Cloud computing makes the data center "move" up

TCL Communications is a subsidiary of TCL Corporation, and it focuses on providing TCL and Alcatel mobile communication terminal products to consumers worldwide. Its products are sold in China and the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific markets, covering more than 120 countries. . According to Zhang Wei’s memories, as early as 2008, TCL Group had started to build a “Cloud Life Ecosphere,” and subsequently released a cloud life strategy: using the Internet, the broadband network, and the communication network as cloud access, cloud computing, and cloud storage. Super-smart is the core technology, driven by rich cloud software, Android+ cloud platform, and super-smart terminals, it is committed to bringing massive, shared, convenient and three-dimensional wonderful cloud life to consumers. From this we can see that cloud computing is inseparable from the business development goals of the entire TCL group, and the use of cloud computing technology to promote business goals is naturally a matter of course.

People often say that if cloud computing wants to land smoothly, it must find a business-related point of convergence. TCL Communications dares to introduce advanced cloud computing technology once to transform the IT infrastructure of the original data center, and to create a platform-based IT infrastructure to achieve unified deployment of all resources. Where does this courage and courage come from?

In 2002, TCL Communications has achieved an increase of 263% in revenue for three consecutive years. It ranked first in the list of Deloitte's top 500 high-tech growth companies in the year and became the fastest growing high-tech enterprise in its mobile terminal. The annual sales volume is currently stable at around 50 million units. It is a major industry pillar of the TCL Group. However, such a high-growth enterprise has to some extent hindered the development of corporate business because of the constraints of IT systems.

Zhang Wei unveiled the reasons behind this. The biggest challenge that TCL Communications currently faces in its business is the rapid development of its overseas business. TCL Communications has become the top three partners of overseas mainstream communications operators. As the management of operations related to overseas sales and services is becoming increasingly sophisticated, some of the management systems that are associated with them, such as overseas logistics systems, electronic order systems, sales planning systems, and customer services, are on-line or need to be expanded in time. This is proposed for IT systems. Higher requirements. Zhang Wei stated that TCL Communication is a company with a very high degree of dependence on IT systems. The innovation of IT systems and applications and the innovation and development of the business are mutually driven and promoted.

Since 2010, TCL Group has been transforming from functional to intelligent machines, and the processing capabilities of systems such as R&D and manufacturing are in urgent need of improvement and transformation. In addition, TCL Group also actively expands the cloud industry chain to import and promote cloud mobile phones, cloud televisions, and cloud applications. "The increase in the scale of our business puts higher requirements on IT's dynamic expansion, flexibility, and rapid delivery," Zhang Wei said.

On the one hand, business growth and scale increase put forward new requirements on the availability, flexibility, manageability, and efficiency of IT systems. On the other hand, TCL Communications adopts traditional IT applications and each application separately purchases and deploys servers. From resource management to enterprise management to business support management, there are many types of application hosts that need to be maintained, resources are dedicated, and procurement and deployment cycles are long. This traditional model has caused TCL communication to face many bottlenecks in the cost, availability, manageability, and compatibility of IT systems. “In 2008, we expanded an IDC room, but by 2012, the utilization rate of the computer room has exceeded 90%, and it cannot meet the demand for business growth.” Zhang Wei cited an example. “As the business expanded, we deployed a large number of x86 servers. However, the single server's resource utilization is low, and when the server hardware fails, it is difficult to achieve rapid response. The configuration, adjustment, and change management of the server, network, and storage are very complicated. This gives data security and system management work. There are many difficulties."

10 minutes to complete the fault migration Faced with the dual pressures of business and IT, TCL Communications wanted to find a way to achieve both the United States and the United States, not only to solve the problem of IT systems inefficient and inflexible, but also more quickly respond to business development and changes, To achieve rapid product development, manufacturing and delivery. Cloud computing has become a recipe for TCL communication to solve these problems.

As we all know, the implementation of cloud computing is a time-consuming and labor-intensive high-tech project that involves many tasks such as technical planning, program coordination, system deployment, and post-maintenance. As TCL Communication is the first to explore the construction of manufacturing IaaS cloud platform, no relevant industry successful experience can be used for reference. It puts forward an end-to-end explicit requirement for solution providers, requires partners to provide overall system planning design, and complete hardware and software products and technologies. The implementation of services must be able to integrate the company's existing IT resources such as network and storage, and provide it with technical support from multiple levels such as technical architecture, basic platform to virtual system.

After extensive inspections, comparisons, and rigorous testing, TCL Communications quickly chose to build an on-demand private cloud environment with the HP CloudSystem solution.

According to Guan Dali, marketing development manager of cloud computing solution sales and development department of China Hewlett-Packard Co., Ltd., said that in this project, the solution recommended by HP for TCL Communication is to build an HP CloudSystem, HP ProLiant BL460c server and user's original storage. Experimental cloud computing platform architecture to better support business applications.

Zhang Wei said that he chose HP CloudSystem because it has the following characteristics.

First, HP CloudSystem is an out-of-the-box private cloud platform where users do not have to manage a very large number of modules or components. Hewlett-Packard directly packaged and sold cloud computing solutions to customers, thereby lowering the threshold for cloud computing technology entry and helping customers quickly import and apply cloud computing technologies.

Second, HP CloudSystem uses hardware resource pooling technology, where all blade servers in the private cloud can be replaced with each other, reducing the need for hardware changes and tuning. The virtualization function can meet the dynamic growth of TCL communication services and the flexible configuration of resources, flexibly allocate business systems of different sizes, and find an appropriate pool of computing resources, regardless of whether the background is a virtual machine or a physical machine.

Third, HP CloudSystem has better openness and compatibility. “We fully leveraged the existing switching network, storage devices, switching equipment, and backup equipment when deploying the HP CloudSystem cloud computing platform. The original virtualization application can also be seamlessly compatible with HP CloudSystem, fully protecting the original investment. "Zhang Wei said.

Fourth, HP CloudSystem can quickly customize enterprise-level application templates and fully automate the rapid delivery of applications. The customer can make a common application system into a business template, and the administrator can immediately deliver the business system after approval. This is a very fast business model.

"On HP CloudSystem, we can easily implement load balancing and automatic failover, and prepare the hardware platform for application-level disaster recovery in the future." Zhang Wei said, "If there is a problem with the application load on a computing blade, The standby server blade can be switched immediately. After testing, we can switch applications on one blade to another blade in 10 minutes without any intervention from the administrator.”

The most obvious change in the deployment of HP CloudSystem, TCL Communications, is the word "province", which means that the integrated input costs are reduced. "As estimated by us, with the same computing resources configured, HP Cloud Platform's investment can save 32% of the cost compared to traditional rack-mounted servers, and energy consumption can be reduced by 30%." Zhang Wei said.

As an electronic manufacturing enterprise, the core competitiveness of TCL Communication is mainly reflected in manufacturing capabilities. The private cloud can not only help TCL Communication quickly increase its production capacity, but also provide a good guarantee for flexible resilience of production capacity, which means that its business management information system can be rapidly brought online, rapidly expanded and on-demand. “We have provided many cloud applications overseas, such as value-added services and applications such as mobile cloud storage, cloud contacts, and cloud games. The HP CloudSystem cloud computing platform can well support these cloud applications and provide customers with a good experience.” Wei told reporters.

Guan Dali added: "Originally within TCL Communication, the deployment of a new application and the procurement of IT equipment, the cycle is about a month. Now, their R & D department from the request to complete the deployment of IT resources, only 2 to 3 days Cloud computing can speed up R&D and accelerate time-to-market, which is very important for manufacturing companies."

Based on the experimental cloud platform built by HP CloudSystem, the overall performance and efficiency of the TCL Communication IT system platform has been further improved, and it has also laid a solid foundation for the successful implementation of its second-phase cloud platform.