Shulou(Shulou.com)06/01 Report--

IT Infrastructure change on the way: Qinghai Mobile's trip to "IE"

IT Infrastructure change on the way Qinghai Mobile's trip to "IE"

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In the past two years, a wave of x86 set off by Internet companies has spread to traditional industries. In the Internet era, this is an inevitable result, because reducing costs and achieving rapid and agile response to customer needs and the ultimate user experience at a low cost is an important means to accelerate business innovation and improve the core competitiveness of enterprises. In order to improve management efficiency and reduce transaction costs, IT optimization is an indispensable factor in the saving plan.

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On the other hand, the traditional minicomputer and centralized storage architecture are increasingly unable to meet the requirements of the current business that requires IT to respond quickly. Infrastructure cloud is the only way to simplify IT architecture, reduce IT system construction and operation and maintenance costs, and achieve agile response to business requirements. In the foreseeable future, the IT systems of most small and medium-sized enterprises will choose to be deployed on public clouds such as Aliyun and Amazon AWS, while traditional large enterprises such as finance, insurance and operators will run IT systems on private clouds.

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However, the cloud of IT system means the transformation of the underlying architecture, which will be a long process. How to plan the technical route and how to take the first step solidly is very critical, and it is also a process that is not easy to make decisions.

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Due to the geographical location, Qinghai Mobile is relatively short of IT talents. For the traditional centralized architecture is increasingly unable to meet the current needs and high operation and maintenance costs, they have a deeper understanding, and the desire to transform the IT infrastructure is also more urgent. For these reasons, Qinghai Mobile launched the reform path of IT infrastructure and took a critical step in June this year. The following is the specific situation of this project, and how to further realize the leapfrog change of IT infrastructure on this basis. Hope that through this case, we can provide a reference for similar enterprises.

Make up your mind to go to IE

Qinghai Mobile has just migrated the statistical database from the original minicomputer and EMC storage to the Oracle database based on distributed storage. The success of this project is of great significance to them. Most of Qinghai Mobile's systems run on minicomputers and centralized storage. Minicomputers and traditional disk arrays have an advantage in hardware reliability, but with the development of technology, especially the improvement of cluster technology and software methods, and the re-emergence of the concept of resource pooling, x86 platform has made great progress in avoiding and dispersing application software risks.

Although Qinghai Mobile has previously used virtualization technology to build a cloud resource pool on the x86 platform, it is mainly used to run some application software and does not carry the database of the production system. Under the application of modern software technology, the application software system is almost modular and non-centralized deployment, and the hardware basically will not affect the operation of the application software. But the database, as the core of IT system, belongs to the absolute centralization. If there is a problem with the database or data, it will seriously affect the operation of production.

Before that, Qinghai Mobile had almost no experience in running databases on x86 servers. How to ensure the long-term reliable and stable operation of the system by migrating Oracle databases to x86 servers? Qinghai Mobile has great concerns. In this case, Qinghai Mobile decided to cooperate with Yun and Enmo, a domestic database service provider, to officially launch the migration project. It took half a year from the beginning of the project to the formal migration, and in May this year, the statistical database was migrated from the traditional architecture to the x86 distributed storage platform. So far, the system is running very stably. It can be said that Qinghai Mobile successfully completed the first step of Oracle database to "I (BM) E (MC)".

Performance, cost, operation and maintenance: going to "IE" brings positive effect to Qinghai Mobile.

In the view of Qinghai Mobile, this successful "IE" project has achieved the following two goals:

1. A substantial reduction in costs. The original minicomputer has been out of service, and the storage capacity of the disk array can no longer meet the demand, so it is necessary to replace the minicomputer and expand the storage capacity. The cost of using the new architecture is much lower than that of the original one. From the perspective of long-term operation and maintenance, the cost of TCO will be even lower.

two。 A significant improvement in performance. After the migration, the performance of each business module of the system has been generally improved, and the performance of many services has even been improved by more than ten times.

More importantly, through more than a month of actual experience, business people reflect that the system has become faster and smoother, and want to migrate other systems to the new environment. Positive feedback and positive cooperation from business units will play a very important role in promoting the real change of Qinghai Mobile IT infrastructure. It is understood that Qinghai Mobile has begun to migrate the settlement system to the new x86 platform based on distributed storage architecture, and integrate with the original statistical database, so as to achieve the purpose of reducing the number of Oracle database segmentation and management. And this is another kind of voice of the industry against the slogan of "go to IOE", that is, "go to IE minus O".

Qinghai Mobile Prospect Planning

The following Qinghai Mobile project leaders' plans for the future and how to implement them show their determination and confidence in the transformation of IT infrastructure:

1. Migrate the edge system to the x86 platform, construct a new infrastructure from 0, and realize the verification and experience accumulation of the de-IE scheme.

two。 Gradually migrate the surrounding system to the new architecture, in this process to achieve database integration, achieve "minus O" program verification and experience accumulation.

3. Migrate some important systems to the new architecture, and finally form the architecture pattern of the database cloud platform.

On the basis of the success of the previous project, Qinghai Mobile realized the integration and migration of Oracle databases of more systems by building databases on the distributed storage architecture. In this way, the exploration of database private cloud architecture model presents a steady but rapid progress. For operators, this approach is undoubtedly the most effective but safest way.

For operation and maintenance, what changes will occur under the new architecture model? In response to this problem, the person in charge of the IT infrastructure and operation and maintenance of Qinghai Mobile Business support Center said that the new platform is indeed very different from Yicheng. It is now open and standardized software and hardware. When expanding capacity on the new platform to prepare for the consolidation of the settlement library, you no longer need to hire a professional storage engineer to do it. You only need to purchase standard hard drives and PC servers, and connect them to the distributed storage network. With the installation of distributed storage software, the storage capacity is expanded through simple commands. Because they are standardized and open devices: PC server, SAS hard disk, SSD hard disk, any IT technician can quickly become familiar with these devices and carry out maintenance. They no longer need to order specialized hardware as before, and wait for specialized mainframe and large storage equipment engineers to arrive for maintenance in the event of failure, which greatly reduces the requirements and costs of operation and maintenance. And the responsiveness of operation and maintenance staff has been improved. It is no longer necessary to do long-term capacity planning as in the past, because under the new distributed storage architecture, both storage capacity and computing power can be plug and play. The original capacity planning, either idle resources, resulting in a waste of costs, or insufficient resources, the system capacity is affected.

Adopt a new storage architecture

Qinghai Mobile tried a new distributed storage architecture-zData in this project. Xiong Jun, head of Yunhe and Enmis District, learned deeply about the technical architecture of zData and showed the following architecture illustration.

According to Xiong Jun, cloud and Enmo's distributed storage architecture zData is a super-converged solution that integrates standardized x86 servers, 40/56Gb Infiniband high-speed network, flash memory cards, SAS disks, SSD disks and distributed storage software.

This scheme creates a virtual SAN through a flexible software solution, which greatly reduces the cost and complexity. PCIe-based flash storage provides the advantages of extremely high performance and ultra-low latency to accelerate the overall performance of the database. By conveniently and flexibly matching different storage media, you can cope with the following application scenarios at a lower cost:

1. Use a small number of SSD disks and flash memory cards, plus large-capacity and low-cost SAS hard drives and SATA hard drives to meet large data volume, dense IO systems such as data warehouses. The throughput of a single database node is as high as 12GB per second, which makes it easy to cope with 100TB-level data warehouses.

two。 All-flash memory cards and SSD disks are used to meet the needs of OLTP systems with high concurrency and low latency. A single database node exceeds 1 million IOPS, and a single IO latency of less than 0.6ms is sufficient to meet the extreme performance requirements of transactional systems.

3. Layered design and application of SSD disk, flash memory card and SAS hard disk to form applications with different IO requirements to meet the mixed IO requirements of database integration.

Faced with the successful practice of the IE project, the person in charge of Qinghai Mobile said: "the simplification of IT infrastructure allows us to focus more on business needs and even achieve the goal of IT-driven business instead of spending too much energy on a single device or system. This is the benefit of IT infrastructure change, and Qinghai Mobile will continue to explore and move forward on this road of change."

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