Introduction

China Telecom Global (CTG) Limited is a wholly owned international subsidiary of China Telecom. Headquartered in Hong Kong and leveraging China Telecom’s tremendous resources within mainland China, CTG’s global network platform spans Asia, the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. CTG offers world-class integrated communication services to multinational businesses, telecommunication service providers, and overseas Chinese consumers around the world. 

Challenges

Targeting the enormous potential for international Integrated Data Centers (IDCs), CTG is expanding its service capabilities to win customers, including enterprise customers as well as CTG’s traditional service provider customers. To appeal to enterprises with public cloud services, CTG has launched the Nebula Project. Two IDCs will be constructed in Hong Kong and Singapore, followed by IDCs in other regions. About 30 IDCs will ultimately be constructed globally.

Drawing upon its extensive resources in Mainland China, CTG plans to build on the concept of crossborder public cloud service. Focusing on key customers such as Chinese multinational enterprises, other multinational financial institutions, and Internet companies, CTG is building a brand image of a comprehensive Information and Communication Technology (ICT) service provider. As large Chinese Internet companies such as Tencent expand their global presence, their primary concern is to find a global ICT partner. The partner must provide services that can be expanded smoothly to suit the requirements of local markets and networks.

The president of Tencent commented, “So far, Tencent has invested over 2 billion USD in international markets. The international policy is to push our products to markets outside China and promote our services globally. We are more than happy to cooperate with international partners that can help us expand market share.”

CTG’s Nebula Project is tailored to serve enterprises of this type. To expand in Southeast Asia and globally, China Telecom wanted a partner experienced in operating public clouds.

The CIO of China Telecom remarked, “The globalization of enterprises requires not only multiple cross-region data centers but also unified management of these data centers. Constructing IDCs on a global basis is critical to the success of public clouds and ROI improvements.”

Super-large public clouds such as the one planned by the Nebula Project require comprehensive design, professional services, and an innovative architecture.

Huawei Solution

In Oct. 2013, the Nebula Project was launched with Huawei providing end-to-end public cloud solutions from planning and construction to operation.

Taking advantage of its professional service organizations in more than 300 countries, Huawei has assisted CTG in constructing 30 cloud data centers in Hong Kong, Singapore, and other countries. These data centers can provide global enterprises with secure and reliable data storage, management, and disaster-recovery backup services.

Globalized service centers will provide selfservice portals where services will be available. Using these portals, customers can subscribe, use, and unsubscribe services as needed. The portals also enable CTG to track and manage resources accurately, making internal costing easier and minimizing wasted resources. Selfservice portals categorize users into different roles and control user permissions based on these roles.

• A distributed architecture shapes the most cost-effective solution in the industry.

Another challenge facing Nebula is to maximize the operating efficiency of public clouds.

According the director of Nebula Project, “To construct super-large multinational public clouds, Nebula needs a substantial architecture and excellent cost-effectiveness. Only in this way can we compete with industry-leading internal cloud suppliers, such as Amazon.”

Huawei has employed a distributed architecture for CTG’s public cloud platforms. This architecture is based on a super-large cluster, network delayering, and software-defined storage. These features ensure high reliability, easy capacity expansion, and excellent performance.

More specifically, a super-large cluster improves overall stability, resource utilization, and management efficiency, resulting in a reduction of TCO by 20%. The delayering feature makes it easier to expand the system architecture, which suits Nebula service developments in various geographical areas.

Software-defined storage reduces investments in traditional external storage as well as CAPEX in general, enabling public cloud suppliers to shorten the time to obtain returns on investment. An ROI projection indicates that the payback period of Nebula is shorter than 3 years. The project is expected to show a profit in the second year.

• Operate cooperatively to construct an ecological chain of public clouds.

Constructing public cloud platforms is only the first step for CTG Nebula, and then the company has the resources to expand globally with endless potential based on Huawei’s end-to-end public cloud solutions. In addition to providing products, Huawei helps customers with service consultation, service packages, and customized expansion policies.

With this support, CTG can focus on marketing the cloud services to customers. The openness of the services helps in the marketing effort. Because multinational enterprises are running services in different countries, service diversity is essential. As a result, Nebula emphasizes a sound service ecology in its chain of public clouds — an ecology that includes roles for local information suppliers. These public clouds can provide Huawei cloud services, communication services, and dozens of information products and applications such as office systems and email. 

Customer Benefits

The concept of CTG Nebula is to provide customer-oriented ICT services. The company’s efficient, reliable cloud service platforms have the following advantages:

• Expanded global market: Huawei solutions have helped CTG secure more than 10 Chinese enterprise customers, including Tencent.
• Reduced TCO: based on a distributed architecture, Huawei public cloud solutions improve system performance by a factor of two and cut TCO by 20%.
• Guaranteed compliance with Service Level Agreements (SLAs): multiple heterogeneous cloud platforms improve management efficiency threefold and ensure service quality.