Private Cloud in the Rail Transit Industry – A Success Story
1. The background of WUXI METRO private cloud project
WUXI METRO Group Co., Ltd. is mainly engaged in the comprehensive development of city rail transit system and its surrounding resources. The scope of business of the group also covers investment, financing, construction, operation and management projects affiliate to the rail transit projects. The group takes on the jobs of other city infrastructure construction and operation management that issued by the government as well. In July 1st, 2014, the first line of WUXI METRO, Line 1, opened, and the average daily passengers were no more than 90 thousand in the first month. However, from February 2015, the daily passengers of Line 1 and Line 2 maintained at 190 thousand. In Feb. 28th, 2016, the amount of daily passengers even reached 306.6 thousand which had been the largest daily traffic for Line 1 and Line 2.
As the informatization of WUXI METRO developed further, all applications and servers, storage and network resources are increasing and the sale of the network and the number of terminals are growing too. Compared the Legacy information infrastructure with the cloud computing technology architecture, the weakness of the former is obviously day by day. High construction cost brings no expected corresponding output but low resource utilization. The large system with the demand of constant expansion still along with a narrow interval increasingly, which requires the complex and changeable configuration increasingly, is a big challenge to the post-maintenance. The details are as below:
- Business system expands frequently, leading to a long launch period, impedes the development of business.
The development, testing and launch of the new business systems belonging to the subway appurtenance industry need the delivery and configuration of many resources such as computing, storage and network provided by the IT infrastructure. However, the expansion among resources can neither adjust nor switch for each other flexibly. System engineers, database engineers and business architects have to prepare the infrastructure resources in turn those results in a long launch period for the process and business, which hinders them to be launched and used quickly. - Data storage is decentralized, lacking of security and reliability protection
WUXI METRO application system and its servers are widely distributed, the data are dispersed, some are stored on local disks which mean that the storage device is not being fully utilized, and meanwhile, the data do not have the safe storage and effective protection. Owing to the lack of reasonable backup recovery mechanisms, the security and reliability are poor. - The Utilization of physical IT resources is uneven, hardware duplication results in the resource waste with the high cost
To build a new business system, for example, a new HR or finance system, the group needs to purchase a full range of servers, network and storage devices that unable to make fully use of free IT resources for balance among systems and the stand-alone applications are seriously under threat at single points failure. In order to implement high availability of the application system, the group has to purchase doubled amount of servers which brings about high investment costs. - Too many brands of software and hardware leading to the difficulty of operation and maintenance
WUXI METRO have many brands and models of IT equipment, which exists in the intranet area and DMZ area, the physical servers, sharing storage, network equipment, virtual resources pools and backup service and medias in each area are lack of unified management mechanism that leads to the difficulty to operation and maintenance, many working hours are spent on the management of infrastructure. Since internal staff, equipment maintenance personnel and maintenance personnel of contractor can all operate the system equipment; either misoperation or vandalism can cause a great loss to the enterprise. - IT resource application process is ambiguous, lacking of effective mechanism for resource recovery
When business units demands IT resources to develop or test their business systems, they usually submit the resources application to the infrastructure operation and maintenance department through email or inform them at a meeting. The IT resources application processes are often slow for the offline messaging is slow and both sides have to confirm the resource scale repeatedly. After a success of application, there are no effective mechanisms of periodic measurement so that the free resources cannot be recovered;
Confronted to the problem mentioned above, WUXI METRO plans to build a private cloud platform to integrate all internal IT systems through virtual technology and cloud computing platform. The group expects to achieved the goals of unified management to improve the reliability and availability of resources, cost down to hardware and management significantly, improve the resources utilization so that a dynamic, flexible, elastic, virtual, shared and efficient resources service can be offered to the application to speed up the production and the development which will solve the current problems.
2. The architecture design of WUXI METRO private cloud
2.1. The logical architecture of WUXI METRO private cloud
WUXI METRO private cloud logical architecture is composed of 5 parts; they are cloud portal layer, cloud management platform layer, cloud operation and maintenance layer, cloud security management layer and IT infrastructure implementation layer as shown in the figure:
2.2. WUXI METRO private cloud deployment architecture
2.3. WUXI METRO private cloud key technology
- IT resource unified integration and management:
WUXI METRO group has implement the unified management of all heterogeneous IT hardware and software resources, such as heterogeneous virtualization VMware and KVM, EMC storage, Dell PC server and mini-mainframe by means of cloud to allocate resources efficiently and flexibly as well as the centralized management to the resources in different locations. - Borderless cloud data center architecture:
WUXI METRO has implemented the data backup in the same city by the way of SAN/NAS. With the HUAYUN cloud platform storage unified management combined with the existing city lease lines and the cloud resource migration technology, WUXI METRO data center reaches the goal that important business zero interrupt and data zero loss in the same city; - End-to-end delivery of cloud services with the combination of business:
WUXI METRO Group possesses capabilities of end-to-end delivery of business system resources by the flexibilities of cloud platform resources arrangement, process design, rapid deployment, as well as the aim of private cloud data integration scheduling from HUAYUN. With these functions, WUXI METRO realizes the linkage of computing, storage, network and other IT resources; - Delivery model based on the business application architecture resource:
The WUXI METRO private cloud constructed by HUAYUN is based on the resources end to end delivery capability which implements the resources delivery model by the unit of business application. Developers, testers, operation and maintain personnel can apply cloud resources based on the application model architecture through cloud platform portal that improves the efficiency. The technology regulations and standard templates based on the business accelerate the automatic deployment method, and that is the best practice of composite business characteristics; - Operation and maintenance service capabilities
WUXI METRO private cloud project relies on the operation and maintenance capabilities of HUAYUN which is as an automatic operation and maintenance system specially meets the hardware and software in WUXI METRO Group cloud computing environment and its cloud service. Its function contains routine tasks such as work sheets and process management based on ITIL, log collection and query, change deployment, monitoring alarm report. And users can elastically add functions they want through the standardization and servitization of the working platform. As a one-stop operation and maintenance system, it offers standard and automatic the routine works to the administrators. It meets the operation and maintenance basic operation, unattended operation, performance monitoring and real-time displaying. At the same time, it provides the standardized API and scalable service framework that can integrate WUXI METRO Group's individual requirements and quick disposals to maximize operation and maintenance efficiency. - Product upgrading capabilities
HUAYUN software system use its own operation and management platform product OpsUltra™ to upgrade; It supports Docker or other container technologies to implement automatic upgrade and distribution; It implements management of creating and upgrade based on container (Docker) technology on big data platform; It implements the combination with the container(Docker) and other automation platform management tools in the cloud bottom layer (including computing, network and storage) as well as the PaaS, the core function system management and upgrading technology. - Technical supporting capabilities
HUAYUN holds the idea of "the autonomy, security and controllable", and provides the clients with stable and reliable cloud computing and big data products and services to promote the cloud computing and the development of big data in China. Its branch offices locate in Beijing, Shanghai, Wuxi, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Xiamen, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and Linyi. There are more than 20 cloud data centers running in the world and its networks cover China Telecom, China Unicom and HUAYUN BGP of its own. HUAYUN is devoted to the business-driven customized IT for users, its products cover high quality public cloud, enterprise private cloud, enterprise big data, enterprise hybrid cloud and data center cloud products, it can also provide users with dozens of solutions which deeply meets the needs of enterprise cloud.
2.4. The advancement of WUXI METRO private cloud
Cloud resource of management: With the support of Hypervisor, multiple virtual resources based on KVM or VMware can be managed and scheduled uniformly.
Heterogeneous resource management: Infrastructure resources platform can incorporate the physical servers/heterogeneous storage EMC/Dell devices into uniformed management platform.
Resource application: It provides a visual self-service platform based on web.
CIAM authentication management: It can strictly restrict user permissions and track user's operation.
Snapshot rollback: It provides a reasonable global backup and disaster recovery mechanisms to improve the security and reliability;
Global monitoring alerts: It provides monitoring to physical resources and virtual resources usage and performance.
Elastic and scalable: It provides Auto Scaling virtual resources elastic scaling feature which can improve the resource utilization across the peak and valley time.
High Availability: It provides automatic restarting after a VM failure, and when there is a physical failure, VM can automatically migrate to other physical machines and the VM functions can be quickly restored.
Software defined network: It provides VPC, private network, virtual router and virtual load balance. It supports hardware SDN device and hardware load balance docking.
3. The Innovations of WUXI METRO private cloud
HUAYUN rail transit solution provides application high availability, system-level disaster recovery and disk continuous data protection (CDP). It also provides a number of advanced features such as multiple available area disaster tolerance, automatic fault monitoring and automatic recovery to ensure the business continuity. The solution meets the high standards and strict demands on information management of the rail transit to make it more secure, independent and controllable.
In addition, the HUAYUN rail transit solution focuses on the bottom layer so that it takes over the physical hardware layer, virtual resources, platform management layer and user management layer. Therefore, the HUAYUN rail transit cloud can provide a wealth of monitoring chart, physical and virtual resource usage information. Immediate alarm can ensure uninterrupted support for the rail traffic with 7x24. It can not only provide basic data for resource expansion and analysis but also generate resources usage reports regularly by resource metering.
In view of heterogeneity of legacy IT architectures, HUAYUN rail transit cloud provides full range of self-service, automated deployment implementation, it includes but not limited to : physical devices, virtual resource pools, mirror management, resources templates, applications processes, permissions assignment , monitoring alarm, metering and billing, application and database deployment through one cloud platform. It simplifies the operations so that the business management is much more convenient and efficient. Its front-end supports multiple kinds of virtualization such as VMware or KVM, and its back-end is compatible with distributed/SAN/object storage and can integrate SDN of software and hardware which improves the efficiency of resource usage, especially heterogeneity resource. And it enables automatic migration between KVM and VMware.
As rail transit enterprises usually demand high performance, HUAYUN CloudUltra ™ offers the latest solution of SDN/NFV, which can improve the network performance up to 8 times to OVS solution. Its exclusive fine-grained CPU-pass-through feature can improve computing performance sharply. Parameters adjustment, performance tuning of SSD based on storage cluster can be easily done for the demand of high real-time and heavy load to the rail transit traffic.
WUXI METRO cloud platform provides the IaaS layer cloud computing capabilities to meet the application scenario to users. It provides IT services from physical device management to virtualized resource management via customized images. Users can use IT resources as before and construct IT environment to meet their own needs, and the only difference is that these environments are based on virtualization architecture. To users, the management and the usage of IT resources are transparent. But to the administrator, this platform can convert the physical IT resources to the virtual IT resources. He/She can customize resources services directory available through a variety of images, then he can manage and deliver these projects.
4. The service capabilities of WUXI METRO private cloud project
5. The Economic Benefits of WUXI METRO Private Cloud
WUXI METRO Group cloud computing project is a large cloud computing application model engineering based on the application background of WUXI METRO. The independence, security, scalability and usability deriving from the independent development technology of the system are all for eliminating pain points of China rail transit industry information construction with the optimization of new solution of private cloud. Its outstanding practicability makes it completely suitable for all rail traffic system in China to accelerate to reach the goal of "smart transportation".
6. The Application Effect of WUXI METRO Private Cloud
From the very beginning stage of basic business, to the stage of business, and finally to the stage of cloud business, rail transit industry undergoes the process from meeting the basic operational requirements, to enhancing the operation management and improving the customer experience, finally to the cloud operations, working out the potentialities and full kinds of capabilities. Cloud solutions for the rail transit industry create a more convenient, efficient and sustainable development direction.
The construction of WUXI METRO cloud computing project meets the high standards and strict demands on information management of rail transit. The project not only provides business support, integration of the basic hardware resources, improvement of resource utilization, which deploys the distributed business systems, eliminates the single point failure, improves the capabilities of business applications continuous services, but also offers the assistant decision-making function. Cloud solution of one-stop big data storage and analysis services which can do transportation capacity calculation, ticket-analysis and a variety of big data services such as route planning is helpful to make decision. In the rail transit industry transformation, elastic computing, on-demand delivery and a number of cloud computing technologies such as automated operation and maintenance help the rail transit industry to reform rapidly and implement the business transformation efficiently. WUXI METRO cloud computing project was named "China Metro Cloud model project in 2016" by Center for Informatization Study (CIS) at the end of 2016.
