Sichuan Unicom Upgrades and Innovates with DC²

Sichuan Unicom Upgrades and Innovates with DC²

“The Huawei Distributed Cloud Data Center (DC2) provides an advanced IaaS architecture for Sichuan Unicom, greatly improving our efficiency in IT system implementation and O&M, enhancing our core competence, and helping us better serve enterprises.”
                                                                                            --- Sichuan Unicom

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Introduction

As the level-1 branch of China Unicom in Sichuan, Sichuan Unicom handles operation, management, and development of telecom services in the province. With sub-branches registered in 21 cities of Sichuan, Sichuan Unicom is a large state-owned telecom enterprise operating integrated telecom services. The services include mobile communication, data communication, long-distance calls, and local calls.

Challenges

As a traditional telecom carrier, Sichuan Unicom faces many challenges. On the one hand, Sichuan Unicom must improve service quality and meet increasing mobile Internet service needs to win more customers. On the other hand, Sichuan Unicom must explore business models in new fields and potential needs in the enterprise market. Therefore, Sichuan Unicom has two strategic plans:

  • Construct a large service platform to streamline data channels, integrate service capabilities, and provide a unified service capability. The services provided by this platform can help implement a new business model for China Unicom.
  • Explore Information and Communication Technology (ICT) service transformation oriented to the enterprise market. This plan includes a hybrid service platform that handles office desktop leasing, online backup, web disk capabilities, and cloud hosting.

The key to the large service platform is unification, in contrast to traditional dispersed implementation models that prevent services from sharing resources with each other. The difficulty in sharing resources makes it hard to improve overall service capability.

Traditional data center construction is too slow to keep pace with the rapid business expansion of Sichuan Unicom. Therefore, Sichuan Unicom wanted to partner with Huawei to create an agile and efficient service system with an advanced architecture.

Huawei Solution

Huawei developed a design for the IT system of Sichuan Unicom using the DC2 architecture. A hybrid cloud platform was implemented to run the large service system and other internal service systems of China Unicom.

The large service platform of Sichuan Unicom handles the call miss system location system, and video surveillance system and implements them in a private cloud. Office desktops, cloud hosting, online backup, and web disk capabilities are treated as external services and implemented in a public cloud. Considering security and independence of different areas in these clouds, physical isolation is implemented. From the perspective of management, however, the IT capabilities are logically unified as one cloud for central management and monitoring.

 A public cloud resource pool with high availability was implemented to serve as a cloud service supermarket for Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs).

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that Sichuan Unicom can use the utility’s existing bandwidth and customer resources to develop the public cloud project with high availability. Sichuan Unicom can operate Software as a Service (SaaS) along with partners. Huawei implemented a public cloud resource pool and unified the interfaces for the project. Huawei also introduced product combinations suitable for enterprise business, thereby meeting the needs of SMEs in Sichuan within the shortest time possible.

In addition, based on Service Level Agreements (SLAs), the cloud is divided into resource pools of different levels to meet the service requirements of different customers. Resource isolation is implemented between tenants. Rights- and domain-based management enables each customer to use the public cloud service without security issues.

The DC2 architecture supports sustainable development of multiple data centers.

According to Sichuan Unicom’s plan, the cloud project will be expanded and centrally managed with Sichuan Unicom HiSpace and the private cloud. In addition, the cloud will interwork with China Unicom’s headquarters cloud.

This project includes management interworking interfaces for the data center architecture, enabling the various cloud resources to form horizontally distributed data centers with unified resource Operation and Maintenance (O&M). With this approach, an advanced multi-level distributed data center architecture was implemented for Sichuan Unicom.

Customer Benefits

The cloud implemented for Sichuan Unicom provides unified management and increases service channels. The unified service process improves collaboration with partners and the service experience of customers. Intelligent operation and management improve efficiency.

Sichuan Unicom has transitioned from a traditional telecom carrier to an ICT integrated service provider, making progress in exploring new business models in enterprise IT services. The agile and efficient cloud data center architecture improves efficiency in using data center resources, raising utilization of server resources by 40%, reducing energy consumption by 45%, and decreasing the service rollout time by 70%.

The distributed data center architecture seamlessly integrates the O&M of Sichuan Unicom’s private and public clouds, simplifying data center operation. The architecture includes interfaces for unified operation of multiple data centers in Sichuan and for enabling the IT resources at the headquarters to form a multi-level data center.