Lenovo Cloud: Drive Enterprise Mobile Internet transformation

In China's cloud computing infrastructure solutions provider, Lenovo Group appears to be more special, the original PC, mobile terminals, servers and other hardware-oriented manufacturers, the rapid construction of enterprise cloud services, enterprise storage line of business, and announced the acquisition of IBM System X after the establishment of Lenovo Cloud services business Group, A complete personal cloud and enterprise cloud solution is illuminated. What is the purpose of Lenovo to build the enterprise cloud business, what is the difference in its service, and through what special technology to support the needs of enterprise users? What benefits can businesses and developers get? How will it evolve in the future? A few days ago, Csdn reporter interviewed Lenovo Group vice President Weidong, for his responsible enterprise cloud business carried out a detailed discussion.

The planning purpose of cloud services business Group

April 2014, Lenovo announced the implementation of a new business framework, covering the personal cloud, the cloud of corporate cloud services, and PC, Mobile, enterprise-level business groups. To understand the Lenovo Cloud service, we need to understand the change of the whole industry, the reform of the large associative structure and the concrete measures.

In Lenovo's view, more cost-effective, faster 4G mobile network services, richer and more powerful intelligent terminals, as well as cloud computing and the wide use of large data, is to enable mankind to enter a world of interconnection, "forever online" Internet age, the user's real needs has become the main driving force for enterprise development. In other words, companies are also facing the transformation of the Internet.

Lenovo's judgment comes from observation of the industry and perception of customers. As a global manufacturer of equipment (personal, enterprise, and Mobile), Lenovo has experienced 4 different changes in its interactions with customers:

customers need more than just simple equipment, but a more complete product experience; The relatively long cycle of services can facilitate the purchase of equipment; traditional scatter-point interaction is difficult to make Lenovo better understand and service users, complete experience; The internet is forcing the transformation of enterprise architecture.

"The entire enterprise to consumer Internet forced back, staff experience and work model is also gradually changing, business processes and efficiency requirements in the Internet under the transformation of a more rapid outbreak, efficiency rise out, it will force enterprises to change the structure." The process of changing the architecture and changing the way it is applied is actually giving the cloud service practitioners and the industry opportunities. "Weidong said.

Of course, the work that an employee can do with a mobile phone in an enterprise may be very limited. Weidong that the concept of cloud computing and wisdom is "wool" in many cases. Lenovo set up a cloud services business, is to have a continuous interactive process with customers, close to the needs of users and industry applications, to build a complete enterprise-oriented Internet experience, to build their own ecological system, to provide simple, easy-to-use, reliable cloud services, simplifying application development, reduce operational costs, accelerate the application of the online, Drive Lenovo Internet Service transformation.

The reason for the establishment of cloud services business group, rather than put to the equipment business, the most important thing is to consider the hardware operating mode and application software services operating mode of difference, can not be two different rules of the business hard to tie together. Weidong explains that although to provide a complete user experience is the same, but in the process of pushing back, the hardware business team's main appeal is how to do the product well, how to the basis of the hardware products, how to do the scale of users, sales and revenue to do, to the general products to meet more needs. The business model of the software Application service team is different, facing the efficiency of different business processes, in a standard product platform, users often have some customization requirements that are combined with their own business processes. These two businesses, the development cycle is different, if hard put together, two teams will each other to their own stumbling.

Therefore, Lenovo set up the fourth business group, through the coupling way, hope in the Lenovo system to use Lenovo's platform, but can have a new mechanism and law, meet the needs of the industry rules to promote the development of cloud computing business. Lenovo, for example, has recently launched a cloud-computing project, in which cloud services groups and other business groups collaborate to advance delivery.

Lenovo Cloud focuses on technology and products

Lenovo Cloud Services business Group was established only half a year, has achieved a breakthrough in performance. The group's net income exceeded its budget by nearly $40 million trillion, with corporate cloud services growing rapidly in the second quarter, with revenues rising 186% per cent year-on-year. This is the result of Lenovo's years of accumulation. Weidong Introduction, Lenovo Cloud Business Foundation as early as a few years ago, the institute began to start, but did not packaging a business form.

Lenovo Cloud Business composition covers IaaS, PaaS, SaaS three levels:

In IaaS, Lenovo as a front-end provider of equipment, hope to be able to better enable enterprises to the performance of equipment, efficiency, flexibility to use, in the way of the cloud to provide services to enterprises. In PAAs and SaaS, Lenovo focuses on data storage and data management, based on its data processing, storage scheduling, data auditing, and some security technologies. The SaaS layer is based on Lenovo Enterprise Network, extending the business to the needs of data, distribution and management around the enterprise. PAAs is mainly under the SaaS layer to solve the enterprise inside the massive data management, providing including storage backup, mobile applications, digital media, large data, the Internet of Things cloud platform and product services.

In addition, Lenovo also works with ISVs in an open mode to provide products and services at all levels, forming a large cooperative model and ecology.

How Lenovo meets the needs of industry users

On the basis of cloud platform solution, Lenovo further launched the End-to-end integrated industry application Solution--pm2.5 Intelligent Environmental Cloud, using the new generation of information technology, such as IoT, cloud computing, large data, spatial geographic information integration, to enhance the efficiency of environmental monitoring.

Lenovo Wisdom Environmental Protection Cloud-pm2.5 cloud monitoring solution

Lenovo Intelligent Environmental Cloud PM2.5 Cloud monitoring solution emphasizes elasticity, low cost, more flexibility and efficiency. Based on the dual monitoring system (combination of cloud monitoring data and existing monitoring data), GPRS/IPV6 data transmission, spatial geographic information positioning, automatic calibration and other technologies to build intelligent acquisition node, through the cloud to achieve efficient monitoring process, the terminal can be flexibly deployed according to demand, and can even be deployed in mobile vehicles, The coverage can be very large. The program can be combined with the meteorological Environmental Protection Department system very well, the dynamic monitoring process can be real-time, but also through large data technology, second-level records analysis of changes in trend.

Weidong revealed that in view of the current smog-ravaged as the representative of the environmental pollution problem, many cities are interested in PM2.5 environmental clouds.

In order to meet the different needs of users in different industries, only the custom development of Lenovo is clearly not enough, so Lenovo cloud services to emphasize openness and cooperation, build the ecosystem, not only with ISVs, but also with the infrastructure partners, such as with EMC to establish a joint venture to improve the infrastructure product line.

Taking the education industry as an example, aiming at the reform of the system structure facing education, Lenovo currently has a program to do with some of the education industry companies to cooperate, such as campus education management system, we provide hardware and resource cloud management platform, including virtualization, object storage and software definition network services, that is, the overall cloud management platform. At the application level, we will work with the industry's dedicated ISV in the field of education to turn this into a higher performance, cost-effective solution for the education industry.

Secondly, for the education industry for data and document management needs, Lenovo can provide local storage, but also can provide software services, in this unified management platform, through different levels of authority configuration, decentralized in various departments, laboratories, the document data efficiently managed. Weidong, Lenovo Cloud storage System, through the cluster application and distributed network storage technology to bring customers different types of storage devices to provide enterprise-class data storage, management and business-efficient collaboration solutions, with greater flexibility and scalability.

For example, it involves interacting with teachers and students in schools, like the College of continuing education this dispersed throughout the country, Lenovo through the provision of private, public network disk services, can improve their communication efficiency, to avoid the traditional mailbox, IM, FTP and free network disk existence of convenience, cost and security issues.

According to Lenovo's introduction, Lenovo Enterprise Cloud has successfully provided services to more than 50 industries and 150,000 enterprise customers.

Data Services become the core

According to a new Gartner survey, early SaaS has been focused on smaller pilot projects, and now these projects have turned into critical business and production levels, and the traditional local (on-premises) software deployment model is expected to shrink from the current 34% to 18% in 2017. Of course, the combination of SaaS and on-premises patterns is still important in consolidating and migrating between the two different deployment modes. In any case, this means that the competition in the SaaS sector will be more intense, especially for Lenovo, which is taking the global route, and facing a worldwide competition with companies like IBM and Oracle. Weidong that the combination of software and hardware, through the framework of cloud services to achieve, around the user just need efficient, high-performance, safe way to quickly provide services, is the future trend.

What Lenovo does at the SaaS level is to unite ISVs to provide services for the enterprise, but Lenovo also captures the core of modern enterprise operations-data, through object storage, data distribution, and data management, while providing a minimalist, standardized protocol to facilitate access by third parties. So, Lenovo's expansion of services at the SaaS level, the reinforcement of PAAs cloud platform services and research in large data areas are well worth looking forward to.

Availability and security

For enterprises, the use of data and documentation-related services, the company's internal data out, through Lenovo's platform to achieve business services operating processes, availability and security requirements can not be discounted. Lenovo through the combination of technical means and management process, step by step to build the trust of customers, security as one of its important selling points.

From the user front-end operations to the background cloud service platform operation and maintenance management, Lenovo mainly through 3 technical means to ensure the entire process of data security: Before the data into the data center, it will be encrypted, block and backup processing.

on the transmission channel, the data from the client came out in an encrypted way in the public network transmission. After the data reaches Lenovo Data center, from the system layer to the underlying infrastructure layer, each layer has the mechanism of security protection, including firewall, virus scanning, and various security mechanisms. Using metadata and block data separation of the data schema, the user unified data file will be sliced processing, will not be placed on the same server, even if boarded a server, can only see a part of the encrypted data. When the data is placed in the background is redundant mechanism, the same data guaranteed at least three copies of the backup, even if the server downtime, the user's data will not be lost.

In addition, in the management process, Lenovo also has a very strict authority distribution system and the corresponding inspection and audit system, provide administrators can not delete or change the log and record functions, with the mature multi-tenant architecture system, the implementation of multi-level authority control, decentralized division, Enables fine-grained permission settings for Team folders and individual files to permanently ensure that no operational personnel on the internal operational team can see data on all servers.

"So far Lenovo has been operational for six or seven years, without an accident of data security," he said. This, in turn, attests to our technical and managerial approach to meeting the expectations and requirements of users. "Weidong said.

In terms of usability, for example, Lenovo's corporate network is a complete SLA that maintains a 99.9999% level. The entire architecture of the cloud services is more challenging to the stability of smaller IT systems that are used alone within the enterprise, as it involves the access side, the backend applications that provide the platform, and the response requirements.

Outlook on the evolution trend of cloud infrastructure

The carrier of cloud services is still physical infrastructure, Weidong stressed, completely out of hardware pure software plus services, similar to "Castles in the sky." Because of the baggage of history, the practice of enterprise's own infrastructure is still unshakable in the short term, so it is easy to understand Lenovo's strategy of adhering to the "Equipment + service".

The evolution of IT infrastructure, from traditional it to the current cloud data center, from mainframe to small servers, from RISC architecture to x86 architecture seems clear. Weidong said that the future long-term development process must be driven by the user's application needs and application patterns. For example, the previous ERP requires advanced computing density, continuous reading and writing capabilities, mobile internet debris, random, a large amount of demand, will require you the entire architecture will make great changes. He believes that x86 will evolve in the future, and there may be a new architecture that is lighter, more responsive to front-end requirements, and will change in future servers and storage architectures.

Summary

Internet thinking is not new, wave, Huawei, Ufida, Kingdee, bat are talking about the Internet, Lenovo transformation is also the time. Through the accumulation of personal cloud market to cultivate enterprise cloud users, from the data platform into SaaS, PaaS, to build an industry-wide ecosystem, Lenovo's strategic layout is commendable. As Weidong said, Lenovo's brand and customer relationship is its two major advantages, in hand with EMC, x86 IBM business, Lenovo has gained the technical strength of the upgrade. In the future, how to strengthen the enterprise cloud service characteristic, construct the perfect ecosystem, and ensure its indispensable position in the ecological chain with the more diversified service, is the thing that Lenovo needs to consider.