Kathy Gibson reports from the Huawei Cloud Congress in Shanghai – The future of ICT is the service-driven distributed cloud data centre.
This is according to Yelai Zheng, president of the IT product line at Huawei Technologies, who says this is an extension of the software-defined data centre.
“The development of the digital world is redefining ICT,” Zheng says. “The service-drive distributed cloud data centre will be driven by advances in mobile computing, the Internet of Things, big data and cloud computing.
“And this means that IT is changing from being equipment-centred to service-centred patterns. The data centre of the future will be service-driven, open and compatible with equipment from various vendors.
“So we can talk about the data-defined data centre and the software-defined data centre, but these are all aspects of the service-defined distributed cloud data centre.”
Zheng believes enterprises that are serious about succeeding in the future need to build data centres that allow them to perform analysis using big data technology – and the platform could be distributed across the cloud or on-premise.
The FusionSphere Cloud operating system (OS) platform enables the software-defined distributed cloud data centre for service awareness, Zheng adds.
FusionSphere is the cloud operating system from Huawei, which offers universal management for both cloud and non-cloud systems.
The company is positioning it at the core of the data centre, allowing organisations to transition their siloed data centre environments to a converged ICT cloud platform.
Because FusionSphere is based on OpenStack, it is open and standardised, so companies can leverage their legacy investments in hardware and software infrastructure.
“You can have universal management for a multi-vendor environment and support multi-vendor technologies, so there is no lock-in,” says Huawei Enterprise’s Zhang Xiaosong.
FusionSphere sits on top of the FusionCube converged infrastructure management system within the data centre and interoperates with both the FusionInsight big data management platform and the desktop virtualisation system FusionAccess.
While FusionStorage, FusionCompute and FusionNetwork create a software-defined IT infrastructure, FusionSphere takes these features into the cloud domain as well.
“It provides a common platform for ICT service,” says Xiaosong. “Huawei was born in the telecoms space, so leading performance has always been important; and we are OpenStack compatible, which means this is a fast way to build an open cloud.”
Xiaosong says the cloud infrastructure market is currently worth about $110-billion, and set to grow to about $160-billion by 2018.