supporting the stable operation of 2 subsidiaries, 3 subsidiaries and the entire IT system at Headquarters. While such staffing is at the right level, as required by financial industry regulators, it is still hard to imagine the size of the infrastructure being managed by just 12 people. The reality, however, is that the 12 people who manage the infrastructure are only 3 people, and others work on project management, application management, system analysis, etc. It is the "private cloud" that clears the Zhang Yi team.

Step by step towards the private cloud

In 2008, with the help of data center relocation, Suisse began to decide to realize the full server virtualization gradually. The financial business did not dare to take too much risk, so initially it simply migrated test systems, internal systems and unimportant systems into virtualized environments. "We spent more than 1 years training the technical team to get used to it and to accept it, and to make better use of virtualization technology," he said. By the end of 2010 years, we began a large-scale virtualization migration. "In Zhang Yi's view, the biggest risk that cloud computing brings to companies is the change in IT management and operational dimensions, in the process of attempting virtualization, testing, and applying migration practices and training, they are constantly discovering problems and solving problems that have laid a solid foundation for a smooth transition to a private cloud in future work Suisse.

Zhang Yi and his team also experienced a number of challenges in applying virtualization technology. For example, in the process of full virtualization of the server, they found that the virtualization of heterogeneous computing platforms was difficult to achieve in the future with the goal of flexible and E7 resources, so the server was updated as uniformly as possible to the IBM 3850 X5 server based on the intel® processor family, The configuration of the target workload can be customized according to its actual situation.

In the process of applying migrations, engineers generally believed that the virtualization of system 100% was to be implemented. But in the actual operation, but found a lot of problems, resulting in database efficiency, low efficiency of middleware, in the process of switching difficult to ensure data integrity, if not to achieve database virtualization will increase the complexity of the system. After repeated practice, they finally found the application of virtualization technology balance point.

Solve the Troubles of fund company's rapid growth

Suisse's data center currently carries more than 90 applications, and more than 2/3 of the systems are currently running in virtualized environments. The fund industry has a feature that applications for IT resources occupy a huge difference between day and night: Intensive daytime transactions, which can consume a large amount of processor resources; At night, the system mainly carries out batch class operation, which consumes a lot of memory. "After virtualization, we can easily deploy IT resources." Very simple to complete the processor, memory, storage in the deployment between different systems, the release of resources, recycling can be fully automated, management pressure will be much smaller. ”

Zhang Yi believes that a small number of people to manage all the infrastructure, without the support of virtualization technology could not be done. With the development of computing technology and the increasing demand of the financial business for the computing ability of the backstage equipment, the advantages of virtualization in high reliability and usability are obvious, and once the physical machine fails, it can be migrated to another machine, but the application will not stop, so as to achieve seamless application migration, Just click the mouse to complete the action. "It can be said that Intel should have no competitors in terms of virtualization, especially from the chip perspective, so it has to choose Intel as a partner to virtualize the road," Zhang Yi explained.

  At the end of each year, the fund industry is the "war period", the fund companies in the rankings, but also the IT department busiest time. From the product to the release, the general time only 2 weeks, 2 weeks IT departments to complete the system development, testing, on-line, deployment and a series of work. Since the time of development testing is generally difficult to compress, Zhang Yi and its team always have to find ways to compress the time of deployment. After the large-scale application virtualization technology, the data center realizes the standardized IT resources purchase and the allocation mechanism, the on-line deployment time also becomes the minute computation. In Zhang Yi's view, virtualization is just the primary stage of the cloud. The real private cloud should be a synthesis of the results, including the storage, computing, network virtualization, front-end virtualization, the application of virtualization, through the cloud released is a variety of applications and services. Last year, ICBC made a first attempt at private cloud applications to publish its internal office system to the portal on a cloud-application basis. Zhang Yi hinted that if all goes well, they will continue to try to move production systems into the cloud in the future.