According to the "Guide to Promoting Enterprise Cloudification (2018-2020)" released by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), by 2020, China will optimize enterprise cloud environments and significantly improve industry awareness and enthusiasm for cloudification. Significant increases will be seen in the proportion of cloud-based applications. Cloud computing will be widely adopted in enterprise production, operations, and management. A million new enterprises migrate to the cloud, and more than 100 benchmark application cases will emerge.
From the "Three-year Action Plan for Cloud Computing Development (2017-2019)" last year to the "Guide to Promoting Enterprise Cloudification" this year, the Chinese government has been vigorously encouraging enterprises to accelerate digital and intelligent transformation through the use of cloud computing. However, migrating enterprises to the cloud is just the beginning. As the IDC pointed out in its whitepaper "Unleashing Business Value with Cloud Professional Services", transformation does not cease upon cloudification. Once an organization has migrated to the cloud, the digital process continues.
"Life on the cloud is far from static, and it is possible that organizations underestimate the effort required to introduce cloud-based software and manage those constant changes," the IDC pointed out. Their white paper also emphasized the importance of digital operations and O&M. At HUAWEI CONNECT 2018, Huawei's Enterprise Technical Service Dept released the unified O&M platform I•MOC, incorporating Huawei's vast experience in digital operations. The I•MOC is an external version of Huawei's internal IT tool SmartIT, which allows all enterprises to share Huawei's digital operational experience.
Huawei enterprise service: A driver for digital enterprise transformation
Based on customer O&M transformation requirements and years of industry service experience, Huawei leverages new technologies such as big data and AI, and works with partners to help enterprises develop platform-based, automated, and intelligent O&M service solutions, such as cloud DC O&M, remote management, subscription-based optimization, and smart maintenance. Furthermore, Huawei targets key industries such as government and finance, and provides cloud O&M service solutions covering IT infrastructure and typical scenario applications such as the smart cities, smart campuses, safe cities, and finance/government cloud big data. These solutions help customers reduce fault rates by over 70% and shorten time to market (TTM) of new services by 50%.
Sun Maolu, President of Huawei Enterprise BG's Enterprise Technical Service Dept, reiterated at last year's Huawei Service Forum Huawei's principle of "staying customer-centric and promoting the spirit of craftsmanship." Customer satisfaction is the starting point of Huawei's services. Over the past few years, Huawei has gradually established itself as a trustworthy and innovative industry leader, and has set up a global technical support and self-service platform to provide high-quality services anytime, anywhere. As of 2017, more than 45,000 customers in over 170 countries have chosen Huawei as their strategic transformation partner, including 211 of the world's top 500 companies. These customers are mainly multinational companies in industries such as automotive, banking, electric power, and logistics. Huawei services are now serving more than a third of the world's population.
Zhou Yilin, director of Huawei's Enterprise Technical Service Dept's Cloud Enablement Service Division, shared how Huawei enterprise services can help customers implement digital O&M transformation in the smart era. He said that Huawei provides a full-scenario O&M service solution to help customers better manage and use the cloud.
Huawei's Enterprise Technical Service Dept has established technical support and resource sharing centers in the Asia Pacific, Latin America, Europe, Middle East & Africa, which are available in 20+ languages. In addition, Huawei has introduced AI technologies such as big data intelligent analysis, knowledge graphing, natural language processing (NLP), and deep learning to improve work efficiency by 20% and reduce accident rates by 15%. Huawei is also the first in the industry to pass TSIA certification in 2017, making it one of the few companies in the world to obtain such a certification. In the same year, Huawei's technical support website was awarded "one of the top 10 technical support websites" in the world, with more than 1.2 million registered users and 70,000 daily online users. 80% of technical problems are solved via the online support platform.
Huawei has established multiple integration verification labs for professional services in seven countries, covering 50+ scenarios. These labs provide full-process verification services covering development, delivery and maintenance. The innovative industry cloud enablement solution eliminates the service and IT gap based on the idea of "business O&M" and provides customers with full-lifecycle services, such as cloud planning and design, migration, and cloud O&M. The solution has been successfully deployed in more than 5000 projects worldwide.
External output of Huawei's digital operations practices
The digital operations experience of Huawei Enterprise Service comes from Huawei's own digital transformation. As one of the world's largest high-tech companies, Huawei faced similar challenges encountered by other medium- and large-sized enterprises in the process of cloudification and digital transformation of its IT systems.
Zhang Peng, Director of the Huawei Cloud Data Center Management Dept, said that with the rapid development of Huawei's global business, Huawei IT is facing growing challenges. Huawei's revenues exceeded CNY600 billion in 2017. Huawei's business spans the enterprise, carrier, consumer, and cloud businesses. Huawei boasts a total of 20 operational centers in 170 countries, and also has 15 R&D centers and 36 joint innovation centers around the globe. The company has 180,000 employees, 60,000 partners and 900 offices around the world.
Huawei started digital transformation of data center management in 2016. By building a standard, visualized, automated, and self-service smart IT management platform, Huawei provides full-stack services including monitoring, management, control, marketing, and support. In fact, in the early stages, Huawei was also a small "workshop" in terms of IT operations. Each service system was operated and maintained independently, lacking unified processes and system support. With the global development of Huawei's business, the number of Huawei users is increasing. This requires that data center services always be online. Since 2014, Huawei has been investing more than US$10 million each year in building an internal IT O&M platform, which has achieved remarkable results. Huawei's global resource utilization has been improved nearly threefold. The performance of more than 800 applications has improved significantly, with app response time reduced from 10 seconds to 3 seconds, improving the global user efficiency threefold.
Huawei IT now operates 200+ data centers, 300,000+ servers, 1000 PB+ of data, millions of VMs, 800+ services, and multiple heterogeneous cloud environments around the world. Through Smart IT featuring monitoring, management, control, operations, and support, Huawei IT can achieve the goal of a human-machine maintenance ratio of 1-8000 while ensuring zero interruption of core services. By implementing O&M standards, standardizing expertise, and leveraging AIOps to realize machine-based O&M, O&M personnel can finally "carry out network O&M over a cup of coffee".
At HUAWEI CONNECT 2018, Huawei officially released the marketable version of the O&M platform based on Smart IT - The unified I•MOC O&M platform. I•MOC supports local deployment and cloud service mode, and is a unified O&M platform across hybrid clouds. I•MOC provides a comprehensive, visualized, and intelligent O&M management system that integrates monitoring, management, control, operations, and support for digital transformation and cloudification of enterprises. The I•MOC's excellent performance can help solve O&M problems found in large-scale cloud architecture, and implement 10 million-level object monitoring (monitoring), 10 billion-level relationship management (management), 1 million-level automatic task scheduling (control), an extremely fine-grained measurement system (marketing), and a standardized O&M management process (support). Based on the I•MOC, services such as ITO, RMS, cloud DC O&M, safe city O&M, and joint O&M can be offered externally.
The unified I•MOC O&M platform brings a new digital O&M experience featuring visualization, intelligence, ease of use, and openness. In terms of visualization, I•MOC provides six operations themes and a global measurement system, giving users perfect understanding of massive resources and supporting capillary-level visualization. In terms of intelligence, I•MOC standardizes expertise and enables machines to operate and maintain each other, achieving a secure and efficient intelligent platform. In terms of ease-of-use, I•MOC has built-in all-domain standards and supports fast orchestration of O&M scenarios, simplifying digital O&M. Specifically, I•MOC has 20+ built-in standards and supports customized services by dragging. In terms of openness, Huawei utilizes micro-service architecture, integrates ecosystem solutions, and works with partners with open architecture to provide comprehensive IT digital O&M solutions, covering safe cities, smart cities, big data policing, and smart campus.
From Smart IT to I•MOC, Huawei has been sharing its digital operations practices externally on a massive scale, which also demonstrates the evolutionary trend of network O&M --- from manual O&M to automated O&M to intelligent O&M. In the manual O&M era, manual and standard IT O&M management tools, especially standard O&M software tools based on the ITSM methodology, were used. Typical examples of this era were HP's OpenView and IBM's Tivoli. In the automated O&M era, IT system scale has increased greatly. Especially after the DevOps model became popular, O&M became more reliant on automatic O&M scripts triggered by events. Typical open source products include Ansible, Puppet, and Chef. In the intelligent O&M era, big data analysis and deep learning are used to enable machines to automatically analyze faults and compile solutions. Splunk is a typical example. I•MOC is a more comprehensive O&M management platform for all scenarios. It supports monitoring, management, control, operations, support, and local and cloud deployment modes and better meet enterprise users' requirements.
Digital transformation: O&M
Li Peiwang, deputy general manager of China International E-Commerce Center's (CIECC) Network Operations Dept, said at HUAWEI CONNECT 2018 that with advanced cloud infrastructure platforms, the construction of the PaaS big data platform and the rollout of SaaS application services, the China's Ministry of Commerce's (MIC) unified business system platform is becoming increasingly advanced. However, with the expansion of service scale and digital transformation in government, the O&M of MIC's unified platform faced many challenges, especially in service cloudification.
The unified platform O&M faces the challenges of unified management, including centralized monitoring and management of three data centers in two cities, unified management of heterogeneous platform resources, unified access, monitoring, management of devices from multiple vendors, and domain-based self-management and self-service of multiple tenants. The cloudification of MIC's traditional applications faces the problem of system reconstruction, as there was a strong logical association between applications, which had large amounts of data interactions. Cloudification is a complex, systematic project, which requires careful preparation, planning and step-by-step implementation, especially considering the major challenge of secure O&M.
Based on the dual platforms of operations and maintenance, MIC's data center can implement centralized monitoring and unified management of multiple centers, vendors, and users, and multi-tenant self-management by area and domain. In terms of unified management, the unified user authentication platform is deployed based on Huawei's unified network management platform --- eSight, and the MIC unified business system platform. The unified user authentication platform provides unified authentication, unified portals, service halls, account management, and information interfaces. The unified platform has become the operations management center of the MIC's unified business system platform. In terms of O&M, a unified O&M management platform with CMDB as the core was built. The platform provides centralized monitoring, alarm, and configuration management for the DC equipment room power and environment, network, server, storage, cloud platform, operating system, database, middleware, and upper-layer applications. The unified platform has become the operations management center of the MIC's unified business system platform.
The cooperation between CIECC and Huawei has been deepening: With Huawei's big data services, including planning and design, development support, and management services, CIECC has established five big data platforms and a unified resource library, developed an indicator system, sorted data resources, and gradually interconnected multiple data platforms. Huawei cloud migration services enable the rollout and unified management of CIECC's 100 service systems. In addition, mutual cooperation has extended to areas such as cloud O&M, cloud security, and cloud talent cultivation. CIECC has achieved centralized O&M of business centers, 24/7 platform security and stable operations. The skills of its O&M team have also been greatly improved.
Looking into the future, cooperation between CIECC and Huawei will enter a new phase in the following aspects:
- Developing more complete cloud O&M regulations and processes, formulating and optimizing O&M regulations, and developing flexible and customizable service processes.
- Building an intelligent O&M system in the cloud era to reduce costs and improve efficiency.
- Constructing big data operations to support visualized and refined operations management and continuously improve CIECC's services.
With the launch of the unified I•MOC O&M platform, I•MOC will become a standard solution for enterprises wishing to migrate to the cloud, thereby facilitating and accelerating their digital transformation.