Huawei and Global InfoTech: Building a New Financial Cloud Ecosystem Together

In the current cloud era, cloud platforms built on infrastructure resources like computing, storage, and networking are gaining popularity. Due to the co-existence of multiple cloud platform technologies, the Cloud Management Platform (CMP) has found a niche in the enterprise Information Technology (IT) market. The need for unified management of large heterogeneous enterprise infrastructures is growing, and has contributed to the rapid rise of CMPs throughout the enterprise-class cloud market.

In a cloud service system, the CMP is responsible for unifying the scheduling of traditional IT, cloud-native resources, and applications. The platform also supports rapid service iteration and innovation. Enterprises are increasingly motivated to adopt CMPs as they begin to fully comprehend the role of cloud computing in digital transformation, and as cloud computing increases its enterprise IT market share.

According to Gartner’s definition of the CMP market, the basic core functions of a CMP include: multi-cloud management, service requests, metering/billing, and process orchestration. These functions need to be implemented in hybrid IT environments (virtualization, private cloud, and public cloud) to ensure optimal outcomes.

Meeting the Challenges of the Cloud Era

• Operation model transformation: Core enterprise applications are being digitized, enabling them to provide users with improved, real-time services over the Internet. Digitization has become the focus of many enterprises that are undergoing strategic transformation.
• Distributed high availability: Enterprises sometimes need to cope with short-term load surges. However, most traditional architectures are not equipped to provide the new cloud-era services needed to meet this demand, such as clustering, redundancy, backup, remote Disaster Recovery (DR), and auto scaling.
• Agile service delivery: An ideal IT infrastructure must allow business innovation while ensuring stability for legacy applications. It must allow cross-platform, flexible, timely, batch, and standardized delivery for IT services.
• Hybrid multi-cloud management: Enterprises must be capable of managing multiple types of clouds — private, public, and hybrid — within multi-center structures and numerous environments, like development, testing, and production. They must be able to manage heterogeneous resources — both traditionally centralized, as well as open-source distributed ones.

Dual-State IT Hybrid Cloud Management

‘Dual-state IT’ will become mainstream in the near future.

The steady-state system runs legacy applications requiring business continuity and contains massive amounts of data and transactions. This system works to maintain high reliability and stability while handling a relatively low level of concurrency.

The agile-state system runs exploratory and non-linear innovative applications. It must be easy to use and able to handle high concurrency while still delivering excellent performance. This system must quickly adapt to ever-changing customer needs and market conditions.

At the beginning of 2017, Huawei and Global InfoTech devoted extensive resources to studying financial industry trends and evolution, with the purpose of pinpointing the most suitable cloud solution for the financial sector.

After long periods of functionality and security verification and testing, Huawei and Global InfoTech jointly launched their private financial cloud solution, FinCMP2.0, which provides holistic services for cloud planning, integration, management, and operations. FinCMP2.0 combines the strengths of Global InfoTech’s intelligent dual-state cloud management platform and Huawei’s FusionSphere OpenStack cloud OS solution.

FinCMP2.0 builds a cloud-based IT operation management console to help various customers digitally transform. Heterogeneous cloud platforms help enterprise customers transform siloed IT systems into self-service ones, facilitating approval, metering, and billing based on IT resource usage.

With the unified management of cloud resources within a group, along with unified operation management and metering/billing, corporate groups can transition from traditional IT software and hardware procurement to the pay-per-use model of cloud services. Traditional integrators and cloud service providers create an integrated cloud service catalog on top of a multi-cloud management platform, providing customers with flexible and agile cloud services.

FinCMP2.0 Functions

• Heterogeneous resource management: Supports centralized management of virtualization software and manages VMware, OpenStack, and PowerVC resource pools, as well as physical servers.
• Multi-DC management: Unifies management for heterogeneous resource pools across multiple data centers in different geo-locations.
• Cloud service management: Supports global resource policy management; resource pool and cluster-level scheduling policy management; and data dictionary-based settings management.
• Visual process engine: Orchestrates job scheduling; DR; reference and release; resource delivery; and request and approval processes.
• Multi-tenant management: Offers resource abstraction, provisions standard cloud services, and supports multiple authentication methods.
• Superior extensibility: Allows secondary development on pre-existing products. New products can seamlessly integrate with pre-existing ones.

Cloud Ecosystem Prospects

As market needs mature, general-purpose cloud platforms will gradually evolve to serve specific domains and provide specialized services. Using a CMP to manage heterogeneous hardware and virtualized resources will be the logical choice for many enterprises.

In the meantime, as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) continues to extend its management reach and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) grows its scheduling capabilities, a new software runtime environment is finally coming into existence. Software-Defined Everything (SDE) will soon be the new normal. Additionally, private clouds will coexist with public clouds in enterprises of all sizes. The hybrid cloud market is projected to grow at a fast pace.

Based on years of experience in cloud Data Center (DC) operation and maintenance, expertise with both financial and public clouds, as well as the work of remarkable technical teams from both Huawei and Global InfoTech, FinCMP2.0 will provide highly tailored cloud solutions while developing a thriving financial cloud ecosystem.