• Data Center is the Foundation of Carrier ICT Transformation

As we transform into the digital economy, the role of the Data Center has evolved from just being a container holding its individual assets to being  a business and service driver that enables the ecosystems of the carrier’s data centers. It acts logically as one enabling service that is flexible, agile and software defined supporting the ROADS (Real-Time, On-Demand, All-Online, Do It Yourself and Social) framework. The data center should be the strategic focal point and the foundation of the Carriers ICT transformation in the next generation of services that enables the digital economy.  

• The challenges  of building a service driven data center

Designing and building a service driven distributed data center brings challenges as to how to better enable the business and their customers in the digital economy. In order  to address cost versus value challenges,  the data center  should be transformed from a cost center to a profit center, enabling business service creation that supports both internal ICT departments and the carriers vertical businesses forming  three supporting cloud environments (Telecom Cloud, IT Cloud, Commercial Cloud).

The challenges of carriers building business-driven data center:

• What are the core services to support the business strategy
• How to plan and design the technical evolution path to making the software defined data center
• Take advantage of the carrier’s network and data center landscape in order to promote increased customer experience
• Designing a business migration plan that ensures the business operations achieves a zero down time migration.
• Enhances the business continuity plan (BCP) to ensure that all services available and not just a select few under the traditional BCP and disaster recovery programme. Reduce the operation cost while increasing data center efficiency across the data centers geographical challenges
• Ensuring an UNIFIED management that delivers quality and timely integration with multiple vendors

Being the prime system integrator(PSI) for the Business-driven data center

Having a PSI is very important in designing and building the Business-driven data center. The data center hosts a number of systems and products from various vendors that supports the business operations that need to be integrated and operated in a seamless and faster time to market (TTM) for provision of services. The PSI should focus on the business strategy supporting the growth of the business enablement of services and hybrid unified management that manages both the Public and Private clouds along with traditional data center environments that should follow modularized, standardized, automated and orchestrated approach.

As the prime system integrator,  following core competencies are required:

1. Consulting capabilities of understanding of industry trends mapping that to the business strategic goals so the services and solutions bring financial and operational benefits. It combines the financial evaluation with technical solution, and balances three key factors,investment ,resources utilization and business continuity, which helps CIO or CFO  to choose the right investment.
2. Strong Architecture Capabilities that can analyze the business application functionality and map gaps of the existing solutions with the future requirements.
3. Tailor the solutions based on best practice with proper planning and creation of the solution blueprints.
4. Multi-vendor integration capabilities that takes full advantages of large scale of telecom data center and understands the integration between the CT and IT environments.
5. Can bring in Unified Operations and Management using open source technologies to improve resource efficiency, management efficiency, business reliability and increased user experience. . 

• Data center consolidation & migration

In the process of data center’s evolution from the traditional to the software defined cloud data centers, carriers should setup a new virtual data center as a base and port the existing business services into the new environment after successful validation and testing of functionality. For example, the consolidation of carrier X included hundreds of APPs and thousands of servers, covering five countries across two different regions cannot just be moved with proper SI Testing and business acceptance of functionality and data verification.

Experienced consolidation & migration integrators need to have the following core competencies:

1. Risk management practice that is key to successful and high-quality service migration, including risk classification, business impact analysis models, risk mitigation planning and constant risk monitoring.
2. Can help operators from two aspects of value and cost to analyze priorities of business services that are to be migrated in an always on process.
3. Integrator can define services as well as processes of the ICT infrastructure relationships based on service dependency analysis, groups services according to service dependency complexity, scale resources requirements, bandwidth, and device dependency. 

 

Summary

In all, Service -driven distributed data center is key for the carriers ICT transformation. As a long-term trusted partner, Huawei is dedicated to helping carriers succeed in business. Huawei's data center solution and services can help customers save on ICT infrastructure investment and Operational &Maintenance. The Huawei SD-DC² (service-driven Distributed Cloud Data Center) architecture accelerates service innovation by reducing service rollout time from months to hours, unified management efficiency, and achieves 99.999% service availability.

Recently, Huawei and TBR jointly released carriers ICT transformation whitepaper. The whitepaper is based on carrier’s successful experience and summarizes the reasonable path of ICT transformation. Meanwhile, it also published the cloud data center maturity model and assessment guidance which defines key competency models of each stage in the transformation program, combined with cases to show the cloud data center construction model.