Trends in Data-Center Development

The cloud computing model has been significant in creating demand for data centers, which are becoming more modular, standardized, intelligent, and energy efficient. Data centers will be at the locus of the cloud era.

Modularity represents a fundamental change in the way data centers are constructed. An integrated data center now comprises cabinet modules, power-distribution modules, cooling modules, firefighting modules, and management and control modules. An integrated, modular data center enables smooth, elastic expansion; phased construction; and customization for different scenarios. A modular data center can be built in an equipment room or in a shipping container (for outdoor environments), and an integrated resource cabinet can be provided for small users and vendors.

For rapid deployment and simple operation, a data center should be built according to set of standards that encompass civil engineering, power distribution, cooling system, and network. Standardization will greatly promote the deployment of data centers.

A modern data center has intelligent OAM comprising basic OAM and value-added OAM. Basic OAM includes configuration management, topology management, alarm management, performance statistics, authority management, logs, and reports. Value-added OAM services includes PUE calculation, modeling, optimization, energy efficiency analysis, planning and configuration, terminal access, location suggestion, cooling analysis, problem management, event management, change management, and asset management. Of these, problem management, event management, and change management meet ITIL requirements.

Operational management of a data center involves billing management, measurement management, imaging management, order management, contract management, product management, resource management, and bill management.

The inlet air temperature of an IT cabinet is controlled on demand through precision cooling. Cold channels are isolated from hot channels, and efficient water-cooled hosts are used. This helps improve inlet temperature of frozen water. A high-voltage DC power supply is also used to make a green data center with PUE up to 1.3.  

After infrastructure has been deployed, IT facilities are managed in full virtualization mode to create a cloud-based data center. OpenStack architecture is used to manage servers, storage, and networks uniformly so that computing, storage, and network are virtualized. Network orchestration is also implemented, and this enables tenants to flexibly access different resources. 

Computing Virtualization: iECS

ZTE’s computing virtualization product iECS uses  industrial mature XEN as its virtualization engine, and it also integrates ZTE’s carrier-class server operating system, NewStart CGSL, ZTE’s virtualization management suite ZXVManager, and related tool kits. This means that ZTE’s cloud computing solution supports full virtualization and para-virtualization. iECS supports a variety of guest operating systems, such as Linux, Windows XP, BSD, and Solaris. It supports CPUs in a different architecture such as X86, ARM, and PowerPC, and provides hardware virtualization for Intel VT and AMD-V. iECS also provides highly available clustering, live migration, dynamic load balancing, dynamic resource adjustment, and energy-saving management.

Storage Virtualization: ZXCLOUD CSS2000

The hardware resource pool of ZXCLOUD CSS2000 comprises storage gateways, disk arrays, and storage servers. The hard resources can be flexibly expanded to meet specific application scenarios. The software system of ZXCLOUD CSS2000 includes the distributed file system (DFS), distributed database (DHSS), and distributed cache (DCache). The software system is installed in a universal storage server and supports the architecture of universal x86 servers and universal disk arrays. ZXCLOUD CSS2000 has local OAM modules to facilitate local management of the system. ZXCLOUD CSS2000 can be managed by a unified cloud management platform iROS through the Webservice interface.

SDN-Based Virtualization

Software-defined network (SDN) technology enables centralized network management, flexible networking, multipath forwarding, virtual machine deployment, intelligent migration, and multiple virtual tenants. This makes SDN quite applicable in data-center networks. An SDN controller can serve as the control plane of a cloud data center network and is responsible for topology management and routing calculation within the network. Currently, the SDN controller supports OpenFlow 1.0/1.2/1.3 protocols and automatic adaptation and can be interconnected with the upper cloud management platform iROS through the API interface. The Openflow switch, including Vswitch and Openflow physical hardware switch, supports Openflow1.0/1.2/1.3 protocols and is interoperable with standard controllers. The SDN controller also incorporates Vxlan gateways, multitenant NAT, and VPN functions that enable tenants to communicate between their private networks and a sharing network. IP addresses of different tenants may overlap, and real isolation between tenants can be implemented. With SDN technology, network devices in a data center are virtualized into a logical resource pool that allows users to manage their own networks through a unified framework, allocate resources on demand, and ensure their ability to respond to applications.

Openstack-Based Cloud Management Platform: ZXCLOUD iROS

ZTE’s cloud management platform ZXCLOUD iROS is based on the OpenStack architecture and can provide a standard OpenStack interface for upper-layer applications. This removes the differences of virtualization software platforms provided by different manufacturers so as to uniformly manage and operate different virtualization software platforms and allow for diverse underlying virtualization technologies. ZXCLOUD iROS also supports flexible expansion of various third-party virtualization software platforms.

New-Generation PCDC with Automatic Orchestration

ZTE’s new-generation PCDC provides automatic orchestration based on the OpenStack APIs. Users may allocate computing, storage, and network resources flexibly to meet their specific application scenarios. The PCDC enables automatic deployment of a virtualized data center.