What cloud technology should the data center look for to transform

What are the real concerns of data center users before the cloud transition? What kind of cloud technology should the data center look for in the face of different service requirements? What are the key technologies that determine the efficiency, energy consumption, and management of cloud computing data centers? Through cloud practice in China's local data centers, Let's look for answers to these questions together.

"The past year has been an exciting year, and the development and value of cloud computing has been like the role of electricity when refrigerators and televisions come into play." "In the face of the rapid changes in China's cloud services at the China Cloud Computing Conference this year, Wang Jian, chief technology officer of Alibaba Group, has made this feeling."

2013, China's cloud computing industry has entered the growth period, based on cloud computing from the point to face of innovative applications permeate all fields, finance, transportation, electricity, manufacturing and other industries have touched the "cloud" to seek breakthroughs for the Internet and intelligent city applications launched cloud Computing data Center building in full swing. Cloud maturity, to cloud storage, cloud manufacturing, cloud management services, and then to the government cloud, education cloud, financial cloud, urban management cloud, health care cloud, location services cloud and so on a series of cloud applications rich, all show the Chinese cloud service market huge potential and broad prospects. According to IDC, a market research firm, China's cloud services market will reach $1.1 billion trillion in 2014 and will grow at a compound growth rate of nearly 45% over the next 4 years.

At present, more and more enterprises have seen the opportunities and changes brought by cloud services, but there are still a lot of enterprises are puzzled about how to proceed to transform the carrier of cloud service-data center. Many CIOs say they have a clear expectation of the service capabilities of the data center, but they don't know how to make sure that the cloud-centric data center has the ability to serve the applications it is hosting and really play the role of the cloud.

What are the real concerns of data center users before the cloud transition? What kind of cloud technology should the data center look for in the face of different service requirements? What are the key technologies that determine the efficiency, energy consumption, and management of cloud computing data centers? We may as well come together from the experience of the pioneer of cloud practice in China data Center, Look for answers to these questions.

Ignore this, cloud computing will be a piece of paper

By deploying a private cloud, Intel saved $9 million trillion in spending over the past 5 years; Reduce the time required to apply for infrastructure services from 14 days to 45 minutes, improve performance by 5 times times while reducing the 40% design servers, and allow 80% of new services to be deployed in the cloud and provide self-service services. So far, Intel's Shanghai Purple Bamboo Data Center has been nearly 75% virtualized, and the use of blades for EDA design is up to 80%.

In just a few years, the complex IT systems that support nearly 20,000 employees around the world can be used in the process of building the cloud, what is Intel doing to build the clouds by translating them into efficient private clouds without impacting the business, and translating the value of the cloud into the value of dramatically reduced costs and increased efficiency?

"The goal of cloud computing is to achieve a double rise in business efficiency and user experience, ignoring these two points, cloud computing will be a piece of paper." At the same time, it is an important part of cloud computing deployment to implement cloud management effectively and build a computing environment with different security levels according to the different nature of the industry. "When it comes to Intel's experience with building a private cloud, these are the basic principles that Intel's IT department references."

Based on its long-standing experience in the area of data center construction and computational load, Intel it has developed a "balance rule" that balances the balance between improving computational load and reducing resource consumption, achieving management needs and reducing capital investment, sound development and positive innovation to enhance competitiveness. Intel IT department has also developed three major strategies for this purpose: first, the continuous optimization of the data center, covering the server, storage, network, infrastructure and other levels, so that it and business development to match, and the second is to improve data center utilization, that is, through business optimization and technical means to maximize the use of existing infrastructure, reduce resource input; The third is to implement the regional planning strategy of vertical integration of data center on the basis of considering local demand.

When planning data centers, companies are often used to focusing on the technology architecture of the cloud, such as how to implement virtualization, which is a myth. The process of transforming an enterprise data center into a cloud is not only a change in the IT infrastructure, but a radical change in the way IT services are made.

The traditional data center is more to support enterprise business, while the core value of the cloud is much more than this, enterprises use the driving force of cloud is to enhance business efficiency and user experience, support globalization, mobile change. So before planning the datacenter, it is precisely the basic principles, implementation rules and strategies considered by Intel IT departments to consider the transformation of the architecture of the data center in such a way that it is possible to "not be confused" and "not biased" in the direction of investment construction and technology selection. The "balance rule" and the three implementation strategies, based on Intel's experience, are now highly valuable for all enterprises planning or building private cloud data centers.

The key to transition: a unified network architecture

The transition to a data center cloud is not just about how to make computing or storage resources realize pooling. Because virtualization allows computing and storage resources to be pooled, allocating and delivering these resources is done over the network. In such a data center, the function of the network has undergone great changes, it must have the bus-like efficiency in order to successfully deliver the cloud services. Therefore, in the process of transforming traditional data center into cloud, the transformation of network function is the key of data center transformation.

Three years ago, the trend of data and storage network convergence began to change data centers. FCoE as the key technology to achieve this convergence is highly respected by it vendors, Intel also implemented the LINUXS kernel of open source FCoE, and further promote the technology in the data center wide application. With the price of gigabit Ethernet ports falling, the integrated network has begun to serve as a cloud data center in the cloud practice of many domestic users.

Data center of Shanghai Jiaotong University in the process of cloud transformation, the data and storage network Fusion scheme was enabled, and they realized the smooth transition of traditional FC storage network to FCOE storage network with the help of new FCoE technology. The experience is that Cisco Nexus 5500 in the data server area enables FCoE functionality, some interfaces are configured with 8G FC SFP modules, and the SAN storage system chooses the NetApp FAS series Storage System that supports FCOE. NETAPP FAs and the server's gigabit NIC are connected to the Nexus Switch's gigabit interface, so that on the same 10,000 gigabit ports, the FCoE, iSCSI, and NAS protocols can be supported, and the original FC-configured storage devices and servers are connected to the Cisco Nexus 5500 FC interface. and FCoE network integration. NETAPP FAs FC interfaces access existing FC switches to provide storage space for existing FC Sans. In view of the strong exclusivity of the FC switches of each manufacturer, Shanghai Jiaotong University did not interconnect the existing FC switches with Nexus 5500. In their view, over time, FC SAN devices will naturally be eliminated and the data center will transition to pure FCoE storage. It is expected that more than half of the servers in its data center will be configured with a gigabit fusion port in the next two years.

Cloud data centers need a unified network architecture more than ever, mainly because when virtualization transforms the data center into a cloud environment, the heterogeneity of the transport network and the storage network creates more complex traffic. More and more complex traffic needs to be managed, which is bound to turn the cloud into a inefficient system. Especially with the increase of traffic scale, it is very difficult for data center to guarantee usability without reducing performance. At the same time, heterogeneous networks can be more costly when they need to be expanded. Only by adopting a unified architecture, can we achieve the goal of simplifying the network architecture and simplifying the operational dimension to enhance efficiency.

The transformation of the Software definition data center

The cloud of data center into the design of the datacenter architecture poses some new problems: if the likelihood of the future of such a data center is almost zero, what kind of architecture and technology will make it sustainable? As data centers transmit, collect, summarize, and analyze the volume of data that is growing, the network, How should the new challenges of computing and storage be addressed?

The technological evolution of server virtualization, storage virtualization, and network virtualization does not happen by chance. Virtualization makes IT infrastructure flexible and scalable, and it is proving that the agility and resilience of business can only be based on a flexible IT infrastructure in the face of a complex and changing business environment and the development of the Internet. The development of data centers will be service-oriented, and must be easier to manage and operate.

Therefore, the development goal of cloud data center is to become such data center--Software defined data center, a more flexible, more intelligent, the performance is no longer be constrained by physical hardware of data center. The transformation of data center must be around the network, transformation of automated processes for server and storage: The network evolves from a storage area network share to a "storage-as-service" cloud storage that will evolve into a SDN-based service-aware network, and will be evolved to be resilient in terms of load requirements and must be secure, Credible。