Data Center Ushered In Cloud Era

There has been a passage in the bookshops: constantly changing the breed of good horses to get horses that are faster and more stamina, that is called R & D; but if they are inventing trains, this is called innovation and revolution.

Although cloud computing has no revolutionary technology, its revolutionary significance is increasingly prominent, and this revolutionary fire is not only confined to the upper application and business mode, but also will sweep the bottom of the data center.

It is not difficult to understand that both the public cloud and the private cloud have a direct and close relationship with the data center at the level of infrastructure.

A recent research report by Gartner, a market research firm, has clearly pointed out that enterprises should introduce the idea of cloud in the data center from the beginning of design.

In the eyes of more people in the industry, cloud computing will bring revolutionary significance to the data center, and the construction and management of enterprise data center will usher in an opportunity for pformation.

The data center ushered in the cloud age

If the lens of time is pulled back for several years, that is, the era of cloud computing has not yet been born, enterprises.

Therefore, cloud computing, which has many advantages such as breaking IT islands, improving system utilization, achieving loose coupling between application and underlying hardware, and speeding up application deployment, is expected to eradication the drawbacks of IT system which has long plagued the enterprise.

For example, IBM's Research Compute Cloud (RC2) will be scattered across the IBM research institutes around the world.

In fact, more and more enterprises have expressed strong interest in cloud computing. A survey launched by the Internet world newspaper in March confirmed this point: 15% of respondents said their enterprises had already begun to use cloud computing, while 49% of respondents indicated that they planned to adopt cloud computing.

"Yes.

In addition to the technical level, a senior cloud computing architect Li Rui (a pseudonym) believes that the adoption of cloud computing will also trigger changes in the IT management structure of enterprises.

In traditional data centers, servers, storage and networks are clearly separated from each other on the architecture, and there will be their own operation and maintenance management teams. Cloud computing technology integrates the servers, storage and network resources in the data center to form a unified resource pool.

This will not only change the supporting tools, but also change the IT management structure.

For example, when China Mobile adopts a private cloud deployment plan of a IT manufacturer, it explicitly requires manufacturers to make a prediction of the future operation and maintenance organization structure so as to make adjustment ahead of schedule.

More importantly, cloud computing is conducive to the pformation of CIO career.

Because an important advantage of cloud computing is that it accelerates the deployment and response time of the business, which shortens the distance between CIO and business, thus increasing the possibility of CIO upgrading to CEO.

Twists and turns

Although cloud computing brings such a bright prospect to data center, it does not mean that the cloud pformation journey of data center will be smooth and convenient.

At present, IT vendors generally propose two kinds of cloud computing solutions.

One is the gradual approach, that is, in line with the principle of maximizing the use of existing IT assets, helping enterprises gradually pform existing data centers into private clouds, and the other is rapid deployment, that is, to launch a whole solution from hardware to software, and quickly build a cloud environment.

For example, DELL's vStart, HP's CloudStart, IBM's CloudBurst, Fujitsu's EasyCloud, and CISCO, EMC, VMware (VCE alliance) jointly launched Vblock, etc., all belong to this category of products.

Frankly speaking, most of the companies are experimentation and experience in adopting these rapid deployment solutions, and manufacturers seem to have a good understanding of users' prudence. For example, Fujitsu's EasyCloud entry-level solution has only 4 cloud computing physical nodes.

However, if enterprises really want to gradually turn to cloud computing environment from now on, what are matters worth attracting attention?

First of all, in the construction of data center computer room, Zhang Yonghai, manager of key facilities and service business of HP Technology Co., Ltd., said that if the data center had determined that cloud services would be carried out before construction, the idea of cloud should be introduced at the beginning of the design.

Specifically, first of all, we need to identify the types of cloud services that will be provided in the future, determine the required hardware devices from the type of cloud services, then deduce the density of cloud modules from hardware devices, and ultimately determine the power and refrigeration needs of the data center rooms through the density of cloud modules and the reliability requirements of services, and the level of future data centers.

In terms of software and hardware selection and system architecture, some virtualization vendors may avoid talking about it, allowing business users to think that cloud computing is mainly related to virtualization software, while Sun Ninghui, deputy director of the Institute of computing, CAS, said that, for the whole cloud computing, all kinds of hardware and software products and technologies can only be used together. "{page_break}"

Sun Ninghui explains that cloud computing poses many new challenges to the entire computer system.

For example, cloud computing has high requirements for server I/O throughput and computation to memory ratio.

Sun Ninghui gave an example of city traffic: "imagine that if the city's pportation depends entirely on trains, is it not enough flexibility? Do we still need the flexible means of pportation? The train is carrying a large group of people to a certain place along the fixed track, and the car is where two or three people want to go.

The mode of pport of trains is like high-performance computing, which completes a large number of computing tasks at a time. In this way, automobiles are similar to high-throughput computing (a new computing system proposed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences).

Cloud computing requires not only "train" (High Performance Computing), but also "car" (high throughput computing).

Secondly, cloud computing has higher requirements for Internet service software, which requires "strong dynamic" because the number of requests on the Internet is fluctuant and unpredictable.

However, high-throughput computers are the future vision. If we go back to the present situation, Li Rui suggests that enterprises should pay more attention to the storage system.

Because the image of the virtual machine is centrally stored on the storage device, the storage device has become a key point, and the performance and security of the storage device should be emphasized.

On the choice of application, Sun Yongxue, manager of the Northern District Manager of the infrastructure consulting service of China HP limited, business services group, said that it is best to deploy some lightweight tool class applications, or newly developed applications, such as mail service and approval process, because the biggest advantage of virtualization itself is to increase utilization and increase IT flexibility.

Those highly coupled core business applications such as ERP, CRM, financial systems, or high utilization systems with high utilization rate are best not to be considered.

In fact, enterprise users need not worry much, because DELL, HP, IBM and VMware have regular cloud computing evaluation links when deploying cloud computing for enterprises.

In general, as cloud computing as the future trend has become the consensus of most enterprises, cloud computing related products and technologies are pouring into the market.

Although the overall atmosphere gives people a sense of impetuosity and following suit, it is in this bustle and chaos that the cloud computing industry chain is accelerating to enrich and mature, and enterprise users should also welcome and try cloud computing with an open and cautious attitude.