New equation of cloud computing in Yunnan Agricultural province

Yunnan Agricultural University is transforming from "digital campus" to "intelligent campus", and the Tide eight server TS850 set up a unified campus "private cloud" platform for Yunnan Agricultural University, which provides a digital environment with "cloud service" as the core of resource digitalization, application integration, intelligent management and scientific decision-making. After the deployment of cloud computing in Yunnan, the average eight server consolidates more than 30 applications, reduces operational costs, increases system flexibility, saves 80% of electricity per year, and deploys a new system in minutes. Yunnan Agricultural Bank of the cloud computing is still in progress, the future cloud computing platform hosting more than 100 business systems.

Located in Kunming, the Yunnan Agricultural University is a provincial key university, has a long history, founded in 1938, formerly known as the National University of Yunnan Agricultural College, is the cradle of Chinese agriculture talent. Since 1998, Yunnan Agricultural University has been committed to the construction of information technology, has been built million trillion core, gigabit access to the park network, and independent research and development of a number of full-featured network application system, in the school teaching, scientific research, management work plays an important role.

Campus of Yunnan Agricultural University

At present, the overall development trend of education informatization in Yunnan Province is changing from the first generation of "digital campus" to the second generation of "intelligent campus", the digital campus platform with data as the core, management as the means and service-oriented is paid more and more attention.

Model innovation--introducing operators to solve capital bottleneck

Yunnan Agricultural University has therefore formulated the intelligent campus overall construction goal--on the foundation which unceasingly consummates the campus network and the public service infrastructure, the use of modern information technology to the school teaching, scientific research, management and service of the various business modernization, specifically with advanced, secure wired and wireless mobile campus network as the basis for the construction of "cloud services "For the core of the resources digitization, application integration, management intelligence, decision-making scientific digital environment."

However, the problem of lack of funds has been a bottleneck. Referring to and drawing on the information construction experience of other universities, the Yunnan Agricultural University boldly carries on the model innovation, takes "the socialized cooperation construction" the pattern to carry on the construction, by the telecommunication operator investment construction, this solves the school fund question, unifies the school itself good technical and the scientific research strength, the Yunnan education profession has begun the new round data center construction.

Upgrade Data center--Comprehensive clouds

After the introduction of the third party to solve the financial problems, Yunnan Agricultural University began to upgrade the digital campus, the purpose of the data center upgrade is very simple, is to establish a unified campus "private cloud" platform, through the server virtualization, storage virtualization way, set up a server, storage resource pool, For the school's business application system to provide a high-performance, high reliability, high security computing, storage platform.

Campus cloud with eight server as core

After a rigorous bidding, Yunnan Agricultural province chose the cloud computing infrastructure solution, which is divided into 2 parts. Firstly, using the Wave eight ten core TS850 as the platform, constructing the virtual resource pool as the unified deployment platform of the future application system, secondly, constructing the storage system with the capability of expanding, dynamically allocating 60T capacity and the disaster-tolerant storage system of 60T capacity to ensure the reliable storage of the important data resources of the school.

Although this scenario is highly available, can guarantee the continuity of business operation, but this program does not have disaster-tolerant function, once the fire and other major accidents, Yunnan Agricultural University Digital Campus system still has the risk of interruption, so the wave and use of the school's existing computing equipment, storage equipment, etc. do a Remote Data center disaster ( The main data center in the new Campus No. 6th teaching Building B 205, disaster-tolerant data center in the old campus complex building 517, to meet the level of information security protection requirements of colleges and universities.

The topological structure diagram of Yunnan Agricultural Institute data Center

Shuttle ts850--is designed for cloud computing

Wave TS850 is the first self-developed domestic eight server based on Intel Xeon, which integrates 8 Xeon e7-8850 processors (80 cores, 160 threads) and maximum 1TB DDR3 memory in 6U space. Peak floating-point computing capacity reached 578.56Gflops, the equivalent of 5 years before the 1 42U Cabinet Server computing power, can fully meet the virtualization of server performance requirements.

With virtualization, the equivalent of a number of eggs in the same basket, which must require a strong basket, that is, the server must have a very high availability and reliability, wave TS850 power supply, signal, cooling system using a highly available design, CPU, memory, I/O and other key components are used redundant, Fault-tolerant design, at the same time, the use of more than 20 small platform RAS features, such as memory mirroring, SMI Channel failover, 1200W 3+1 power Redundancy, MCA recovery, QPI Bus error correction, to prevent the part of the single point of failure.

I/O extensibility and flexibility are the basic technical requirements for cloud computing, because multiple I/O slots must be matched while deploying more than one virtual machine, and the Wave TS850 uses high-performance 512MB SAS RAID cards, configures multiple SAS drives for RAID5, and provides up to 9 I/O expansion slots. You can add I/O devices at any time as needed.

TS850 to the market for more than 4 years, well received by customers, is currently eight server market sales of the first star products, but also laid a wave in the eight market leading position. In the first half of 2014, the Chinese market every 2 eight servers, there are 1 from the wave.

Profit, lower cost is just the beginning

For Yunnan Agricultural Choice Eight server as the basic platform for cloud computing, the reason is actually very simple, low-end server running cloud computing, system density, reliability can not be compared with large servers, although the eight server in the procurement link price will be higher, but the overall cost is significantly better.

Currently, the eight server based cloud computing platform offers a 30:1 consolidation ratio, averaging one device to 30 systems, and the server's average utilization rate is increased from 5% to 15% to 60% to 80%. As the number of systems increases, the ratio is expected to reach 60:1--80:1. Database, middleware, and operating system software are based on the core number of CPU charge, the overall procurement costs of Yunnan Agricultural Bank has been significantly reduced.

At the same time, the increase of the density of the data center system will directly drive the lower cost of energy consumption, air-conditioning and manpower. Only take energy consumption as an example, to 30 servers, each server power consumption in accordance with 500W calculation, in accordance with industrial electricity per degree 1 yuan calculation, annual power consumption expenditure of about 480,000 yuan. And in the integration, each year can save 384,000 yuan of electricity. According to each server 4-5 years of life cycle calculation, total can save about 2 million yuan electricity tariff.

More obvious than cost reduction is the increase in flexibility, the future of Yunnan agricultural to deploy a new system as long as the addition of a virtual machine can be completed in a few minutes, which was unthinkable before.

At present, Yunnan Agricultural University's cloud computing has not been completed, public automation systems, library management systems, financial systems, educational systems, personnel systems, and many other old systems need to gradually migrate to the cloud computing platform, in accordance with the plan, in the "Digital Agricultural University" phase one project construction completed, The cloud computing platform hosts nearly 100 business systems.