OrgVDC Lets Organizations Work Independently

Background

Guangzhou, China is the capital and largest city in China’s Guangdong province. The sprawling area, with a population of over 14 million (54 million if adjacent Hong Kong is included), is the largest metropolitan area on Earth. The region is one of China’s leading commercial and manufacturing centers and an important transportation hub. Regional GDP in 2013 was USD$248 billion.

The Science and Information Bureau of Guangzhou created the Smart Guangzhou project as a way to offer more comprehensive and easily accessible government services to companies and the public. The project uses advanced cloud computing technology to serve current needs with the capacity to expand rapidly as needed.

Challenges

The Bureau’s overall strategy combined an existing patchwork of individual and separately built platforms into a single, coherent cloud-based system that lowered costs, speeded service deployments and was easier to manage. However, it was a huge undertaking with many challenges.

New services took 3 to 6 months to roll out

Ninety percent of Guangzhou’s government departments already had online office services and 95% of their portals and collaboration systems were in place. However, individual organizations had developed the systems independently with no unified strategy, which caused information silos and hampered data sharing. The complexity of the patchwork system routinely caused 3 to 6 month service rollouts. With more than 200 IT projects on the horizon, rollouts could not keep up with demand.

High costs and complex O&M

The existing system used a wide variety of platforms and devices from different manufacturers, so overall constructing costs were extremely high. With a lack of centralized management, IT personnel also devoted a lot of energy to maintenance, making O&M difficult and expensive. Plus, the complexity and expense caused very uneven service levels between departments, preventing an acceptably uniform level of service.

Poor security and stability

Security and stability were also problems. The system had too many moving parts and vulnerabilities. Without switching to a unified, cloud-based system there was no way to properly protect data and keep system availability acceptably high.

Solution

Huawei’s solution took a 3-pronged approach.

OrgVDC allows departments to operate like they have their own data center

Huawei used an innovative Organization Virtual Data Center (OrgVDC) to provide on-demand hardware capabilities and O&M services for the eGovernment extranet. The OrgVDC allows each department to tailor their configuration and usage to their specific service and management needs. The fine-tuning allows them to concentrate only on their IT resources as if they own a dedicated, logically separated data center.

Each department can choose 8 Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) configurations to meet their specific needs, including:

• Facility
• Computing
• Storage
• Backup
• Network
• Security
• Management
• System migration services

The choices cover 3 logically separated external eGovernment sub-clouds including:

• Private network
• Security
• Internet access

In the future, Huawei will build software public platform services for the cloud using ID services, data exchange and other Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) application components that meet the common requirements of all department websites.

Unified physical/virtual resource management and simplified O&M

Huawei used an integrated, cost-effective platform construction method to consolidate all the individual departmental systems into a single OrgVDC. A virtualized management system was deployed in the OrgVDC to provide unified maintenance and management for the entire eGovernment cloud.

The system permits automatic, virtualized O&M management of the equipment room, IT architecture and application systems. It also handles unified management and scheduling of traditional hardware virtual resources in the cloud. In addition, the system provides flexible O&M functions such as product and service processes, role rights customization and provision services. 

End-to-end security isolation and reliable traffic flow design

The cloud platform provides complete network boundary and internal protection solutions apart from physical protection of the equipment room. The solution meets Chinese national security requirements and virtualized a full series of security devices customized for each department. For users with special requirements, Huawei provided a Level 3 zone security consolidation plan to ensure level- and zone-based protection.

To increase reliability and availability, the cloud platform provides multiple reliability design services such as:

• Virtualization
• Storage
• Data protection design
• Network path redundancy
• Flexible backup policies
• Local and remote backup services and data recovery

Benefits

The Smart Guangzhou cloud service platform provided unified management and on-demand utilization that broke up data silos, improved data sharing, lowered costs and increased capacity, including:

• Shortening service rollouts from 90 days to one week  
• Reducing total resource costs by 40%
• Reducing O&M costs by 30%
• Ability to run more than 200 services that meet stringent national security requirements