Benefits and challenges
Cloudification is set to bring powerful benefits to operators’ service systems. The main systems are the vertical systems of telecommunications networks, IT support systems, and IT services.
Cloudification will open and simplify operators’ legacy closed and complex networks and VAS, and convert convoluted IT support systems into simple, agile, flexible, automated, and intelligent systems.
Cloudifying customer-facing IT services will help operators shift from selling resources to selling services like cloud services and VAS. After cloudification, the three vertical systems mentioned above will become cloud services. To support them, operators need to adopt unified cloud platforms for service-driven data centers.
They will need to fully assess the impact and requirements of these various cloud services on their IT, networks, and server rooms to ensure data centers can respond to different service scenarios and different stages in their lifecycles at minimal cost.
Cloud data centers are nothing like traditional data centers. They possess many new features, including COTS hardware, virtualization, distributed storage, and SDN. Therefore, operators face a number of challenges when building cloud data centers:
- Cloudifying IT and CT systems and building future-oriented cloud infrastructure that support ICT service development, despite the complexity of existing network services.
- Designing cloud data centers to meet the different service requirements of internal and external users while improving efficiency, minimizing costs, and maximizing QoS.
- Ensuring normal service operations using a large amount of legacy network equipment, multiple vendor brands, and complex service cutover and migration.
- Managing delivery to ensure progress and quality despite the high quantity of data center subsystems and the complexity of their interfaces.
Operators need strategic partners to tackle these challenges by planning the top-level design of their cloud data centers, overseeing construction, and migrating existing services to the cloud. Huawei has extensive experience in primary integration and service migration, having built more than 160 data centers for clients globally.
Primary integration
Huawei's primary integration service for data centers is service-driven, top-down, and based on a service-to-infrastructure approach. As an integrated and E2E solution, the design centers on modularization, specialization, and standardization. It enables the dynamic matching of infrastructure for service expansion and rapid TTM for new services, while ensuring data center security and reliability.
Three services:
Huawei's technical consultation service, which is based on leading cloud maturity models and uses industry-standard benchmarks to analyze IT shortcomings in business management, service management, operations, and infrastructure. It can also draw up IT blueprints and formulate step-by-step, manageable construction plans for customers.
Huawei's cloud network synergy design service is based on the various data center scenario needs of operators, and includes five functions: 1) mapping virtual networks to physical networks, 2) matching IT resource models and network architecture, 3) converting service SLAs and network QoS, 4) unifying the design of data centers’ inner and outer networks, 5) balancing security and disaster recovery.
Huawei’s primary integration solution can also simulate services and optimize network policies so data center networks can rapidly migrate cloud resources and services, and guarantee high quality for Per Service Per User (PSPU).
Huawei's data center multi-vendor integration service includes solutions based on the seven types of pre-integration and verification scenarios for mainstream vendors, and a mature third-party management system. This service manages progress and risk for customers and ensures final delivery quality.
Data center consolidation and service migration
Operators need to consolidate their data centers to transition towards the new SD-DC2 architecture and achieve digital innovation, and simple management at minimal cost.
As the first step toward digitization, Carrier T plans to consolidate its 96 data centers into 6, and migrate most of its OpCo applications to its European headquarters.
With considerable experience in data center consolidation and migration, Huawei helps operators standardize IT, increase efficiency, optimize costs, and accelerate innovation. Features include quantifiable ROI, clear pace of service cloudification, and smooth and rapid migration.
Huawei’s mature construction and migration methodologies fully consider service complexity and uncertainty. These methodologies include implementation plans, rollback schemes, suitable migration paths, and effective operating modes. They eliminate faults due to human error, and migrate whole systems within set timeframes, minimizing service down times.
Huawei’s consolidation process includes the following steps:
Match the financial assessment and technical plan through deep analysis, and balance investment, resource utilization, and service continuity to help customers’ CIOs or CFOs make the best investment decisions.
Develop a service cloudification roadmap after evaluating factors such as cost and benefits, TTM, compatibility, migration time window.
Analyze service correlation to accurately restore original services, processes and IT infrastructure links; implement data packet grouping based on service correlation complexity and scope of influence; and divide packets into migratable batches based on factors such as resource demands, bandwidth, and equipment reliability. This step minimizes migration risks and ensures service stability.
Huawei's mature management processes also include risk classification, business impact analysis (BIA) models, risk tracking, monitoring, and mitigation systems.
Risk management determines the success of the migration process, which has risks in many areas, including the technical plan, support environment, and resource readiness. A typical support environment risk is insufficient interregional bandwidth, which requires a response plan to be prepared in advance.
When migrating big data applications, the following measures are used to mitigate risks: storage medium backups, manual transfer, and an online incremental data synchronization plan.
Helping operators build cloud IT infrastructure
Operators' future IT transformation will be based on service-driven data centers, with a strategic focus on consolidating IT and CT and building agile, efficient, and open infrastructure to support business innovation and enablement.
New service-driven data centers and old data center consolidation and migration will help customers greatly lower IT CAPEX and OPEX, accelerate service innovation on SD-DC2 architecture, reduce service TTM from months to hours, boost management efficiency by up to 50 percent, and increase service availability to 99.999 percent.
As a long-term partner, Huawei is committed to helping operators achieve commercial success. In the area of data center integration, Huawei continues to build primary integration capabilities to provide high-quality, service-driven data center construction and integration services to help operators construct service-driven cloud IT infrastructure.