ZTE's Hyper-Converged Cloud Management Platform

Challenges Faced by Operators

With the development of technologies such as cloud computing and big data, there is a rising demand for personalized services and a large-scale growth of IT cloud services. Elastic networks that are data center-centric, highly reliable, easy to maintain, and quick in response are emerging to meet this trend. Traditional data centers have a number of drawbacks, such as complicated management, high costs, low scalability, low resource usage, and long deployment period. They have to be transformed to prevail in the future.
Businesses are seeking to build flexible, efficient, green and low-cost data centers. ZTE's hyper-converged cloud management platform is based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, and allows for resource sharing and scheduling across data centers. It is a visualized, automatic, scalable, and highly reliable platform, providing businesses with a flexible, easy-to-deploy and end-to-end solution.

ZTE's Cloud Management Solution

ZTE's tulip elastic cloud system (TECS) director cloud management platform is a multi-DC unified management platform. It centralizes the management of global resources across geographically distributed data centers while guaranteeing safe isolation between resources to facilitate users in resource planning and management. It provides standard IT products and service offerings—which are available to tenants from a self-service portal—and functions like service templates, for rapid definition and deployment of services. It provides intelligent operation and maintenance functions like multi-view topologies and system health monitoring to make operation and maintenance easy.
ZTE's unified cloud management platform consists of a cloud resource domain, an operation domain, an OMM domain, unified portals, and unified APIs (Fig. 1).

Cloud Resource Domain

The cloud resource domain has access to the resources of multiple data centers (or heterogeneous systems), and integrate physical resources across different locations into a logically unified cloud resource pool. It provides data center management, unified resource management, unified resource orchestration, and resource statistics. It implements infrastructure convergence as well as hierarchical management of both the virtual and physical resources.

Operation Domain

The operation domain provides operational support with services at its core. Based on the idea of "resources as service", the operation domain refines the resource requirements and integrates the resources into a standard product. Requests for resources or resource provisioning can be done per service. The operation domain provides service management, service directory, service metering, order management, policy management and work order management.

OMM Domain

The OMM domain provides unified management, scheduling, and maintenance of resources from all the data centers. It provides OMM and monitoring staff with problem-locating methods such as centralized alarming and log analysis. The monitoring staff can view the operating status of the cloud platform on the performance dashboard. The domain also provides statistical reports for construction and management staff so that they can perform capacity planning and asset audits. It manages configurations, assets, alarms, performance, logs, topologies, and reports.

Unified Portals

The administrator and self-service portals have a unified Web interface to display operation and O&M data. The administrator portal allows O&M staff to manage resources, services, tenants, and work order. It also displays the monitoring data and alarms in a centralized way. The self-service portal allows tenants to view their available resources. It is a one-stop portal where tenants can request, manage, and monitor resources.

Unified APIs

Resources from distributed cloud pools are allocated using virtual data center (VDC) services and the primitive OpenStack programming interfaces.

Advantages of ZTE's Cloud Management Platform

ZTE's TECS director unified data center management solution enables hyper-converged infrastructure to improve management and profits for operators. It has the following advantages.

Intelligent Management

This solution provides health analysis. It uses algorithms to identify the health ratings, risk ratings and other indicators of the network equipment and physical servers so that the administrator can identify potential risks to avoid faults.

Unified Management

This solution unifies the management of private, public, and hybrid clouds. It allows L2/L3 interoperability between public and private clouds to accommodate multi-DC networks of enterprises. It centralizes management and scheduling across multipgeographically distributed data centers. It centralizes management and orchestration across heterogeneous resource pools—including third-party OpenStack resource pools and VMware—to realize heterogeneous resource sharing and build an open ecosystem for resource pools.

Easy O&M

This solution supports graphic navigation-style installation, deployment and upgrade, and automatic discovery and management of devices. It greatly simplifies the deployment and upgrade of cloud infrastructure.
It provides a unified performance analysis and problem-locating platform that allows the administrator to detect a trend change on the performance indicators and evaluate and avoid potential risks.
It enables topology-based visualization of network-wide resources. It demonstrates the connections between system resources and the dependency relationships between services and resources in a multi-view multi-layer manner.
It monitors both the virtualized and non-virtualized resources, including alarms, performance data, and device status information. It allows the maintenance staff to understand the operation status of the system in real time and respond quickly to abnormalities.

Conclusion

Operators have increasing demands for unified cloud management platforms. ZTE's hyper-converged cloud management platform is a convenient, efficient, and intelligent data center management platform. It provides service-centric management that helps operators accelerate service innovation, quickly deploy new services, and reduce time-to-market; and it automates deployment of services so that operators can focus on new profit growth points. The platform brings great value to operators with improved infrastructure usage, increased investment return, and reduced Opex.