Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

More than a month ago, when I learned that the China OCP Technology Symposium (OCP China TechnologyDay) would be held in Shenzhen, I was a little surprised. In the seven years since its establishment, the official activities of OCP have been mainly in the United States and Europe, and there have also been some activities in Japan and Taiwan in the Asia-Pacific region. This is my first visit to Chinese mainland.

But this is also to be expected. According to the latest data from Synergy Research Group, the total number of super-large data centers in the world reached 430 in 2018. Hong Kong, China, next to Shenzhen, and the United States have the largest number of new data centers, not to mention that China ranks second only to the United States in market share.

Data center has become an important support for the development of Internet and cloud computing business. Globally, AWS, Microsoft and Google are the three companies with the largest infrastructure scale in the world. In China, the infrastructure scale and innovation of Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu have been in the forefront.

Tencent Cloud Vice President Zou Xianneng

Shenzhen has always been synonymous with innovation and openness in China. It is also of great significance for OCP Summit to choose Shenzhen for the first time in China and to co-host with Tencent Cloud. Facts have also proved the correct choice of OCP and brought more new ideas and surprises to the industry.

OCP feels the fever of China.

OCP is short for Open Compute Project (Open Computing Project), launched by Facebook in April 2011 in conjunction with Intel, Rackspace, Arista and Goldman Sachs.

When it comes to open source and open source, Tencent has successively become a platinum member of international open source organizations such as Apache Software Foundation, OpenStack, Linux Foundation, LF Deep Learning and MariaDB Foundation in the past year or so, and announced in February 2018 that it joined the OCP Foundation and became a platinum member. OCP is the industry's first open source hardware project at the data center level, and it is also an open organization focused on hardware. Its mission is to provide open source server delivery, storage, and data center hardware design for large-scale computing. At present, there are more than 200 enterprise members, including infrastructure adopters and solution providers.

Vice President of OCP Channel, Steve Helvie

The number of hardware developers at the data center level is far from comparable to that of software, but the annual OCP summit always brings surprises. In 2014, Microsoft, which ranks second in the field of cloud computing, joined the OCP Foundation and became the representative of open source hardware for cloud computing vendors. Apple in 2015 and Google in 2016 announced to join the OCP Foundation one after another, and the strength of the OCP community continues to grow.

In 2018, OCP expanded from the United States to Europe and stepped up its activities in the Asian market. Following the OCP Silicon Valley Summit in March, the European Summit was held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in October.

OCP CTO,Bill Carter

This time, OCP officials held a community event in China for the first time, choosing to cooperate with Tencent, which has the largest infrastructure in China and vigorously develops cloud computing, which has proved a wise move.

As a highly technical event, the technical seminar was originally planned to be over 100 people in size and located in Tencent's Shenzhen Binhai Mansion, but later, based on the appeal of OCP and Tencent, the number of applicants greatly exceeded expectations, and tickets for the summit were sold out early. Later, the two sides opened to register again after consultation, with the actual registration size reaching more than 400, so the seminar had to be changed to a hotel.

The project in the OCP organization is led by a number of volunteer leaders to jointly develop new technologies, including network, power supply and support, storage server, data center project, etc. At the OCP China technology seminar, Tencent Cloud Vice President Zou Xianneng announced four core technology projects: DCOS server resource management components, Tencent Open Optical Network project, T-Flex2.0 server framework, Open DCN. And announced that all these technologies will be contributed to the OCP community one after another.

Innovation and contribution from China

Traditionally, cloud services are usually divided into IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, but in fact, it is easy to overlook the importance of infrastructure to PaaS and SaaS providers. From the trip to a very large-scale data center sponsored by E Enterprise College in 2018, we can find that from the perspective of cloud service providers, whether PaaS or SaaS, the efficiency of the use of infrastructure will affect the innovation, pricing and profitability of cloud services. Infrastructure is actually the cornerstone that determines the competitiveness of cloud service providers.

From the perspective of infrastructure, from IaaS to SaaS, it is the innovation of the underlying computing, storage and network resources and the coordination management and application layer software. At the OCP China Technology Seminar, Tencent Cloud released four technical projects and displayed T-Block and northbound interfaces, which belong to the data center management system, network and server, respectively, which constitute a solid foundation for cloud computing.

First, DCOS will build a supervisor engine for the private cloud infrastructure.

Currently, Tencent has more than 1 million servers. Tencent has accumulated experience and capabilities in operating these million-scale servers, trillions of devices, and large and complex business ecosphere. For example, how to deal with many uncontrollable factors in a private cloud environment.

To this end, Tencent has built a complete data center automation management platform: DCOS, which is mainly responsible for the supervision and control of servers and network equipment in the data center.

DCOS combines Tencent's excellent operational experience while allowing customers to customize. With the arrival of Tencent's financial cloud and proprietary cloud, many medium and large enterprises begin to use DCOS. The number of these enterprise servers ranges from hundreds to tens of thousands, and there are a variety of business types.

Tencent is now opening up the most basic data modules of DCOS internally, and plans to contribute the use of DCOS software to OCP open source projects in the future.

Second, modularization speeds up the iteration of hardware innovation.

To meet the needs of different customers, cloud computing requires a variety of computing instances and different hardware configurations to match.

Tencent Cloud developed T-Flex 1.0 in 2017 to accelerate the process of server design and R & D with the concept of modularization. This time, T-Flex 2.0 is introduced, which is more flexible and builds servers based on the concept of functional differentiation, thus effectively speeding up hardware development and iteration. For example, the 2U24 disk system is released by Tencent Cloud for the first time based on the T-Flex 2.0 framework. It provides 24 3.5-inch hot maintainable hard drives and up to 2-way processor computing storage density in 2U space, effectively improving TCO (total cost of ownership) compared to traditional 2U12 disk system.

T-Flex 2.0 is expected to contribute to OCP at the OCP global summit in Silicon Valley in March.

Third, flexible network verification strength.

Network is the lifeline of cloud computing, in addition to increasing investment in data centers, network investment is also an important consideration of the strength of cloud service providers. At the OCP China Technology Seminar, Microsoft experts said that Microsoft has invested more than $15 billion in the Internet.

How to keep the network of multiple data centers more flexible, stable and secure? Ten years ago, Tencent began to build a portable optical network system in line with the Internet data center. by redesigning the optical network hardware suitable for the data center, Tencent broke the bulky and closed state of the traditional optical transmission system and made the transmission system more open. accelerate the deployment speed of data center interconnection bandwidth and improve the quality of data center interconnection bandwidth.

At the OCP China Technology Symposium, Tencent released OPC-4, which has made great changes in power consumption, performance and maintainability compared with traditional wavelength division devices.

Fourth, an efficient, flexible and stable interconnection platform.

The network project has always been a very active project in the OCP organization. The layout and efficiency of the network are directly related to the experience of cloud computing.

The newly released Open DCN (data Center Network) project is a complete intelligent self-operation system for data centers developed by Tencent Cloud, which provides a more efficient and stable interconnection platform for cloud services. It mainly includes all kinds of equipment and their corresponding operating systems, network control software, and an automatic platform composed of a series of subsystems to help network construction, operation and maintenance. In this way, Tencent allows users to use large, highly available and congestion-free global network backbones and edge locations to direct Internet traffic to application endpoints.

The distribution of the data center is closely related to the network layout. Tencent's strategy is to locate the data center in densely populated areas as much as possible. Tencent T-Block model further optimizes the initial input cost of the data center. However, considering the poor air quality in big cities, Tencent T-Block uses efficient indirect evaporation refrigeration technology to reduce the energy consumption of the system.

With the rise of cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence, starting from the infrastructure, Tencent not only has a large volume but also runs fast. With the open innovation of hardware, the coordination of technology has become active on the world stage.

Positive effect of advantage superposition

The advantages in the scale of infrastructure will show a trend of "the stronger the stronger" in the future. Cloud service providers have the willingness and ability to build and optimize their products according to the needs of business development. Support more rich and reliable product performance.

Take Tencent Cloud for example. First, in terms of quantity, Tencent Cloud has a more innovative and diversified product category. Currently, 200 + products and applications can fully meet the cloud needs of all kinds of enterprises in various scenarios.

Second, the product performance is continuously enhanced. With the acceleration of innovation in infrastructure, Tencent Cloud can provide enterprise-class load and applications.

For example, the time taken to create a single CVM of Tencent Cloud's CVM product has increased from 1 minute to 10 seconds, and the concurrent throughput capacity has increased 10 times to 5000 units per minute. The new generation of self-developed cloud native database CynosDB released at the end of November 2018 achieves 1.3 million QPS read performance of a single node.

The third is the operation ability of globalization.

In terms of service capacity, Tencent Cloud has massive infrastructure, operates 53 availability zones in 25 geographical regions around the world, and has more than 1 million servers. Coupled with a flexible network that covers 1300+CDN acceleration nodes around the world, Tencent Cloud already has the global service capability to ensure the global operation of various enterprises.

In terms of global open source and open organization industrial ecological construction, Tencent Cloud has always participated in innovation and promoted industrial development with a positive and open attitude. As a collaborator of OCP China Technology Seminar, Tencent Cloud demonstrated innovative design in the field of infrastructure and promoted in-depth exchanges among open source hardware enterprises. As a cloud service provider, Tencent Cloud shows how to polish technology and products around users' applications, and ultimately innovate user value.

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