Next-generation cloud computing platform - converged infrastructure

Convergence is the trend of the cloud data center

At different stages of the cloud computing experience, whether it is a private cloud, a public cloud or a hybrid cloud, it will face the key issues of cloud data center construction: how to improve the resource utilization of the data center, how to reduce the overall cost, optimize management, how to deal with The rapid changes in business, how to scale and so on, etc., are all issues that data center builders are thinking about.

At present, the construction of the data center pursues the strategy of separate procurement, that is, the independent procurement of servers, storage, network equipment, platforms and application software, and then the integration, which reduces the initial acquisition cost of the data center to some extent. However, as the scale of cloud data centers continues to expand, business needs continue to change, and IT technologies become more complex, enterprises will consume too much manpower and resources in subsequent operations/operations, and IT inefficiencies will eventually hinder the pace of business development. .

It is foreseeable that in the future, enterprise IT hopes to purchase a data center infrastructure as a whole, focusing more on the response of IT technology to the business, adding value to the company's business, and transforming from a traditional cost center to a profit center. As a result, the convergence of infrastructure has naturally entered the vision of IT managers. The rapid growth of the converged infrastructure market in recent years is also confirming this trend. According to Gartner, by 2015, nearly 30% of data centers will adopt converged infrastructure.

Deep fusion

At present, one of the development models of the industry's converged infrastructure is integrated, which is more common among alliances formed by IT vendors. Based on their existing experience and best practices, they pre-integrate products from different vendors to build a converged infrastructure, and some vendors also integrate a customized unified management platform. This is undoubtedly a key step to reduce the burden on customers from the tedious IT daily management and operation. The shortcoming is that the basic components come from various manufacturers and cannot achieve efficient pull-through; the unified management platform also has limitations on the management of different vendors' products; the operation and maintenance management still requires the technical knowledge and technical certification of each manufacturer's equipment; There are vendors pushing each other during the troubleshooting process; and so on.

To overcome these shortcomings, Huawei has launched an integrated infrastructure with deep integration—FusionCube. The all-in-one machine is positioned on the enterprise integrated cloud platform to integrate and simplify the IT system, helping the enterprise to focus on the main business and streamline IT. This is also the industry's first truly integrated computing, storage, networking and virtualization platform under a unified architecture. The ensuing benefits are: increasing integration density, saving room space; reducing connection between devices and reducing the probability of failure; components of the same manufacturer are easy to end-to-end, improving the overall performance of hardware and software, and improving the efficiency of unified management; The experience of after-sales technical support is better.

In particular, the product was also awarded the 2013 World's Most Innovative Cloud Infrastructure Award by Frost & Sullivan, and the most innovative component is the distributed converged storage engine, FusionStorage, which provides technical support for FusionCube's deep integration. FusionStorage is essentially a set of software that is installed on top of each compute node to take over the local hard drive of each node. The discrete local hard drives are then consolidated into virtual SAN storage for all compute nodes through a high-speed backplane and converged network. In this way, FusionCube bypasses the hardware limitations of traditional SAN storage, and achieves deep integration, and brings many benefits, such as improving I/O performance, enhancing data protection, and being easy to scale.

Streamline IT

In the construction process, the FusionCube all-in-one machine has realized pre-integration, pre-installation and pre-verification of software and hardware, realized “home appliance” installation, reduced the cost of human resources, and shortened the on-site installation time from 7 days to 1 hour. At the same time, a series of pre-verification schemes for FusionCube were also built into the template and built into the IT system. Users can easily deploy applications with one-click deployment, allowing the system to automatically handle various basic and time-consuming tasks in the background, reducing IT application deployment time from days to hours.

In the operation and maintenance process, the unified management convenience brought by resource pooling, FusionCube also provides a unified portal to synchronize and monitor different resources. When a fault occurs, the automatic early warning and automatic fault recovery function based on unified management greatly shortens the fault resolution time, improves the efficiency of IT operation and maintenance, and reduces the operation and maintenance workload by nearly 60%. In addition, the high scalability brought by the converged architecture and the distributed storage engine, combined with the automatic discovery and automatic configuration functions, has eliminated the most difficult expansion problem of the traditional architecture.

Optimize performance

Converged infrastructure brings enterprise management convenience and business agility to enterprise IT. In addition, Huawei FusionCube integrated machine further integrates software and hardware, improves the performance of business software running in one machine, and reduces the impact of short board performance on the system.

By deploying a distributed storage engine in the blade server, the FusionCube appliance changes the way the compute node serially accesses data to parallel access, thereby enabling simultaneous data acquisition from multiple nodes' local storage and reducing access latency. Disk I/O throughput is 100% higher than traditional SAN storage, and effective capacity is increased by 200% to improve business performance. In the deployed data warehouse scenario, the FusionCube achieves up to 10 times the IOPS upgrade, more than 5 times the data exchange, and finally accelerates the application query by 3 to 9 times.

Moreover, FusionCube's unique "intelligent network card" hardware technology and "virtualized multi-queue direct" software technology can also ensure that the virtual machine's hot migration and other functions are not affected, thereby improving the I/O throughput and reliability of all virtual machines.

The maturity of the converged infrastructure will bring a new application and management model to the data center. While making the IT system in the cloud computing era simpler and more efficient, it will continuously improve system performance, help enterprises reduce investment and improve the operation of core business. Efficiency, we are full of confidence in this.