ActiveCloud presented its new product E-Cloud, a cloud data center for big businesses, on July 27, 2018, to celebrate System Administrator Appreciation Day. The product was developed based on Huawei hardware and uses VMware solutions.
Sergey Avramenko, Product Director, ActiveCloud:
“E-Cloud is based on the VMware software stack and Huawei high-tech equipment. This symbiosis has made it possible for us to build a top-quality cloud product with literally limitless capability for corporate IT landscapes. An important project phase was the search for a technology partner to supply the hardware component, in order to meet our high requirements and for the project to become a reality. We explored several proposals from leading equipment manufacturers and eventually decided in favor of Huawei. The key criteria included full compatibility with components from other vendors within the E-Cloud technology stack, applicability of the equipment in the corporate environment, its manufacturability, value for money, and level of service support.
Further, we focused on purchasing the equipment from a single supplier (as a rule, this implies higher risks for the customer). Huawei was the one capable of offering the entire package of necessary components for the E-Cloud infrastructure. Naturally, purchasing all hardware components from a single brand means maximized efficiency. They work as a single organism: fully compatible and with optimized performance, managed through a single support service and ready for flexible scalability in the future.
Konstantin Bakanovich, Lead IT Specialist at Huawei Corporate Services Department::
“The E-Cloud project is designed to meet the needs for IaaS services for medium and large organizations using a high-performance, reliable, fail safe and secure high availability solution. To achieve this objective, Huawei has provided the following infrastructure components: Oceanstor Dorado V3 storage, FusionServer 1288H V3 rack mount servers, Cloud Engine switches, Oceanstor 5000 V3.
Huawei FusionServer 1288H V3 1U server is designed for the virtualization of cloud computing devices and high-performance computing (HPC). Key features include FDM (Fault Diagnostics and Management) to implement 93% in-depth fault diagnosis, simplified network setup and configuration using LOM, and standard and open software interfaces for full integration with third-party management software.
E-Cloud’s OceanStor Dorado V3 All-flash storage system is designed for use with high load applications. FlashLink provides up to 4 million IOPS with a stable delay of no more than 500 µs, while the deduplication and compression functionality significantly increases usable capacity and reduces operating costs. The system supports active-active, gateway-less dual node deployment with RPO=0 and RTO≈0. Further upgrades to a three-node data center can be implemented to achieve 99.9999% availability. Due to the 3:1 data compression ratio, operating costs can be reduced by 75%.
As for the network portion, the CE6851 switch was used for the solution. The 48 downstream 10Gb SFP+ ports and six 40Gb QSFP+ ports provide exceptional connectivity with the core switches. FCoE (Fiber Channel over Ethernet) support allows using a single network to provide data storage, transfer and computing, which significantly cuts infrastructure development and maintenance costs. Intelligent operational and maintenance toolkits ensure high accuracy and efficiency of collecting device status data, while ensuring real-time network monitoring.
The resulting E-cloud project is a complete package of IT resources for creating any Enterprise IT landscape. The following use models are possible within the E-cloud data center:
- Deployment of accounting and bookkeeping systems, corporate portals, ERP, CRM, web services databases and other productive services.
- Hybrid Cloud
- Cloud as backup data center
- Development and testing environments
- Cloud backup repository
- Any on demand customized model
On August 1, 2018, E-Cloud became available for order. This product formed the foundation for a new ActiveCloud business model: transition from a cloud provider to a cloud aggregator. Please read a report from the ActiveCloud Reload news conference for prerequisites, cloud solutions models, and modification of the corporate model under a new CEO.
