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e.huawei.comHuawei EnterpriseLeading New ICT, The Road to Digital Transformation.
Huawei KunLun Mission Critical Server is a new-generation computing platform that embraces the x86 ecosystem and delivers the high reliability, ultimate performance, and scalability required by critical business. KunLun helps global enterprises get better positioned for the digital transformation.
KunLun SAP HANA Appliance: Scale-Up FirstHuawei-Hundsun Securities Core Transaction Solution Spurs Innovations with Assured Reliability and PerformanceECI Shifts to a New Paradigm for Future Retail with Huawei KunLun
01/2018
Navigating CriticalEnterprise BusinessThrough DigitalTransformation
Navigating CriticalEnterprise BusinessThrough DigitalTransformation
Inaugural Issue
The Huawei KunLun server is the world’s first x86-based 32-socket (32S) mission-critical
computing platform. It offers the advantages of a groundbreaking CPU interconnect architecture
and advanced Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS) features to meet the ultimate
performance and reliability requirements of the most demanding workloads. Since its launch in March
2016, KunLun has been selected and trusted by global customers across industries including finance,
government, retail, healthcare, education, and electric power. KunLun has been widely implemented for
critical application scenarios such as core databases, mission-critical in-memory computing, and service
consolidation.
For these service scenarios, the core databases touch the most important part of the customers’
business systems and therefore are viewed as the most valuable. Many core systems used to be deployed
on UNIX servers and, due to the closed UNIX architecture, the entire platform is built on a single
vendor’s hardware and software. This traditional deployment leads to poor system compatibility, costly
upgrades, and expensive maintenance. The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) has found
a paradigm to shift these challenges into opportunities for growth. ICBC has decided to build a new-
generation platform for providing its core systems. The defining factors for this new platform are high
reliability and performance to be delivered based on an open architecture. Among all of the vast tests and
verification performed by ICBC, KunLun servers stand out by meeting all of ICBC’s stringent demands.
For example, on the reliability front, KunLun incorporates proactive fault prediction and analysis
mechanisms, which allow the system to generate risk prewarnings and isolate a potentially faulty
component before it fails. This feature covers key components such as processors, Dual In-line Memory
Modules (DIMMs), and the Node Controller (NC) chip. Leveraging this feature, KunLun delivers up to
99.999 percent reliability and is able to provide 24/7 service assurance for the bank’s core production
system. On the performance front, KunLun provides even more advantages with its CPU interconnect
architecture. By supporting up to 32 processors, KunLun far outperforms its counterparts with a higher
number of transactions per minute. Finally, KunLun wins the trust of the customer by its superior
performance, exceptional scalability, and unrivaled reliability, and helps ICBC migrate its mission-
critical systems from a closed architecture to an open platform, assuring ICBC stays on track towards
digital transformation.
The technical challenges experienced by ICBC is actually a common situation confronting many
customers in various industries, including the Postal Savings Bank of China (PSBC), Henan Traffic Police
Corps, Heilan Home, and Fujian Medical University Union Hospital. More and more customers are
KunLun Charts New Waters in Global Digital Transformation MarketsBy Wang Zhen, General Manager for Huawei High-End Servers
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turning to an open architecture, and KunLun emerges as a solution of choice to help customers best resolve their UNIX-to-x86
migration issues. In addition to its superb performance and reliability, more importantly, KunLun provides an open ecosystem.
A vast number of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) from inside and outside China have expanded the ecosystem and
developed flexible industry solutions around KunLun. The ISVs include Nantian Electronic Information Co., Ltd., Adtec,
Hundsun Technologies Inc., and India’s Infosys. These solutions have been integral to the customers’ success in migrating
their critical applications from UNIX servers to the KunLun-based open platform. Customers are now empowered with new
levels of agility and rapidity in deploying and upgrading core applications, as well as the ability to lower their Total Cost of
Ownership (TCO).
In addition to the core database application scenario, the KunLun-based SAP HANA In-memory Computing Solution
has also received much recognition from customers worldwide. A case in point is El Corte Inglés (ECI), a Spain-based
mega department store. ECI was planning to deploy a data mart project. As a subset of its data warehouse, data mart
will enable ECI to rapidly analyze massive volumes of retail data, keeping ECI better informed of the ever-changing
business landscape, meanwhile simplifying O&M for ECI. After methodical observations and evaluation, ECI found that
the industry’s popular scale-out HANA solution supports up to only 4 TB of memory, which would fall short on service
demands, would necessitate data table division after system expansion, and would further increase O&M workloads. To
fulfill ECI’s requirements, the Huawei KunLun SAP HANA solution supports scale-up and, as the world’s first SAP HANA
solution supporting 8 TB of Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) capabilities, delivers 30 percent higher performance
than the scale-out SAP HANA. KunLun’s scale-up architecture also means that all data is stored on a single node, which
eliminates the need for data re-distribution after capacity expansion and therefore drastically simplifies O&M for ECI.
Huawei has worked with global partners to leverage KunLun servers to help customers solve the challenges arising from
digital transformation. Looking ahead, Huawei will continue extensive investments in R&D for KunLun. Development of more
features for the KunLun server are underway, including logical partitioning, uneven physical partitioning, and I/O expansion
enclosures, which are to be launched in 2018. These efforts will augment KunLun to become an even more powerful,
reliable x86 server for mission-critical systems that help transition customers smoothly and successfully through their digital
transformation journey.▲
Huawei will augment KunLun to become an even more powerful, reliable x86 server for mission-critical systems that help transition customers smoothly and successfully through their digital transformation journey.
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Navigating Critical Enterprise Business Through Digital TransformationHuawei KunLun Mission Critical Server is a new-generation computing platform that embraces the x86 ecosystem and delivers the high reliability, ultimate performance, and scalability required by critical business. KunLun helps global enterprises get better positioned for the digital transformation.
Huawei-Hundsun Securities Core Transaction Solution Spurs Innovations with Assured Reliability and Performance
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Huawei and Nantian Team Up to Build Core Banking Service Solutions
Huawei and SUSE Join Forces to Spearhead x86 Mission Critical Server Technologies
KunLun SAP HANA Appliance: Scale-Up FirstHuawei's experience makes the company the best practitioner of SAP system infrastructure solutions and the best choice for an enterprise's digital transformation partner.
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ECI Shifts to a New Paradigm for Future Retail with Huawei KunLunAfter deploying the 16-socket KunLun SAP HANA appliance based on all in-memory computing, ECI is able to consolidate the active data from multiple systems on a quasi-real-time computing platform.
KunLun SAP HANA Catalyzes ‘New Retail’ for Heilan Home
Flexible Service Deployment with KunLun Mission-Critical ServersHuawei KunLun Mission-Critical Servers are one of the best choices for building a large-scale enterprise business-consolidation platform.
KunLun Seminar: Paving the Way for Digital Transformation
KunLun Global Exhibition Roundup
Huawei KunLun Honored with the ‘SAP HANA on Huawei KunLun I&II Optimization’ Award
Fujian Medical University Union Hospital Relies on Huawei for Their Fault-Tolerant Hospital Information System
Nantian Teams with Huawei to Help Banks Embrace an Open EcosystemNantian is working with Huawei to offer core banking service systems on Huawei’s x86-based KunLun platform, helping banks handle mission-critical applications with greater flexibility, scalability, and lower cost.
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Editors: Luo Weitao Du Shaohua Zhu Handong Li Qi Zheng Wei Li Bingfeng Zhou Zhiping
Guo Jian Liu Yuanhui Wang Changcheng Chen Ben Scott Jamar John North Simon Locke
Pauline Zhang Linda Hudson Gary Taylor Robert Peterson Tracey Hum Colin Fuller
Issuer: Jing Chen
Ecosystem Success
Exhibition Report
Huawei Teams Up with Russia’s Top ISV Diasoft to Release a Digital Bank Joint Solution
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Navigating Critical Enterprise Business Through Digital TransformationBy Storm Liu, IDC Analyst
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Industry Insight
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Industry Insight
Storm Liu
Huawei KunLun Mission Critical Server is a new-generation computing platform that embraces the x86 ecosystem and delivers the high reliability, ultimate performance, and scalability required by critical services. KunLun helps global enterprises get better positioned for the digital transformation.
I DC finds that the enterprise IT environment has shifted from being traditionally technology-driven to business-driven. The centricity around service demands has pushed deeper into different phases of the whole process, from production and sales to services. To support this change in the role of IT systems, the systems must meet high
performance and availability requirements, and enterprises must achieve a sensible balance between IT system agility, technology continuity, and cost control. Only a unified, open architecture can meet all of these requirements. The ‘open-up’ trend has been an unstoppable force in enterprise IT system development. Openness is IT’s new normal.
Enterprises have long used UNIX servers based on RISC or EPIC architectures that impose some degree of lock-in to one vendor’s systems, which leads to high Operations and Maintenance (O&M) costs and difficulties in service innovation. Against this backdrop, enterprises are calling for a mission-critical computing rebuild. A shift to x86 platforms is underway.
Another top concern of enterprise CIOs/CTOs for building open mission-critical computing platforms is to ensure business continuity and data security. Clearly, mission-critical application platforms must provide high performance; advanced Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS); tight security; high scalability; and openness.
After in-depth studies of enterprise requirements for mission-critical computing, IDC finds that the requirements have fundamentally changed in the context of cloud computing and Big Data. Mission-critical computing requires an open platform that can rapidly grow and smoothly expand along with an enterprise, and the data management architecture must be both service-oriented and enterprise-oriented.
To meet these requirements, Huawei has launched the KunLun Mission Critical Server, which uses Intel® Xeon®
E7 v3/v4 processors. KunLun has been engineered and built for mission-critical applications. It leverages a scale-up architecture to help customers build mission-critical computing platforms of high performance and reliability. These unified, open computing platforms enable enterprises to migrate and manage services in cloud and non-cloud environments, help take better advantage of ‘third platform’ applications, and accelerate digital transformation.
This article analyzes today’s new requirements for mission-critical applications and drills down into specific expectations regarding the open architecture, business innovation, and service protection mechanisms. This article also describes how Huawei’s KunLun Mission Critical Server has been engineered to meet mission-critical requirements and how it helps unlock the power of business innovation.
Mission-Critical Computing Becomes the Market MainstreamWith the support of technologies such as cloud computing and Big Data, companies will introduce more intelligent and internet-based products and services. Every business will be an IT business and IT’s genes will be rooted in every
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Industry Insight
business. For example, manufacturing companies will accelerate the transition to service-oriented manufacturing with the help of Internet products. In general, enterprises will roll out a steady stream of value-added services to maximize business value potential. In addition, Big Data and faster feedback of user needs will shorten the distance between manufacturing plants and consumers, making C2B a new normal. Through the analysis of customer preferences, habits, and usage frequency, companies can optimize product design, improve product quality, adjust marketing strategies, and enhance the level of after-sales service. The rapid development of Internet+ will shatter the boundaries of industries, and cross-domain competition and integration will be more common. Disruption and game-changing newcomers will be another new normal.
IDC believes that the transition of IT from a support system to a production system will bring IT systems to the foreground in an enterprise. In the future, every business will become a technology company.
The accelerated deployment of ‘third platform’
technologies, such as cloud computing and Big Data, has resulted in a stream of new applications, services, and business models. Users are becoming more and more comfortable with the use of IT, so technology thresholds are lower, but this raises the bar for user experience. As a result, enterprise IT infrastructure must accommodate more customers and more applications, have deeper insights into customer needs, respond faster to market changes, and provide the data and decision support that are essential to business innovation and transformation. At the same time, CIOs must strike a balance between business support capabilities and cost control.
With improvements in x86 chip performance and the maturity of distributed computing architectures, x86 servers have replaced many low-end and mid-range non-x86 UNIX servers. In 2010, x86-based servers accounted for about 58 percent of the overall server market in China, then climbed to 89 percent in 2015. The open-architecture computing platform represented by the x86 architecture will continue to maintain strong market momentum for the foreseeable future.
IDC believes that the transition of IT from a support system to a production system will bring IT systems to the foreground in an enterprise. In the future, every business will become a technology company. >>
Figure 1: Open-architecture computing becomes the market mainstream(Source: IDC, China 2016 x86 Server Market Research Report)
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RISC/EPIC vs. 4 way+ x86 Server by Industry, 2015/2014 (Rolling 4 Quarters)Average growth rate: 4 way+ x86 server 21.1%, RISC/EPIC server -19.6%
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Industry Insight
Figure 1 shows the market scale of x86 servers with four or more sockets compared to non-x86 RISC/EPIC servers in China in 2015 and 2014. The data shows a year-on-year increase of 21.1 percent in the market share of high-end x86 servers in 2015, while the market size of RISC/EPIC servers shrank by 19.6 percent.
• x86 Server Challenges in Mission-Critical ComputingMission-critical services refer to applications supporting critical, revenue-generating business processes, including Business Intelligence (BI) analytics, business processes (such as transaction processing and Enterprise Resource Planning [ERP]), and core databases. These core applications have zero tolerance for interruptions, especially in sectors such as government, defense, security, telecommunications, finance, transportation, and medical care.
Standard x86 architecture servers have achieved the necessary reliability and performance for mission-critical applications mostly through scale-out and application-level control. In fact, IDC finds that the current replacement of non-x86 servers by x86 servers is still mainly in the low-end and mid-range market, which is basically implemented through scale-out — deploying a large number of two-socket to four-socket x86 servers to improve overall system performance and reliability.
At the single-node level, x86 servers differ from traditional UNIX servers in performance and RAS and require features such as load balancing, HA, and data backup to be implemented at the software or application level. x86 servers still have limitations in compute-intensive applications such as Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), service processing, and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP). For these reasons, many enterprises are still wary about using x86 servers for business-critical applications.
IT system operating costs are also an issue for traditional x86 servers. Power consumption, IT system efficiency, and computing density are of paramount
importance to the overall operation efficiency and cost control of data centers. However, the scale-out architecture with large numbers of x86 servers clearly does not have the advantages of efficiency or computing density. The x86 scale-out requires more racks, bandwidth, and power support in addition to needing a large, technical O&M team. These factors make cost control all the more difficult.
After in-depth study of data centers and talking with customers, IDC found that the enormous volume of x86 servers deployed has led to a rapid increase in the overall number of enterprise IT devices which, in turn, caused continuously increasing data center size and energy consumption, and an ever-increasing management and maintenance burden. ‘Data center sprawl’ has put enterprise IT system OAM and operation cost control under tremendous pressure.
• Value of Scale-up Mission-Critical ServersFrom 2012 to 2015, in a global commercial value study project, IDC tracked customers who selected scale-up servers for some mission-critical workloads. The study involved qualitative and quantitative metrics, including IT infrastructure and data center costs, IT staff time requirements, impact on unplanned downtime, and support for business operations.
Figure 2: Comparison of annual costs of scale-out and scale-up architectures (Source: IDC, 2016)
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Industry Insight
IDC found that enterprise users are more likely to adopt the scale-up architecture or converged infrastructure solution for workloads such as business processing, OLTP, BI, and in-memory computing because these architectures are more integrated, computationally dense, and easier to manage.
As shown in Figure 2 and Table 1, the IDC study found that the scale-up architecture has benefits in typical business-critical computing scenarios. Enterprises that choose scale-up architecture servers based on application scenarios and workload types can effectively reduce unplanned system downtime and improve system operational efficiency despite the high cost of a single server. These advantages help reduce IT system Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by up to 30 percent.
Today’s enterprise choices for business-critical computing solutions are mainly based on core application support capabilities, IT system flexibility, and TCO. As x86 architecture servers deliver higher performance and better RAS features for mission-critical computing and its application scenarios, the benefits of an open, scale-up architecture will make a big difference in the business-critical computing space.
Huawei KunLun Mission Critical Computing SolutionKunLun is a Huawei x86-based mission-critical server line that includes three products: KunLun 9008, KunLun 9016, and KunLun 9032. These products provide scale-up computing platform options of 8 to 32 CPUs and 6 TB to 32 TB of memory for processing core applications. To meet the requirements of mission-critical applications, KunLun offers high performance, high reliability, an open ecosystem, and good alignment with typical application scenarios.
• High PerformanceThe KunLun series supports 32-CPU high-speed
interconnect and nanosecond-level transmission latency through the Huawei proprietary Node Controller (NC) chip. KunLun delivers 40 percent higher performance than traditional UNIX servers. KunLun also supports physical and logical partitioning functions, delivering usage experience rivaling that of traditional high-end UNIX servers and flexibly meeting the workload demands for computing resources:
• High-speed CPU interconnect enabled by the NC chip: This x86 processor interconnect chip implements a full mesh architecture and supports four Quick Path Interconnect (QPI) links in the downlink and four Network Interface (NI) ports in the uplink. The NC chip has pushed beyond the limits of industry-standard x86 8-socket interconnects to vertically interconnect 32 Intel Xeon E7 v3/v4 processors with high speeds (with 64 CPU interconnections). The nanosecond-level data transmission latency represents a leap forward compared with the IP or InfiniBand (IB) interconnects used in scale-out architectures and enables faster response and higher OLTP efficiency.
• 8S to 32S, single-node, scale-up computing resources: Specifically, KunLun 9032 supports up to 768 cores; 1,536 threads; and 32 TB of memory on a single server. The flexible and powerful scale-up capabilities of KunLun cater to the demands of growing services for computing resources and drive down the initial hardware purchase cost.
• Industry-leading computing performance: Huawei KunLun leads the pack in performance benchmark tests such as SPEC CPU2006 (floating point and integer computing capability test) and SPEC JBB2015 (MultiJVM performance test). KunLun delivers tpmC (database OLTP performance) of over 10 million with linearity up to 1.97 times, meeting the requirements of latency-sensitive and bandwidth-intensive workloads for computing performance.
Project/Unit (USD) Scale-out Environment Scale-up Environment Difference (%)Server and network hardware $7,446.00 $6,669.00 10%Software $10,398.00 $9,353.00 10%Electricity and infrastructure $1,483.00 $1,082.00 27%Data center IT staff $17,448.00 $10,021.00 43%Service-affecting unplanned downtime $11,418.00 $4,980.00 56%Total $48,193.00 $32,105.00 33%
Table 1: Comparison of annual costs of scale-out and scale-up architectures (Source: IDC, 2016)
As x86 architecture servers deliver higher performance and better RAS features for mission-critical computing and its application scenarios, the benefits of an open, scale-up architecture will make a big difference in the business-critical computing space. >>
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Industry Insight
• Flexible physical and logical partitioning: Huawei KunLun is currently the industry’s only x86 mission-critical computing platform that supports both physical and logical partitioning. The partitioning features maximize resource utilization and extend the usage experience of traditional mission-critical environments to reduce deployment complexity.
• High ReliabilityPowered by the Intel Xeon E7 v3/v4 processor family, KunLun leverages Huawei’s innovative RAS 2.0 technology to transform reactive troubleshooting into proactive fault management. These servers provide the most comprehensive RAS features for x86 mission-critical computing platforms to ensure business continuity. RAS 2.0 is a package of code built into the OS, BIOS, and Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) to enable comprehensive collection of module health information and real-time online diagnostics without relying on the OS, pinpointing where a problem occurs and fixing the fault quickly
and precisely. In addition, RAS 2.0 is able to identify lurking problems and intelligently divert tasks running on a potentially problematic module to other resources, thereby minimizing downtime while keeping the production jobs up and running. The core design concepts of RAS 2.0 include the following:
• 100 percent modular design and tool-free maintenance without opening the chassis. This maximizes maintenance efficiency.
• Proactive Failure Analysis Engine (PFAE), which proactively generates alerts about potential faults.
• Hot swap of core components such as CPUs and memory modules. The components can be replaced without shutting down the server, maximizing server uptime.
• Multilayer, fault-tolerant architecture with fault-tolerant chips, firmware, and OS. The fully redundant architecture eliminates single points of failure.
Huawei believes that previous RAS features mainly solve the challenges of system downtime caused by
Figure 3: Huawei KunLun flat view (starting from the left: 9008, 9016, and 9032 front and rear views)
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Industry Insight
highly vulnerable parts such as hard drives, I/O, power supply, and heat dissipation components. However, according to Huawei’s O&M statistics, failure of core computing components, such as DIMMs, lead to a system crash ratio of up to 30 percent. Additionally, such faults are hard to locate precisely and consequently result in low on-site O&M efficiency, which compounds the losses incurred by unexpected system crashes. RAS 2.0 focuses on such situations and especially tackles the reliability issues related to core components such as the Node Controller (NC), CPU, and DIMMs.
RAS 2.0 features include the following:• NC interconnect chip-related features: This chip
enables link-level fault tolerance and error recovery, full link redundancy, and online support for NI cable replacement.
• CPU-related features: First, RAS 2.0 provides complete cache protection and error detection and recovery mechanisms for all core/non-core errors; the mechanisms can detect and recover more than 95 percent of transient errors and soft errors. Regarding persistent failures, RAS 2.0 provides an isolation mechanism to isolate the faults before recovering them. Second, an Enterprise Manager Configuration Assistant (EMCA) recovery mechanism combined with the OS improves the ability to recover uncorrectable errors by more than a factor of two. In addition, RAS 2.0 supports scale-up capabilities that grow with the service.
Feature Application DescriptionKernel data mirroring Cost-effective memory mirroring mode helps reduce system crashes at the physical partition level
Management modules in 1+1 redundancy If a fault occurs on the system management module, a failover is triggered online in real time,improving management function availability
Clock boards in 1+1 redundancy If a fault occurs on the clock board, a failover is triggered in real time online, reducing service faults causedby clock signal failures
CPU PFA and CPU board online replacementMemory PFA and memory module onlinereplacement
Huawei provides online replacement of CPUs and memory modules independently to recover system-processing performance, which is unique in the industry
NC dual-plane architecture, NC dynamic routing The two planes work independently and support link-level and protocol-level fault tolerance
Flexible physical partitioning on a four-socket basis CPU, memory, I/O, NC, and other key hardware resources can be physically isolated to reduce inter-partitionfault coupling
Logical partitioning Support logical partitioning at physical core level, and logical isolation between partitions, to avoid failure diffusion
Table 2: Key RAS features of the Huawei KunLun server
• Memory-related features: RAS 2.0 provides memory failure detection and recovery mechanisms covering the hardware, BIOS, BMC management software, and OS. RAS 2.0 also offers memory-level error correction capabilities to minimize system crashes caused by memory failures. Further, memory can be added while the servers are in operation.
• Open Ecosystem Supports KunLunHuawei partners with leading global companies to foster an open, collaborative, and comprehensive industry chain. With this third-party support, the company offers end-to-end solutions that improve mission-critical business economics and increase enterprises’ ROI in IT systems. This ecosystem offers:
• Complete and mature industrial chain: The servers are compatible with mainstream databases (such as Oracle DB, IBM DB2, SQL Server, and SAP HANA), middleware, and OSs (such as Red Hat Linux, SUSE Linux, and Windows Server). Huawei collaborates with partners to promote the development of the industry chain to better meet core enterprise requirements.
• Comprehensive solution capability: Huawei has a professional solution team that provides one-stop services ranging from consulting and planning to after-sales O&M. The company’s extensive experience with migrating UNIX servers helps enterprises accelerate their transformation to x86 mission-critical computing.
• Better economics for business-critical computing:
Huawei partners with leading global companies to foster an open, collaborative, and comprehensive industry chain. With this third-party support, the company offers end-to-end solutions that improve critical business economics and increases the ROI for enterprise IT systems. >>
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Industry Insight
Compared with closed-architecture UNIX servers, KunLun can reduce TCO by more than 30 percent, helping customers improve overall IT ROI.
• KunLun Aligns with Typical Application ScenariosHuawei’s KunLun uses its high performance and advanced RAS features to provide powerful support for workloads such as databases, in-memory computing, High-Performance Computing (HPC), and large-scale virtualization:
• Core databases and related applications: Core databases are the most complex and valuable part of an enterprise’s IT system, and organizations are demanding the most stringent performance and reliability for these databases. The core database is the engine driving OLTP and OLAP and is the lifeline of an enterprise. For databases, scale-up servers are better options than scale-out servers because the scale-up machines meet service performance requirements more efficiently. More importantly, they require simpler O&M.
Huawei KunLun Mission Critical Server provides a high-performance scale-up solution for large database applications. With KunLun carrying OLTP performance of over 10 million tpmC, the server meets the computing performance needs of large-scale service loads. KunLun supports multiple mainstream databases, and can provide multi-database consolidation solutions by using physical partitioning technology. These solutions enable enterprises to build a more open system to better control TCO.
• In-memory computing: Over the past 10 years, the total amount of data has increased tenfold every five years. Enterprises often need large-scale IT systems to analyze data in real time to ensure that information about products, customers, and partners is applied to business processes. OLAP applications and real-time analysis capabilities are common requirements these days.
KunLun uses the NC high-speed interconnect chip to support up to 32 CPUs and 32 TB of memory.
With these resources, the system can handle some hyperscale workloads to provide real-time, in-memory computing solutions. At the same time, building on the Huawei and SAP/Oracle collaboration, Huawei has optimized a KunLun-based in-memory computing platform for typical applications in financial, manufacturing, and public security to enable linear growth of memory capacity and computing performance. This linear expansion capability enables enterprises to configure the servers according to the needs and trends of service growth, and scale up the processors and memory for optimal usage efficiency and ROI.
• HPC fat node: For applications such as Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE), gene sequencing, and scientific simulation, each HPC node needs to provide high performance and a large memory. Such nodes are called fat nodes. KunLun servers can work as HPC fat nodes to deliver high performance that cannot be provided by traditional x86 servers. At the same time, KunLun offers higher cost-effectiveness than RISC/EPIC servers.
• Virtualization consolidation: Cloud computing and virtualization help enterprises reduce hardware investment costs and operating expenses, while improving responsiveness in business support. KunLun can provide a virtualization platform based on VMware or Huawei’s FusionSphere. Users can also abstract KunLun’s physical resources into logical resources through Huawei’s multi-partitioning technology, and turn one server into several, even hundreds of isolated virtual servers. This approach puts hardware such as CPUs, memory, disks, and I/O into dynamically manageable ‘resource pools’ that increase resource utilization, simplify system management, and enable server consolidation to make IT more resilient to business changes.
KunLun allows a single server to provision multiple virtual machines, enabling users to migrate more heavy-duty services to a cloud platform. Using this cloud architecture saves machine room
Huawei’s KunLun uses its high performance and advanced RAS features to provide powerful support for workloads such as databases, in-memory computing, High-Performance Computing, and large-scale virtualization. >>
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Industry Insight
space and reduces investment in the cloud platform equipment.
KunLun Offers More Choices for Mission-Critical ApplicationsHuawei’s KunLun Mission Critical Server brings together Huawei’s most cutting-edge technologies and expertise developed in the server field over many years. Since the system’s launch in Germany in March 2016, it has been extensively tested and deployed in the financial, government, and telecommunications sectors.
In a bank case, KunLun is used as a computing platform for business-critical applications to replace a UNIX platform. As part of the banking business system, the KunLun 9032 uses physical partitioning to host database OLTP and middleware logic processing applications. This deployment method continues the method used with the UNIX servers and reduces the workload of software porting or rebuilding. KunLun has handled tens of thousands of transactions per second during peak hours, delivering more than twice the performance of the original platform. The TCO, including hardware purchase, O&M, and software licenses, is slashed by about 50 percent. At the same time, the system achieves six-nines system-level availability. In addition to the KunLun server, the bank’s solution includes Huawei’s OceanStor 18000 V3 high-end storage system. The storage system provides backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) using a two-site/three-center active-active approach through Huawei’s HyperMetro remote mirroring technology for mission-critical workloads, meeting the bank’s requirements for system performance, stability, and flexibility.
Challenges and Opportunities Facing KunLunIDC has noted that, as the use of cloud computing, Big Data, mobile and social networks, and other technologies expands, requirements for mission-critical computing systems become increasingly stringent, demanding higher performance and more
innovation and openness. Backed by strong R&D investment, Huawei’s KunLun Mission Critical Server targets the needs of this market.
At the same time, IDC notes that Huawei will face some challenges in popularizing the KunLun server. Due to the importance of an enterprise’s core services, enterprise customers often adopt mature systems that have been proven over time. For Huawei, developing well-structured, well-functioning products is only one step in a long journey. The products need to be constantly updated and improved in practical application environments to meet the needs of complex IT services. In particular, KunLun needs to be further honed, especially in customer best practices and user experience in different industries. Huawei recently announced the establishment of its Industry Consulting Solutions Department to better understand the needs of different industries and better serve its customers.
Meeting the Need for Mission-Critical ComputingThe enterprise IT environment is experiencing cloud transformation, and IT architectures are developing towards an open, converged, and integrated state. At the same time, enterprises in various sectors anticipate expansion of business-centric critical systems.
Through in-depth research into users’ needs in key enterprise computing, IDC believes that user demand has undergone a disruptive change through the extensive application of ‘third platform’ technology and digital transformation. The key computing platform needs to be innovated and balanced in performance, RAS features, and openness to meet user demand. Huawei’s KunLun Mission Critical Servers provide a reliable, high-performance computing platform based on an x86 scale-up architecture, which can help customers get on track to cloud computing and Big Data. More generally, KunLun promises to match enterprises’ urgent needs for highly available, high-performing, and cost-effective mission-critical computing platforms.▲
Based on an x86 scale-up architecture, Huawei KunLun provides computing resources up to 32 CPUs on a single server — which places more choices in the hands of industry customers for deploying mission-critical systems. >>
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Industry Insight
Roy Shek
Huawei is a leader in the x86 Mission-Critical Computing market and SUSE is a leader in the Open Source software domain. Together, the two companies are well positioned to combine their technical expertise and professional prowess to present innovative solutions to customers.
Huawei and SUSE Join Forces to Spearhead x86 Mission Critical Server Technologies
A t Huawei Connect 2017, Huawei and SUSE showcased the achievements they’ve made in the x86 mission-critical server domain since they began working together in 2012.
SUSE is well known for open-source, mission-critical solutions that simplify complex platforms to be faster to deploy and easier to use. For Huawei, we support the unique features of Huawei hardware within the kernel of the SUSE operating system. An ideal example of our collaboration with Huawei is support for the Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS) 2.0 features of the KunLun servers to optimize the hot-swap technology for CPUs and memory.
Huawei is a most-important global technology partner to SUSE, as the KunLun advanced RAS features have helped SUSE optimize our own solutions. Specifically, the SUSE ‘zero downtime’ technology complements Huawei’s always-on service technology: When a KunLun server invokes its hot-swap functionality when encountering a CPU or memory fault, similarly, SUSE Enterprise Server 12 dynamically fixes kernel patches with no interruption to customer services. The joint Huawei and SUSE solution far surpasses both the baseline x86 and old UNIX architectures.
In March 2017, Huawei and SUSE released the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP2 for RAS 2.0. The firmware and driver integration with the kernel module at the memory and CPU manager now allows KunLun RAS 2.0 standard OS customers to replace memory modules and CPUs online — and future SUSE hot-patch technology will fix patches without users having to shut down their systems.
The collaboration between Huawei and SUSE focuses on mission-critical servers. From an application perspective, it will still be mainly about SAP-related applications. Huawei accounts for a large market share in the SAP application domain, both in the Chinese and European markets; therefore, in my opinion, SUSE and Huawei can advance collaboration in the SAP application space.
Huawei is a leader in the x86 mission critical server market and SUSE is a leader in the Open Source software domain. Together, the two companies are better positioned to combine their technical expertise and professional prowess to present better innovative solutions to customers. Collaborating in the R&D domain has brought the KunLun server and the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server into perfect synergy. Moreover, Huawei and SUSE continue to work closely in the product promotion front. In addition to attending the HUAWEI CONNECT conference and exhibition in Shanghai in 2016 and 2017, SUSE hosts many product release ceremonies. By the end of 2017, Huawei and SUSE will have announced the release of a new standard OS built to support the Huawei KunLun RAS 2.0. Together Huawei and SUSE have much more to offer for the success and amazement our customers.▲
By Roy Shek, Asia-Pacific Business Development Director, SUSE LINUX GmbH
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Partner Testimony
Liu Wei
“Nantian views Huawei as a valuable partner, and we look forward to advancing our collaboration with Huawei to synergize each other’s own software and hardware into integrated solutions. I believe that our joint solutions will take core banking systems in China to the next level.”
Huawei and Nantian Team Up to Build Core Banking Service Solutions
N antian Electronics Information Company is one of China’s leading application developers in the financial services industry. With years of experience, Nantian brings deep insight in meeting customer requirements
when building banking applications. During Huawei Connect 2017, Huawei and Nantian announced a collaboration that features the release of a new core banking services solution that uses the power of the KunLun Mission Critical Server. The industry response in the months following the public debut points to a popular and successful product lifecycle.
In early 2016, Nantian began to work with Huawei and the KunLun Mission Critical Server. Together, we established the Co-Innovation OpenLab in Huawei’s Hangzhou Research Center. In this project, Nantian and Huawei successfully migrated a Nantian core banking service system written for the UNIX operating system to Huawei’s open-source KunLun architecture. This in-depth synergy has succeeded in building a holistic solution that empowers financial services customers with more ease and confidence for their digital transformations.
Throughout the collaboration process, Nantian has made intensive optimizations to align with the underlying framework of Huawei hardware products more closely. The result is the production of a deeply integrated solution that brings the features and benefits of the KunLun Mission Critical Server into full play. We believe the solution enables a lineup of superb service offerings for customers across the finance industry.
Among the unique features included in the Huawei KunLun Mission Critical Server is the Proactive Failure Analysis Engine (PFAE) that, when combined with Nantian’s software expertise, will generate fault alarms based on the automatic screening for failed nodes and the relocation of active workloads onto normally functioning nodes. Most importantly, throughout the fault recovery process, the core banking system remains up and running with no disturbance perceived by the bank’s customers. This is an ideal example of the reliability and stability of a mission-critical server.
Huawei has a wealth of technologies in regards to server stability and reliability. Nantian looks to constantly advance its partnership with Huawei, and we hope to combine our software and hardware strength into future comprehensive solutions that will serve greater numbers of customers.▲
By Liu Wei, General Manager, Shanghai Development Center, Nantian Electronics Information Co., Ltd.
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Partner Testimony
KunLun SAP HANA Appliance: Scale-Up FirstBy Dr. Zheng Wei, Huawei IT Technology Planning Dept.
P rofessor Hasso Plattner, one of the founders of SAP in 1972, is a technology zealot. In 1998, he personally funded the establishment of the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) with a commitment to promote academic research in software system engineering and industrial applications. For nearly two decades, HPI’s biggest achievement has been the development and
successful application of SAP HANA, a High-performance Analytic Appliance that uses in-memory database technology to enable the processing of massive amounts of real-time data in a short time.
In 2009, Dr. Plattner, representing HPI, published paper titled A Common Database Approach for OLTP and OLAP Using an In-Memory Column Database at the SIGMOD conference in Providence, Rhode Island. The core premise of the paper was the use of in-memory databases and columnar storage as the enablers of hybrid Online Transaction Processing and Online Analytical Processing (OLTP/OLAP) applications which, in turn, are the fundamental building blocks behind the development of the SAP HANA platform. Later, Dr. Plattner led the effort by HPI and SAP to
successfully launch the SAP HANA in-memory database products, to which the market quickly and enthusiastically responded. As of 2017, the full spectrum of SAP applications has been updated to support the SAP HANA.
What are the Unique Advantages of SAP HANA?These are the main technical features of SAP HANA:
• Keeps data as close as possible to computing resources, with database data residing entirely in dynamic memory. This avoids
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After an enterprise replaced a legacy database with the Huawei SAP HANA appliance, measurements of real-life data showed that average server response times were slashed from over 800 milliseconds to below 370 milliseconds. Customer response times were also reduced by nearly 100x for services such as remittance notifications via SMS queries. There are many such real-world cases that demonstrate an overall high level of customer satisfaction.
Objectively, memory-based databases have an absolute advantage over storage-based databases that run on the internal hard drives or external storage arrays. This is because they are not, technologically, the same generation of products. The current 64-byte local memory access latency for Intel® processors (Xeon E7 v4) is 110 nanoseconds, while the latency of reading 4 KB data from local SAS SSD disks is about 130 microseconds. As is clearly seen
Zheng Wei
Huawei’s experience makes the company the best practitioner of SAP system infrastructure solutions and the best choice for an enterprise’s digital transformation partner.
frequent data transfers from hard disk drives or other storage devices to and from memory. Except for persistence operations, the CPU avoids interactions with the storage system whenever possible.
• Uses column-based storage to improve the performance of OLAP services, which mainly involve ad-hoc queries, real-time reports, as well as improvements in compression efficiency.
• In the delta area of memory, data is stored in a mixed format of rows and columns to ensure OLTP performance.
So, how does SAP HANA keep data as close as possible to computing resources to support higher data computing performance, while at the same time adhering to the server ‘Scale-up First’ rule?
Technically speaking, the Von Neumann architecture of a computer has resulted in hierarchical storage, which is also called the ‘memory hierarchy.’ It has been widely accepted that in-memory data processing delivers much better performance than data processing based on any kind of external storage device. However, the notion that in-memory computing supports OLAP/OLTP hybrid applications without compromising performance has long been challenged. Dr. Plattner explained that, after analyzing the real-world application scenarios of SAP customers, he found that the data read/write behaviors of OLTP and OLAP workloads are not drastically different — OLTP applications are data read-dominant, while OLAP applications have similarly frequent data writes. Based on this statistical pattern, Dr. Plattner believes that in-memory database products are more than suitable for high-performance OLTP/OLAP hybrid applications.
Since the birth of SAP HANA, its market performance has been no less than brilliant due to its outstanding performance, especially in OLAP scenarios. SAP HANA has been highly praised by customers and has been rapidly gaining market share. Here is an example:
Figure 1: Characteristics of OLTP and OLAP workloads as identified by SAP
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from the low latency measurements indicated above, in-memory access delivers on the promise of high performance.
HANA is the first successful in-memory database product and benefits from advances in technologies such as integrated semiconductor circuits. For example, DRAM density, DIMM capacity, and the number of CPU memory channels have all increased. The Intel® Brickland platform has achieved a memory capacity of over 1 TB on a single Broadwell CPU. The SAP HANA appliance is certified to operate up to 1 TB memory on a single Broadwell E7-8890 CPU.
Huawei KunLun: A Natural Fit with SAP HANA Software FeaturesHuawei KunLun has been certified for integration with a full range of SAP HANA appliance solutions. The KunLun SAP HANA appliance is based on the KunLun Mission Critical Server, which is engineered for business-critical workloads such as enterprise databases, decision support, and business processing. Supporting 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, or 32 Intel® processors with an ultra-large memory of up to 32 TB, the KunLun server is capable of efficiently processing massive amounts of data in large-scale in-memory computing systems. In fact, a single KunLun server will support a larger in-memory database than any existing 8-socket x86 server and, in so doing, greatly improve enterprise IT resource utilization and reduce management expenditures.
At present, the improvements in CPU performance have shifted from a sole reliance on faster clock frequencies to the use of multi-core parallel technologies. For example, each Intel® Broadwell processor supports up to 24 cores and 48 threads, and Huawei’s KunLun server provides a physical platform capable of supporting up to 768 cores and 1,536 threads. In accordance with the primary goal of SAP HANA appliances to keep data as close as possible to the CPU, KunLun servers are perfectly suited to supporting the SAP HANA software features for meeting customer demand for the ultimate in database performance.
For customers in tent on select ing an in-memory appliance solution, SAP’s proposition is that the appliance be able to deliver best-in-class performance to customers. Based on this principle, SAP’s advice to customers is ‘scale-up first’ — which translates to a preference to meet memory capacity requirements in single-node configurations instead of cluster configurations. The implication of this principle is that cluster configurations cannot provide the best performance. In practical terms, if the memory required by a customer exceeds the capabilities of a single server (for example, a requirement for 100 TB cannot be met by any single x86 server), the customer system will have to be installed as a cluster. This is also when the experts in enterprise databases come into play with techniques such as dividing database tables into cluster nodes,
In fact, a single KunLun server will support a larger in-memory database than any existing 8-socket x86 server and, in so doing, greatly improve enterprise IT resource utilization and reduce management expenditures. >>
Figure 2: HANA single-node, big Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) server vs. scale-out data access
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or distributing data through the use of built-in algorithms.
For SAP HANA, differences in access modes lead to drastically different performance results between a single, high-performance node and a cluster of nodes that involve cross-node (cross-OS) I/O or Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) operations. Though not currently available, the roadmap is prepared for SAP HANA to support InfiniBand or RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE). As detailed above, the latency when reading 64 bytes of data from the local memory of an Intel® E7 v4 processor is 110 nanoseconds. Using an InfiniBand interface supporting RDMA, the typical latency for reading 64 bytes from the memory of another node is 1.5 microseconds at a 40 Gbit/s InfiniBand Quadruple Data Rate (QDR). There is a 15x difference between the two modes. If a 10 GE interface is used (10 Gbit/s line rate and 1 Gbit/s effective bandwidth), there is at least a 60x difference between the two modes.
There is an obvious necessity to avoid such cross-node data reads whenever possible, which requires databases or tables to be precisely divided. Though, in practical terms, making cross-node data reads is inevitable as the cross-node data accessed by enterprise applications is often correlated by nature. This makes the huge difference in the performance of single nodes versus clusters of nodes commonplace.
At present, the Huawei SAP HANA solution based on the KunLun Mission Critical Server supports up to 32 sockets with 32 TB of memory capacity on a single node. The 16 TB memory model is certified, the 20 TB model is planned for certification, and any specification above 20 TB will be certified on a case-by-case basis. KunLun single-node solutions, that experience shows meet the requirements for the majority of customers, support capacity expansion from 4 sockets to 32 sockets as may be needed to grow the customer’s business based on business need. KunLun provides a unique logical partitioning
function that further divides resources. With the KunLun logical partitioning function, multiple SAP applications and HANA databases can be consolidated onto KunLun, meanwhile ensuring high performance and fault isolation. This feature is in the process of planning. For customers, the memory capacity and computing capability of the deployed Huawei SAP HANA appliance can be gradually expanded based on the actual service development requirements. In addition, the excellent performance of the single-node solution is always maintained. KunLun’s 32 TB memory capacity on a single node can meet most customers’ requirements. For hyper-scale applications requiring more than 32 TB of memory, Huawei can provide cluster solutions today and is well on track to providing next-generation KunLun-SAP HANA appliances capable of larger scales and higher performance.
Huawei: Best SAP Practitioner and Best Choice for Enterprise Digital TransformationUsed and trusted by many customers all over the world, Huawei’s KunLun SAP HANA solutions are serving more than 1,000 customers in over 40 countries and regions worldwide, including China, Europe, the Middle East, the Americas, and Africa. Current customers include China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), Spanish Petroleum Company (CEPSA), Hillarys Blinds in the U.K., Fonterra in New Zealand, and BYD Auto in China. CEPSA has praised KunLun for its outstanding performance and rock-solid reliability, and is planning to expand the use of the Huawei SAP HANA appliance to run its ERP core production system from a 13 TB Phase 1 deployment to 30 TB in Phase 2.
As the experience of delivering tangible benefits to enterprises with the SAP HANA system deepens, Huawei has risen to become the world’s best practitioner of SAP system infrastructure solutions and the best partner for enterprises undergoing their digital transformation.▲
Used and trusted by many customers all over the world, Huawei’s KunLun SAP HANA solutions are serving more than 1,000 customers in over 40 countries and regions worldwide, including China, Europe, the Middle East, the Americas, and Africa. >>
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Huawei-Hundsun SecuritiesCore Transaction Solution Spurs Innovations with Assured Reliability and Performance
A securities brokerage-service system is an integral part of the core transaction system for securities business centers to secure stock exchange transactions. Such systems are crucial for securities companies to gain the trust of customers, and generally also include the capability to buy and sell securities based upon customer requirements.
By Du Shaohua, Huawei’s Server Solution Architect
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Securities brokerage service systems have continually evolved from manual processing, to single business offices to regional centralization, and now into more broadly centralized solutions. This progression has scaled services to unprecedented larger sizes. A common goal for the IT departments of securities companies is to improve transaction system efficiency and performance.
Hundsun Technologies Inc. is a leading Chinese supplier of financial software and network services. Hundsun’s brokerage service operations platform is noted for its industry-leading technical and service architectures, product performance, stability, flexibility, and scalability. Companies such as CITIC Securities, China’s largest full-service investment bank, have used the Hundsun platform. The field-proven and mature Hundsun platform not only meets customers’ service segmentation and division demands, but also supports scale-out capacities greater than 10 million customers.
Hundsun has introduced its next-generation centralized transaction system, UF 2.0. To date, many of China’s top securities companies utilize UF 2.0, including CITIC Securities, Huatai Securities, GF Securities, Changjiang Securities, Founder Securities, Industrial Securities, and Southwest Securities. As UF 2.0 grows in popularity, more customers have become interested in leveraging the performance potential of UF 2.0 in system deployment and Operations and Maintenance (O&M). In the face of huge, complicated middleware deployments, Hundsun is urgently looking for simple, efficient management approaches that incorporate both software and hardware investments to accommodate refined customer requirements in today’s market.
To this end, Hundsun has collaborated with Huawei to perform a
series of tests on the UF 2.0 system running on Huawei’s hardware environment in Huawei’s Hangzhou Lab. The collected statistics from these tests are saved for future reference to be used alongside real-world project implementations.
KunLun + Dorado: Combining High Reliability and High PerformanceTo meet the performance and stability criteria expected for brokerage operations platforms, the Huawei solution features both high-level performance and high reliability. This solution implements two of Huawei’s foremost products: KunLun Mission Critical Server and OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage.
Huawei’s KunLun Mission Critical servers use a Cache Coherent Non-Uniform Memory Access (CC-NUMA) system built on Intel® Xeon® E7 4800/8800 processors and Huawei-developed Hi1503 chips. The CC-NUMA system supports the seamless scaling of eight processors at a time for a server. Currently, KunLun server models include KunLun 9008, 9016, and 9032, which have 8, 16, and 32 processors, respectively.
• KunLun Servers Provide Optimal Reliability• Changes fault management from reactive to proactive protection.• Provides a fully-redundant architecture that is implemented using
on-chip, firmware, and Operating System (OS)-level fault tolerance that prevents system failures from impacting service continuity.
• Supports in-service (live) maintenance of core components, such as CPUs and Dual In-Line Memory Modules (DIMMs). While traditional architectures support live maintenance for 55 percent of system breakdowns caused by component failures, the KunLun RAS
Du Shaohua
Huawei and Hundsun have jointly unveiled a securities core transaction system built upon x86 servers and all-flash storage. With 24/7 reliability and low latency, this field-proven solution empowers customers in the securities industry to achieve lower TCO and deliver financial service innovations faster than ever before possible.
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2.0 technology improves this figure to over 90 percent due to a zero-breakdown maintenance design.
• Supports physical partitioning (K-Par) technology that prevents faults from spreading across partitions.
• OceanStor Dorado V3 Storage Ensures Optimal PerformanceHuawei’s OceanStor Dorado V3 storage system is a next-generation, all-flash storage product that accommodates interoperation with traditional storage products and the flexibility to accommodate future storage technology developments. The Dorado V3 platform meets the requirements for large and midsize enterprises with large-capacity storage, high-speed access, high availability, high utilization, energy savings, and ease-of-use.
• High performance and low latency: OceanStor Dorado V3 improves performance by a factor of ten by providing 4 million Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) with a super-fast latency of 500 μs.
• Huawei-developed SSD: Huawei is the first and only vendor to incorporate the Flash Translation Layer (FTL) algorithm into its in-house Solid-State Drive (SSD) control chip to maximize the lifespan of the product. The Huawei SSDs deliver a 40 μs latency, which ranks first in the industry.
• Dedicated flash memory optimization controller: The controller utilizes 56 Gbit/s InfiniBand host ports at the front end, a next-generation PCIe 3.0 internal bus, and 12 Gbit/s SAS 3.0 high-speed disk ports on the back end for high-speed end-to-end channels between blade servers. The storage system uses Huawei’s unique dual-uplink SAS configuration that doubles the transmission speed relative to other similar products. The intelligent partitioning technology is applied to CPUs to improve concurrent service processing performance. In addition, the cache algorithm is optimized to improve data queries and interpolation speeds.
• FlashLink improves storage performance: Huawei’s unique FlashLink technology is built on Huawei-developed SSDs and controllers. FlashLink reduces the volumes of garbage collection through
global hot and cold data partitions. By intelligently adjusting I/O priorities, FlashLink preferentially responds to host data read/write I/O requests over secondary I/O requests, which results in greatly reduced latencies. Additionally, FlashLink uses large sequential data block write technology to improve overall storage performance. This technology combines multiple small random data blocks into one large sequential data block before writing them to the SSDs.
• Linear expansion: IOPS increase linearly with the number of engines to predictively satisfy future service needs.
• Solution Certification EnvironmentTwo Dorado V3 storage devices form an active-active disk array system. A two-node Oracle RAC cluster is deployed on this system. The two cluster compute nodes of the Oracle RAC cluster are separately deployed on two KunLun 9016 servers. The following figure shows the networking scheme.
• The Oracle RAC cluster consists of two KunLun servers. A private network is set up inside the cluster through 10 GE switches.
• The Oracle RAC cluster connects to each Dorado V3 storage device through two 8 Gbit/s Fibre Channel (FC) switches.
• Dorado V3 storage devices, KunLun servers, RAC cluster server nodes, Oracle test clients, and FC switches are managed over a GE network.
Lower TCO and Faster Innovation for Securities CustomersTogether, Huawei and Hundsun have jointly developed a securities core transaction system solution that builds on x86 servers and all-flash storage. With 24/7 reliability and low latency, this field-proven solution empowers customers in the securities industry to achieve lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and deliver financial service innovations faster than ever before possible.
Today, it is clear that trillion-level transaction volumes will become commonplace in the securities industry. Service interruptions must be minimized
The Dorado V3 platform meets the requirements for large and midsize enterprises with large-capacity storage, high-speed access, high availability, high utilization, energy savings, and ease-of-use. >>
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through the use of proactive prevention measures that ensure high levels of business service continuity. Further, the policies for media management have also become stricter. Securities traders expect zero faults, and it is the job of the IT service departments to prevent any and all service interruptions. The joint, comprehensive securities transaction solution developed by Huawei and Hundsun prevents system faults from affecting service continuity with the following features:
• Implementation of active-active KunLun servers, Dorado dual-flash storage arrays, and Oracle RAC databases. The resulting benefits include fail-safe storage without the need for gateways; failover recovery in seconds; unbreakable business continuity; and a low risk for single points of failure.
• KunLun servers support real-time monitoring and analysis of the operating status of application processes and components, and provide preventative warnings when necessary. Potential faults are proactively identified and promptly isolated. All of these features operate with an ultra-high reliability of 99.9996 percent. The theoretical annual downtime is less than 5 minutes.
• An intelligent detection technology achieves continuously reliable transactions by automatically isolating high-latency disk arrays. Additionally, end-to-end silent data protection ensures data consistency.
• Enterprise-grade storage, multi-control-center design, and FlashLink (at 99.999 percent reliability)
create a solid foundation for system stability.• Global disk protection delivers the industry’s
highest levels of reliability.Securities companies continuously pursue innovation
in transaction system technologies, especially in the areas of improved stability, higher performance, and lower latencies. To handle future growth, the collaborative solution between Huawei and Hundsun is designed with the following goals to meet the expected requirements for future securities companies’ products:
• Support for 150,000 transactions per second in a stable and continuous manner that will easily scale to handling trillions of transactions.
• Provide latencies of less than 500 µs, which is 1 millisecond to 1.6 milliseconds lower than traditional systems. Lower latencies will increase the transaction volumes by 12 percent and smooth the traffic spikes caused by the large transaction bursts that occur as the securities trading markets open and close.
• Provide ultimate query proficiency to improve overnight settlement capabilities by 50 percent, and expand the effectiveness of the operations query platform by 20 times.
Hundsun’s core transaction platform is combined with Huawei’s highly reliable KunLun servers and high-performance Dorado V3 storage platform to build a next-generation open ecosystem that will help securities customers lower their TCO and accelerate technology innovation throughout the industry.▲
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Today, it is clear that trillion-level transaction volumes will become commonplace in the securities industry. Service interruptions must be minimized through the use of proactive prevention measures that ensure high levels of business service continuity. >>
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Flexible Service Deployment with KunLun Mission-Critical ServersBy Zhu Handong, Marketing Manager for Huawei KunLun Servers
E nterprises operate a rich variety of IT applications, with each having a different requirement for server hardware capabilities. Vertical industry sectors such as finance, government, energy, and telecommunications, among others, have many mission-critical applications. To enable these applications, systems must be stable and reliable, highly elastic for easy expansion, and responsive
to dynamic resource allocations in a timely manner.
Huawei’s flagship KunLun servers are ideal for mission-critical applications such as large enterprise core databases, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. KunLun servers provide up to 32 Intel® Xeon E7 processors, 32 TB of Double-Data-Rate Fourth Generation (DDR4) memory, and powerful I/O expansion. The KunLun platform is built to work as a large-scale enterprise service consolidation platform for two main purposes: 1) dynamic resource allocation to improve hardware resource utilization, simplified management, and reduced operating costs and 2) isolation of discrete services to ensure reliability.
KunLun servers provide a variety of technologies and solutions, such as Physical Partitioning (K-Par) and Logical Partitioning (L-Par), as well as virtualization software and Oracle multitenant solutions to meet different service consolidation requirements. In specific scenarios, multiple technologies and solutions will be used together to further improve reliability and performance, and
reduce costs. This article describes the K-Par, L-Par, and multitenant solutions in detail.
KunLun K-Par for Optimal Consolidation of Mission-Critical Applications• What is KunLun K-Par?The K-Par feature of KunLun servers allows a server to be divided into electrically isolated partitions to provide higher levels of reliability than that can be achieved using virtualized software partitions.
With K-Par, users can allocate server resources based on real service requirements to achieve optimal performance and service reliability. K-Par also allows for high flexibility to further protect customer investments.
KunLun K-Par has the following features:• Easy switching: Users can change the system-working mode
without changing hardware or upgrading software by mouse
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Zhu Handong
Huawei KunLun Mission-Critical Servers are one of the best choices for building a large-scale enterprise business-consolidation platform. Due to differentiated features such as dynamic resource allocation by business, isolation by business workload, and flexible partitioning, the KunLun servers improve hardware resource utilization, simplify management, and reduce Operating Expenses.
selection on the Central Management Console (CMC) web interface.• Unified management: Users can manage the server configurations
through the CMC interface, no matter whether in single system mode or with multiple physical partitions.
• Equal allocation of service resources: KunLun servers support physical partitions with hardware resources (CPUs, memory, and storage resources) evenly distributed.
• High reliability: The physical partitions are electrically isolated. Therefore, faults occurring in one partition will not affect any other partition. Physical partitions offer fivefold higher reliability when compared with virtual partitions.
Table 1 lists the specifications of equal physical partitions (which
means each physical partition has the same resources such as CPUs). Huawei has planned the uneven physical partitioning feature for KunLun with two main enhancements. One enhancement is to add additional 12S and 20S specifications, while the other is to allow different partitions in the same cabinet to have different numbers of CPUs. Take KunLun 9016 as an example. An uneven physical partition will support one 8S physical partition and two 4S physical partitions.
• K-Par Application ScenariosWith its high reliability and performance, the KunLun K-Par feature is ideal for mission-critical application consolidation, and especially for database consolidation.
Two KunLun servers are recommended for a typical Oracle
Figure 1: Computing chassis K-Par front view (left) and rear view (right)
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scenario, where each KunLun machine is divided into two or more physical partitions and the physical partitions of the two servers form a Real Application Cluster (RAC).
The K-Par feature can be combined with virtualization technology to improve resource utilization and slash costs. For example, enterprise ERP databases demand high performance and the applications servers can run properly with few computing resources. In this case, a KunLun 9016 with two physical partitions can be used. The Oracle database will be deployed in one physical partition and the application servers deployed on Virtual Machines (VMs) in another partition. KunLun servers support virtualization packages such as VMware vSphere, Huawei FusionSphere, Hyper-V, and KVM. The physical partition using the virtualization software supports a maximum of eight processors.
KunLun L-Par for Efficient Service Consolidation• What is KunLun L-Par?KunLun L-Par is designed to allow the hardware resources of each partition to be isolated, including CPUs, memory, and I/O devices. Compared with K-Par, L-Par offers greater flexibility and finer granularity. Currently, KunLun L-Par supports processors of 1 to 80 cores and memory of 1 GB to 1 TB (with a step of 64 MB). In the near future, the next KunLun L-Par version will support up to 96 cores and 4 TB memory.
L-Par uses Hypervisor firmware to isolate hardware resources. The Hypervisor firmware is a Huawei-developed virtualization platform that runs between the physical hardware and the OSs in logical partitions. The Hypervisor platform shields the physical hardware differences from the upper-layer applications and services, and provides the required hardware resources for each logical partition based on the logical partition configuration.
The logical partitions are isolated to prevent software errors and most hardware errors of one partition from
affecting any other partition. Each logical partition can be powered off and maintained independently.
The Hypervisor firmware is integrated with the KunLun hardware and management software to achieve better performance and system reliability. It can also be managed with KunLun hardware in a unified manner.
• KunLun L-Par Application ScenariosThe L-Par feature can be used to consolidate mission-critical or non-mission-critical applications on UNIX servers and x86 servers; however, the logical partition specifications cannot exceed the specifications of a 4S physical partition on the KunLun server.
The L-Par feature can be deployed independently or in combination with K-Par on a KunLun server. For example, a KunLun 9008 or 9016 server can use L-Par to deploy services; a KunLun 9016 can be divided into two 8S physical partitions. Logical partitions can be deployed in the physical partition hosting SCE1-BPUA. The other physical partition can then be used to deploy services independently.
When K-Par and L-Par are deployed concurrently, physical partitions are used to consolidate services from mid-range and high-end mission-critical servers, and logical partitions are used to consolidate applications from low-end or x86 servers. In mixed deployments, only the physical partition hosting SCE1-BPUA on the KunLun 9008 or 9016 server will support logical partitions. In the near future, the next KunLun version will support L-Par on more than two physical partitions and also allow in-service dynamic expansion of L-Par to meet more flexible service consolidation needs.
Logical partitions can be used to consolidate mission-critical and non-mission-critical applications. Mission-critical applications are usually connected to external storage arrays and deployed with database services, such as ERP. Non-mission-critical applications (for example front-end applications), generally use local storage disks and are connected to the external network through Network Interface Cards (NICs).
Physical Partition TypeNumber of Physical Partitions
KunLun 9032 KunLun 9016 KunLun 900832S 1 (non-partitioned) N/A N/A16S 2 1 (non-partitioned) N/A8S 4 2 1 (non-partitioned)
4S 8 4 2 (only with 8 CPUs)1 (non-partitioned, with 4 CPUs)
Table 1: KunLun physical partition specificationsWith its high reliability and performance, the KunLun K-Par feature is ideal for mission-critical application consolidation, and especially for database consolidation. >>
26
Solution
KunLun servers support Huawei storage devices and third-party storage, such as IBM, EMC, and HDS devices. Huawei storage devices can be used as system and data disks. The system disk is used to install the guest OSs of logical partitions. The third-party storage devices are used only as data disks.
When L-Par is used to consolidate mission-critical applications, I/O devices must be configured in redundancy mode. Two Fibre Channel (FC) cards are configured and multi-pathing software is used to ensure that a FC-card or optical-link fault will not affect access to the remote storage array. Dual-port NICs and port bonding are used to implement network redundancy. A High Availability (HA) system can be used, and the HA software, such as Veritas Cluster Server (VCS), can be deployed in logical partitions of each system to ensure reliability. The Red Hat Cluster Suite (RHCS) HA software is not currently supported.
• L-Par Characteristics• High performance: 1) In computing virtualization, CPU core binding is used to prevent CPU contention, improve timeliness of task processing, and meet performance requirements. 2) In I/O virtualization, L-Par adopts efficient front-end and back-end communication technology to reduce overhead caused by frequent
switching of CPU modes and memory duplication. In addition, L-Par adopts hardware-assisted virtualization technology to provide PCI device pass-through features, reduce interrupts and memory duplication, and improve I/O performance in logical partitions. 3) The KunLun logical partition has a performance loss (tpmC) of about 10 percent and a CPU loss (Spec CPU) of about 5 percent when compared with the physical partition of the same specifications.
• High availability: 1) L-Par supports HA to reduce planned system downtime and improve logical partition availability. 2) The hardware resources of logical partitions are isolated so that hardware faults of a logical partition do not affect other logical partitions. 3) Logical partitions support I/O redundancy to improve I/O availability.
• High security: 1) L-Par supports CPU, memory, and I/O isolation to improve system stability. 2) Security hardening has been performed for Hypervisor to implement permission control, service tailoring, network port scan, access control, virus scan and prevention, and system risk scan and alerts.
• L-Par ManagementLike physical partitions, logical partitions can be managed through the CMC Web interface. Logical partitions can also be managed through a Command-Line Interface (CLI), which provides user and network management, system upgrades, and log collection.
The logical partition management includes the following:
• Creating, deleting, reconfiguring, and querying logical partitions. A step-by-step wizard is provided to help users create or reconfigure logical partitions.
• Powering on or off, gracefully shutting down, restarting, and forcibly restarting logical partitions, and inserting or ejecting DVD-ROM discs.
• Logging in to a logical partition using VNC.
Oracle Multitenant for Database ConsolidationToday, cloud computing technologies are widely
Like physical partitions, logical partitions can be managed through the CMC Web interface. Logical partitions can also be managed through a Command-Line Interface, which provides user and network management, system upgrades, and log collection. >>
Entry-level UNIX serverMission-critical or non-mission-critical
applications; workloads fewerthan 4 sockets
LPAR 1
FC HBANIC
LPAR 2LPAR 3LPAR 4……LPAR n
Figure 2: L-Par deployed on a KunLun server
Figure 3: K-Par and L-Par co-deployed on a KunLun server
Entry-level UNIX server
Mid-range and high-endUNIX servers
Mission-critical or non-mission-critical applications; workloads fewer than 4 sockets; L-Par consolidation
Mission-critical applications; workloads larger than 4 sockets; K-Par consolidation
LPAR 1LPAR 2LPAR 3LPAR 4……LPAR n
K-Par
FC HBANIC
27
Solution
used by enterprise users. Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) is an important part of the cloud computing infrastructure. DBaaS is designed to support a large number of users and services; and has high CPU, memory, performance, and reliability requirements.
KunLun servers are a good choice for a DBaaS platform in part because of its differentiated-memory hot-swap feature, which greatly reduces the time required for system maintenance to better meet Service Level Agreement (SLA) guarantees. KunLun servers, when combined with the multitenant feature of Oracle Database 12c, are powerful tools that can be used to consolidate multiple database servers into the cloud.
• Multitenant TechnologyOracle Multitenant is a new option for Oracle Database 12c Enterprise Edition that helps users reduce IT costs by simplifying consolidation, provisioning, and upgrades. It is supported by a new architecture that allows a container database to hold many pluggable databases.
Oracle Database 12c has introduced Container Database (CDB) and Pluggable Database (PDB) features. In the multitenant environment, one CDB can hold multiple PDBs. For database versions earlier than Oracle Database 12c, the instance and database are in a one-to-one or many-to-one RAC relationship. An instance can be associated with only one database, and the database can be loaded with multiple instances. The instance and database, however, cannot be in a one-to-many relationship. Oracle Database 12c enables one-to-many mapping between instance and database.
• Multitenant Advantages• High consolidation density: Multiple pluggable
databases share memory and background processes in a single container database, which allow more pluggable databases to run on a specific platform.
• Rapid provisioning and cloning: Pluggable databases can be unplugged from one container database and plugged into another. Alternatively, you
KunLun servers are a good choice for a DBaaS platform in part because of its differentiated-memory hot-swap feature, which greatly reduces the time required for system maintenance to better meet Service Level Agreement guarantees. >>
Figure 4: KunLun Oracle Database 12c solution architecture
Finance
KunLun KunLun KunLun KunLun
Government Carrier Energy (electric power)
Healthcareand education Public safety Transportation Large enterprise
Software-DefinedStorage (SDS)
OLTP Oracle RAC
Mid-range andhigh-end storageNASSSD flash
OLAP Multitenant In-memory
Storage network (FC, InfiniBand, and high-speed Ethernet)
Large-capacity DB
High-performanceDB
High-reliabilityDB
Multi-DBconsolidation
High-performancedata warehouse
Large-capacitydata warehouse
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Solution
can clone a PDB within the same container database or from one container database to another.
• Unified management of multiple databases: By consolidating existing databases as pluggable databases, administrators can manage many databases as one. For example, tasks like backup and disaster recovery are performed at the CDB level.
• Improved availability and flexibility: Plugging and unplugging PDBs shortens the time that services are interrupted when migrating hardware.
• Higher security: The Oracle Database Vault, Transparent Data Encryption, Unified Auditing, and Database Firewall features can be configured at the PDB level.
• Overall ArchitectureFigure 4 shows the overall architecture of the KunLun Oracle Database 12c database solution. KunLun servers are ideal for all database scenarios, especially for mission-critical applications that demand high performance and reliability. In addition to high data-processing efficiency, KunLun servers provide 24/7 service continuity and stability.
KunLun servers are ideal for Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) core database and intelligent analysis services, such as Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), data warehouse, and data mining. By leveraging the multitenant and in-memory features of Oracle Database 12c, KunLun servers can increase resource utilization, improve performance, and maximize Return on Investment (ROI).
• Application ExampleTable 2 lists the original database information as deployed in three Oracle 11g RACs, including HR, finance, sales, production, delivery, service, and procurement information. The data is stored in conventional RAID arrays, and the storage space for different applications is physically isolated. Although this traditional deployment solution meets application requirements for servers and storage, it has drawbacks, such as low resource utilization and high management overhead.
The process of consolidating multiple Oracle 11g databases to the Oracle Database 12c cloud is as follows:
• Upgrade the original Oracle Database 11g software and database to Oracle Database 12c.
• Convert the original Oracle 11g databases to Non-Container Databases (Non-CDBs) of Oracle Database 12c.
• Deploy an Oracle Database 12c cluster, create CDBs, map the original storage resources to Oracle Database 12c cluster nodes, convert the Non-CDBs to PDBs using database cloning, and plug the PDBs to Oracle Database 12c CDBs.
After the consolidation, multiple PDBs share servers and storage resources, which maximizes hardware utilization. The PDBs can be unplugged and plugged across different CDBs, which facilitates changes to the SLA. Before migrating to a cloud architecture, the most important things are to define tenants and allocate computing and storage resources so that tenants will meet specified SLA-levels for applications. At the same time, tenant data must be isolated for the purposes of information security. The PDB management accounts of Oracle Database 12c are used to implement rights-based access to PDBs and self-service tenants. The Resource Manager dynamically allocates computing resources for different tenants.
With the KunLun server and Oracle multitenant feature, mult iple Oracle 11g databases are consolidated as a single Oracle 12c database cloud. This consolidation improves hardware resource utilization and reduces hardware investment and software licensing fees. Most important, the consolidation allows tenant self-service, which greatly slashes management overhead.▲
Table 2: Databases before consolidation
Application Data Volume (GB)
Archived Volume (GB) IOPS I/O Delay (ms) Cluster
ERP (HR and finance management) 2,000 GB 4,000 GB 10,000 10 ms RAC1iSales (sales process management) 1,000 GB 2,000 GB 5,000 5 ms
RAC2iPlan (production planning system) 1,000 GB 2,000 GB 2,000 10 msiDelv (contract delivery system) 500 GB 1,000 GB 2,000 10 ms
RAC3iServ (service process system) 500 GB 1,000 GB 5,000 5 msEIP (System integration message transmission) 100 GB 200 GB 1,000 1 msiBuy (procurement process system) 100 GB 200 GB 500 10 ms
Table 3: Comparison of resources before and after consolidation
Item Servers CPUs Memory (GB) RAC Licenses Hard Drives Power (W)BeforeConsolidation 6 12 768 3x6 176 3,200
AfterConsolidation 2 8 512 1x2 84 2,200
Decreased to 33% 67% 67% 11% 48% 68%
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Solution
Nantian Teams with Huawei to Help Banks Embrace an Open EcosystemBy Dai Min, General Architect, Software Business Group of Nantian Electronics
T he business-critical systems that serve as the pivot point for the digital transformation of banking have long run on mainframes or traditional UNIX servers. As part of the move to Internet-enabled financial capabilities where open-source platforms are the mainstream, the initiatives for architectural transformation are helping banks achieve efficient and strategic service growth.
Nantian Electronics is supporting the move to open architectures for core banking service systems that run on x86 servers. The Huawei KunLun-series of advanced x86 servers are particularly ideal for mission-critical banking services.
Issues with Traditional UNIX ServersThe expanded use of virtualization and cloud computing techno-logies has exposed the limits of traditional closed-architecture UNIX servers. These drawbacks include high O&M costs and long service delivery cycles.
These architectural issues are putting pressure on the banking industry because they slow innovation in markets that are saturated with promises of expansive, Internet-enabled financial products and services. Unified, standardized hardware platforms with open, low-level access are better able to support distributed applications in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) framework, which in addition to helping reduce the CAPEX and O&M costs for IT systems, enables an increased rate for product innovations. An essential characteristic of open architecture systems is the enablement of elastic scale-out and scale-up capabilities, which are also critical for supporting the rapid growth of the Internet-based financial industry.
The successful deployments of open-architecture platforms are empowering banks to achieve holistic digital transformations from the lowest layers of the machine to the highest levels of business strategy and customer fulfillment.
Replacing UNIX Servers with KunLun ServersThe Huawei KunLun Mission Critical server is based on x86 processors. Built on a scale-up architecture, able to deliver high performance and reliability, and embracing an open ecosystem, KunLun frees the mission-critical systems of banks from the longstanding reliance on traditional closed UNIX servers. The KunLun Mission Critical Server also empowers banking customers with unprecedented ease and speed to migrate and manage services in both cloud and non-cloud environments while delivering the high reliability and availability required by banks.
The OFP CoreBanking system offered by Nantian Electronics provides a full array of functions, covering various core businesses of existing commercial banks and supporting multiple emerging products and services. The system uses advanced technologies, such as distributed cloud computing and microservices, to support implicit cross-node and cross-process communication in a distributed processing resource environment. KunLun is used to build a private cloud to support flexible deployment of different upper-layer service systems, unlocking superior overall processing performance and high availability. The solution meets bank customers’ requirements for banking services, quick product innovation and rollout, as well as powerful support for core systems.
30
EcosystemEcosystem
Dai Min
Nantian Electronics Information Co., Ltd., is working with Huawei to offer core banking service systems on Huawei’s x86-based KunLun platform, helping banks handle mission-critical applications with greater flexibility, scalability, and lower cost.
The combination of the Nantian system with Huawei KunLun unlocks unparalleled processing performance and resource availability. With this system, banks can access their core systems reliably and at high speeds.
Nantian and Huawei have combined their technology and service strengths to implement holistic systems that support the migration of mission-critical applications from UNIX servers and mainframes to x86 servers.
Integrated Solution HighlightsHuawei has deployed large-scale core bank services systems on the high-availability KunLun open platform. These core service systems run on the foundation of the distributed cloud computing and SOA
microservice architecture, offering high elasticity through the distributed architecture.
The core service system uses the open Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS 2.0) technology interface provided by KunLun. A proactive error analysis engine is used to further enhance hardware fault detection. It detects potential risks and proactively generates prewarnings through upper-layer application monitoring, implements automatic isolation, and turns reactive fault handling into proactive fault management to ensure the continuity of mission-critical systems.
At Huawei’s OpenLab innovation center in Hangzhou, China, KunLun has demonstrated performance of over 14,000 Transactions per Second (TPS) that, when coupled with KunLun’s reliability features, makes the server ideal for meeting the requirements of banks.
KunLun Mission Critical ServerPhysical partition
Nantian OFP Cloud-DTP PaaS Platform
Database cluster
Virtualization software (FusionSphere)
Logical partitioning
Core banking M-banking
Wealth……
CRM
…
Nantian OFP Cloud-DTP SaaS Platform
Physical partition
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Ecosystem
Migrating Core Applications to KunLunWorking in the Hangzhou OpenLab, Nantian tested and confirmed the migration of a legacy instance of the Nantian banking system to the KunLun platform from a traditional UNIX host. The system components ported to the x86 platform include an integrated financial front-end, cloud payment-services, intelligent counter (customer interaction) functions, cloud-computing core services, and rural bank core services systems. Nantian and Huawei have verified these systems to ensure that the underlying APIs and key components of the UNIX architecture have been implemented correctly on the open Linux platform. More than ten service functionality points have been verified to cover migration phases such as code compilation, partial code rebuilds, deployment, and automated testing. In addition to these migration tests, the OpenLab enabled the companies to run
performance tests that verified the expected reliability, stability, and performance specifications of each solution.
The core service system supports mainframe offload — the ability to migrate from legacy hardware to the KunLun cloud platform. By enabling mainframes and open systems to work together it is possible to free some mainframe capacity for applications or processes that have yet to be, or need not be ported from mainframes to the newer x86 platforms.
Benefits of the MigrationThe Nantian distributed core bank services system is built to meet strict industry requirements for secure and controllable hardware and software. Further, banks are free to run and upgrade their core systems for the purpose of improving Return On Investment (ROI). The move to open computing architectures allows banks to take advantage of a technology ecosystem that includes third-party financial software and better positions banks for digital transformation. Open architectures enable banks to confidently face the challenges of incorporating traditional closed systems into the modern, Internet-based financial services market:
• Closed systems impose long development cycles• Siloed architectures result in low resource
utilization• High Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) results from
the high costs for IT construction and O&MIn contrast, the Nantian-Huawei solution brings a
new architecture with many advantages:• Open platform: A development environment that
encourages service innovation and enables faster service rollouts
• Flexible expansion: KunLun enables high elasticity of infrastructure resources for high-concurrency banking services
• Lower TCO: A dramatic reduction in the cost for additional computing capacity and support for the innovative services that keep banks competitive▲
At Huawei’s OpenLab innovation center in Hangzhou, China, KunLun has demonstrated performance of over 14,000 Transactions per Second that, when coupled with KunLun’s reliability features, makes the server ideal for meeting the requirements of banks. >>
Servicedirectory
Datasharing
Data deliveryframework
Data
Error
OS
PFA
Distributed cloud computing framework
Service framework
Cloud platform service busAOP
support library
Data
OS
PFA
Sys
tem
mai
nten
ance M
onitoring
Enterprise-grade distributedtransaction processing cloud platform
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Ecosystem
Huawei Teams Up with Russia’s Top ISV Diasoft to Release a Digital Bank Joint SolutionBy Wang Changcheng, Moscow OpenLab, Huawei Russia Research Center
Following the completion of the tests, Huawei and Diasoft together sought customers at the FINOPOLIS-2017 financial exhibition in Russia. The joint solution has garnered attention and an enthusiastic interest from bank customers in Russia — for which some have begun to prepare for their own KunLun Proof of Concept (PoC) tests.
Diasoft is one of the largest IT solution providers in the Russian financial industry, and has successfully operated for over 26 years. Diasoft has served more than 300 financial industry customers, including 55 of the world’s Top 100 banks, 31 leading foreign banks in Russia, and companies in the investment management, insurance, pension fund, and microfinance businesses. Diasoft has developed industry software such as the Diasoft FA #, Diasoft Database Adapter, FLEXTERA, and FLEXTERA BI solutions, all of which comply with the rigorous standards maintained throughout the international financial industry.
Diasoft is positioned as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for International Retail Core Banking, and is a leader in the IDC Worldwide Core Banking MarketScape. Diasoft is Russia’s first and only banking software developer to be named in both rankings. Diasoft is a Top 100 member in the IDC Financial Insights 2016 FinTech ranking.
A fter three months of close collaboration, Huawei and Diasoft, Russia’s top Integrated Systems Vendor (ISV) for the banking
industry, completed the verification and tuning of Diasoft’s FA # solution on Huawei’s KunLun 9016 Mission Critical Server and OceanStor 18000 Storage System at Huawei’s Moscow OpenLab. The verification was a thorough test of the performance and reliability of bank applications migrated from the previous Oracle-based UNIX servers to Huawei’s KunLun servers.
Diasoft FA # is a fully modular, automated banking software solution that is suitable for customers in the insurance and capital markets. The solution enables financial institutions to build an integrated information environment, and offers 56 function modules to implement fully automated banking services, including retail and corporate banking, management and investment businesses, and banking services for stock and currency markets.▲
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Ecosystem
ECI Shifts to a New Paradigm for Future Retail with Huawei KunLunE l Corte Inglés (ECI) is the world’s third largest department store group and Spain’s largest retail group. Established in 1935,
ECI’s headquarters are located in Madrid, Spain. ECI runs a total of 83 stores in Spain and Portugal. ECI department stores bring together a host of international luxury boutiques selling fashion, accessories, cosmetics, watches and jewelry, with countless
gourmet brands inspired by creative Spanish and international chefs to offer its customers a unique culinary experience. “For many tourists in Spain, the ECI department store is just like the unfinished cathedral in Barcelona or the Prado Museum in Madrid, which symbolizes the country,” the Financial Times commented. In addition to department stores, ECI also runs businesses across multiple sectors, including supermarkets, hardware stores, travel agencies, and telecommunications services. To handle such diverse business ventures, ECI is one of SAP’s more advanced customers.
ECI Builds Analytical Platform for Business IntelligenceAmid the rising trends of new retail, an omni-channel converged customer service system that covers online and offline service operations is a crucial success factor for retail enterprises. As Europe’s largest department store chain, ECI has a wealth of data, including sales data from its hundreds of online and offline channels, inventory data from 38 logistics centers, and membership data. It becomes a tremendous challenge for ECI to sift through the vast quantities of data and quickly derive valuable insights that can translate into business success, as well as to quickly grow customer service capabilities to support agile decision-making. To address these concerns, ECI looks to build a High-Performance Analytical Platform (HAP). The HAP would function as an enterprise-grade data platform that runs analytical-operation applications to support real-time analysis of online and historical data. The analysis results will empower executives to make responsive, better-informed business decisions, and effectively guide services such as real-time inventory and shortage management, as well as supply replenishment.
Prior to this, ECI had purchased 4 SAP HANA systems to support its business processes. However, the old scale-out architecture involves complicated Operations and Maintenance (O&M) of many servers, and inter-node data exchange affects system performance. This all leads to poor IT O&M experience. Therefore, it was imperative for ECI to address the Big Data analysis requirements of the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) from its internal departments. ECI’s core requirements are quasi-real-time analytics and a tight project rollout schedule. More importantly, the service platform is required to be innovation-driven and ensure high performance. Through collaboration and innovation with customers, Huawei strengthens its partnership ecosystem to develop powerful solutions such as the KunLun SAP HANA appliance solution.
KunLun SAP HANA Appliance Optimizes ECI’s SystemIn early 2017, the CIO of ECI was invited to visit the Huawei headquarters. Huawei partnered with SAP to analyze the status and requirements of ECI’s system. Building on the implementation experience of over 3,000 TB of server solutions, Huawei strongly recommended to ECI the KunLun SAP HANA appliance solution based on an 8 TB single-node scale-up architecture. The solution is technically aligned with ECI’s core requirements for high performance and quasi-real-time analytics.
• Why Scale-up?• Higher performance: The scale-up SAP HANA system archi-
tecture eliminates inter-node communications and delivers over 30 percent higher performance than the scale-out solution.
• Easier deployment and management: The single-node solution does not require external storage or switch devices, enabling simpler and easier deployment and management.
• No more data table re-distribution: With all data stored within the same node, there is no need for data table re-distribution after capacity expansion.
• HANA Non-Uniform-Memory Access (NUMA) awareness: The CPU memory scheduling mechanism with awareness of the HANA database NUMA architecture is continually being developed.
• Why Huawei KunLun SAP HANA Appliance?The Huawei KunLun SAP HANA appliance is one of the very few in the industry capable of offering a scale-up, mission-critical platform with high performance, scalability, and reliability all in one package. Based on the x86 architecture, KunLun delivers the industry’s No. 1 HANA Benchmark performance. It leverages advanced reliability features such as Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS) 2.0 and Disaster Recovery (DR) backup and supports memory module hot-swap. KunLun is the best-in-class platform for the SAP HANA solution.
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Success
After deploying the 16-socket KunLun SAP HANA appliance based on all in-memory computing, ECI is able to consolidate the active data from multiple systems onto a quasi-real-time computing platform. The new platform eliminates performance bottlenecks, and supports real-time data writes and analytics through HANA, enabling ECI to fully tap into the data to drive faster time-to-value.
As the 8 TB scale-up solution is the first-of-its-kind ever in the industry, ECI expressed considerable concerns about its risks and the certification which had to be completed within a very short time. As SAP’s global technology partner, Huawei actively conveyed ECI’s apprehensions to SAP and explained the advantages of the scale-up solution. As such, SAP showed great support to Huawei and the certification was completed quickly and successfully. As of now, the industry’s first 8 TB scale-up system running SAP OLAP applications has come to life — on Huawei’s KunLun SAP HANA appliance. Huawei and SAP have built upon their in-depth collaboration to implement a groundbreaking solution for ECI, to win recognition from across the industry.
ECI Effectively Analyzes Inventory and Sales Data, Finds Shortages in 5 MinutesAfter deploying the 16-socket KunLun SAP HANA appliance based on all in-memory computing, ECI is able to consolidate the active data from multiple systems onto a quasi-real-time computing platform. The new platform eliminates performance bottlenecks, and supports real-time data writes and analytics through HANA, enabling ECI to fully tap into the data to drive faster time-to-value.
• Significant leap in data processing efficiency: The new system delivers 1,000x higher performance than the old system, and analyzes shortage information, production scheduling, and purchase orders at lightning speeds based on the current inventory status, empowering ECI with quasi-real-time insights into business data.
The system completes shortage analysis within 5 minutes, improves inventory turnover rate by 20 percent, and enables automatic replenishment to best suit sales activities.
• Drastically simplifies O&M: Compared with other vendors’ solutions, the KunLun SAP HANA provides the most streamlined scale-up management architecture. It involves only one server, allowing for simple, efficient deployment and management; requires no change to databases or applications, or the need to re-distribute data tables in the case of capacity expansion, making system tuning quicker and effortless.
• System-level high reliability: The KunLun SAP HANA supports online replacement of core components, online rolling upgrades, and automatic failover, maximizing service uptime and ensuring 24/7 availability.
• Anticipating future service needs: KunLun eliminates the current business growth bottlenecks and supports smooth expansion and upgrades, anticipating service development needs for the next 3 to 5 years.
• Open platform: The open platform avoids lock-ins and maximizes Return On Investment (ROI).
Huawei fulfills ECI’s needs quickly by partnering with SAP to design and implement a solution efficiently, finally empowering ECI with a comprehensive solution and establishes a win-win situation for all companies. This paradigm shift expands the influence of SAP HANA over future applications that will further transform the retail industry.▲
35
SuccessSuccess
Fujian Medical University Union Hospital Relies on Huawei for Their Fault-Tolerant Hospital Information SystemFujian Medical University Union Hospital (FMUUH) is well-known and well-regarded in Fuzhou City, China. The hospital was
founded over 100 years ago and has continued to grow into a comprehensive center for healthcare, education, and research. Ranking among China’s top-100 Grade-3, Level-A medical institutions, FMUUH is a facility with expertise in multiple disciplines.
For example, FMUUH has a complete range of clinical departments, of which 6 are national key specialties, 10 are provincial key specialties, and 8 are among the first phase of key subject matter practice. The hospital currently has 1,336 beds and receives nearly 1.2 million outpatient and 37,000 inpatient admissions annually — with the number of outpatients expected to increase by 15 percent year after year.
Outdated IT Data Center Faces BottlenecksServices at FMUUH have grown quickly in the last decades, and an aging IT data center was unable to keep up with their fast-changing needs. As such, the hospital urgently needed to construct a new IT data center. A requirements survey of the live network found that the hospital faced the following IT service challenges:
• System performance bottlenecks: During peak hours, the Hospital Information System (HIS) was processing on the order of ten thousand outpatient service requests each hour, during which CPU memory usage exceeded 80 percent. The legacy UNIX server-based HIS system was unable to support the hospital’s huge service volumes.
• Long emergency response time: In the event of IT-system emergencies, the hot standby failover took more than 10 minutes to recover, which resulted in a higher risk of service interruptions.
• Slow upgrade of service systems: According to design require-ments, the HIS system needed to be flexible and scalable. An additional factor is the possibility for changes to service processes that will arise from continuing reforms within the Chinese medical system. The new HIS system needed to be launched quickly and prepared to develop iteratively. Decades of experience using a closed UNIX server architecture clearly showed the difficulties of developing timely service rollouts.
• Need for future-proof IT platform architecture: The hospital’s overall ICT construction must be future-proof to meet the needs for an evolving system for the next 10 years. This expectation will not only minimize having to upgrade facilities and rebuild services, but will also pave the way for emerging technologies to be added such as cloud computing and Big Data.
A New HIS System Enabled by a Powerful Technical PlatformAfter fully considering multiple factors and the hospital’s own requirements, FMUUH selected Huawei and B-Soft, an integrated systems vendor, to develop a new HIS system. The new system covers all major aspects within the hospital, including doctors, nurses, pharmacy, medical equipment technologies, finance, medical records, statistics, and admissions and discharge management; and further provides a powerful technical platform for in-depth hospital management.
Huawei’s x86-based KunLun 9016 Mission Critical Server and high-end storage OceanStor 18000 V3 combine to form a local highly reliable solution. The SQL Server is deployed to provide database functions for medical services. Additionally, Web/App services are deployed on x86 virtual clusters.
As part of the underlying architecture for the entire system, two data centers are set up for disaster recovery. The two data centers are physically isolated but logically connected to form a cluster. In this way, services will not be disrupted in the event that one of the data centers suffers a failure. KunLun 16-socket x86 servers are used as the database servers for the underlying HIS system. By using physical partitioning (K-Par) technology, these servers are deployed into both data centers to support multiple database applications such as the HIS, Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS), and Laboratory Information Management System (LIS). An additional layer of redundancy is provided by the Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC), which is set up on the K-Par of the KunLun 9016. The SQL Server uses WSFC services and functions to ensure ‘Always On’ availability.
The OceanStor 18000 high-end storage arrays are configured to work in active-active mode. The database is deployed on the arrays
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Fujian Medical University Union Hospital has commissioned a new HIS system that uses the Huawei KunLun x86-based Mission Critical servers and OceanStor high-end storage.
to provide read and write services for KunLun service hosts; in addition, replication links are used for mirroring write I/O in real time. If a cluster node or service fails during system operations all the services carried on the node are automatically transferred to another available node. This failover mechanism ensures the continuity of normal system operations.
Higher Operational Efficiency and Transformation to Smart HealthcareAfter the new solution was deployed and went online, FMUUH has dramatically improved the running efficiency of their service systems. Specific benefits include the following:
• Stable and reliable services: By using Huawei’s high-end fault-tolerant solution, the HIS platform achieves architecture-level, device-level, and component-level stability and fault tolerance. The RAS 2.0 technology incorporated into KunLun servers provides a demonstrable reliability of 99.999 percent. This high level of reliability ensures that services will not be interrupted during Operations and Maintenance (O&M), upgrades, or expansion of hospital services; core HIS services will always remain highly available; and reliable systems are designed to not suffer service interruptions or data loss.
• Dramatically optimized system performance: CPU use has decreased from 80 percent to 30 percent, and memory use has dropped from 90 percent to 40 percent. The Solid-State Drives (SSDs) used on KunLun servers operate at a rate of Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) that is 200 times higher and only one-tenth the latency of mechanical, rotating-platter Hard Disk Drives (HDDs). Flash memory technologies have greatly reduced the response latency of the HIS system. The hospital is definitely benefiting from
the performance of the enhanced service platform, as doctors have become more efficient in issuing medical orders and the hospital’s workflow for processing financial charges has more than doubled in efficiency. During peak hours, report processing and patient service requests are now handled effortlessly.
• Greatly shortens service rollout time: The KunLun Mission Critical servers platform is underpinned by a complete and mature industry ecosystem. Huawei’s solution decouples applications from hardware to avoid vendor lock-in. As such, the hospital can freely choose Operating Systems (OSs), databases (DBs), and middleware to better adapt to the ongoing innovations in medical services and the accelerated rollouts of new services.
• Reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): One result of the legacy UNIX closed architecture was high application development costs and expensive O&M. In contrast, the open KunLun Mission Critical servers, when combined with high-performance converged storage, greatly improve the system processing performance while having reduced the cost of investment by up to 40 percent.
Huawei and Fujian Medical University Union Hospital have collaborated closely to renovate their IT infrastructure for the hospital’s new data centers. In the future, the two parties expect to gain additional benefits. For example, if and when more KunLun Mission Critical servers are deployed in the hospital, the transition will evolve seamlessly from a ‘same-city active-active’ solution for accelerated service processing to a ‘two cities, three centers’ disaster recovery solution with zero data loss or service downtime — even in extreme situations. All of these enhancements put Fujian Medical University Union Hospital on a fast track to completing a Smart Healthcare transformation journey.▲
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KunLun SAP HANA Catalyzes ‘New Retail’ for Heilan HomeT he Heilan Group is a leading garment company that was established in 1988 in Jiangyin City, China. With 60,000 employees,
in 2016 the Heilan Group ranked No. 202 in China’s Top-500 Enterprises and number 36 among China’s Top-500 Private Enterprises with total assets of USD 7.5 billion (RMB 50 billion). Heilan Home is a fully owned men’s apparel subsidiary of the
Heilan Group. Created more than a decade ago, Heilan Home now has over 5,000 outlets in China and is among China’s top brands.
Heilan Home Embarks on New RetailThe turbulent convergence of the Internet and consumer economy is disrupting the retail landscape, pushing physical retail store operators to rethink long-standing operating models. ‘New retail’ is the common buzzword rising from this convergence. New retail calls for enterprises to leverage the Internet and emerging technologies such as Big Data and artificial intelligence to upgrade and even reinvent manufacturing, logistics, and sales processes. New technology is reshaping the structure of the retail industry by combining online services, offline experiences, and modernized logistics. In summary, new retail is customer-centric rather than product-centric.
While the tide of transformation has closed many retail businesses that failed to react to the changing market forces, Heilan Home owes its success to an operating model based on the synergy of headquarters’ brand management, outsourced manufacturing, a central logistics warehouse, and a network of chain stores for sales. Heilan Home calls this unique business model ‘semi-franchising’ for which the competitive edge is the ability to quickly engage franchisees’ capital investments to expanding its business presence by building new stores. Heilan Home has built a highly digitalized industry chain for managing all suppliers and stores that underlies the efficient operation of the semi-franchising model.
Heilan Home is a retail enterprise acting with the mindset of an Internet company.
In 2016, Heilan Home began a 200-store pilot operation of its Internet retail project that enabled consumers to place orders online and pick up the goods offline. In 2017, Heilan Home teamed up with Tmall, an Alibaba online shopping mall, to expand the reach of this new, cooperative retail operation. These Internet initiatives include upgrades to over 5,000 Heilan Home retail outlets into smart stores that catalyze the convergence of the company’s online and offline operations. The novel operation brings the additional advantage of
empowering Heilan Home with precision recommendations derived from the Big Data collected from online shoppers. Heilan Home is now looking to launch more cutting-edge digital consumption experiences in the future, including unmanned retail, intelligent window showcasing, scan-and-buy, intelligent shopping bags, smart fitting mirrors, and instant delivery. The next phase of online offers will take the retail shopping experience to new and greater heights.
Thanks to its asset-light operation, Heilan Home has emerged as a leader for the new retail paradigm.
SAP HANA Fuels Heilan’s Rapid Business Growth with a Digitalized SystemAn efficient and reliable IT system is instrumental to supporting rapid business growth. Heilan Home has promoted digitalization as a top priority and has been an early mover with the rollouts of multiple systems, including SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Extended Warehouse Management (EWM). The superior performance of SAP HANA as an in-memory database has enabled Heilan Home to move its various business systems to one system, and gain unprecedented efficiency in real-time data processing and analytics. Their success in digital transformation has empowered Heilan Home with new levels of agility and speed in reacting to the constantly changing fashion retail landscape.
In 2015, Heilan Home rolled out the SAP EWM system to support the processing of 60 TB of complex supply-chain queries and analytics. To meet this requirement, the company selected the Huawei SAP HANA solution in a cluster configuration of five 1.5 TB HANA nodes. Upon going live, the EWM system ran stable peak loads. This ensured that the Heilan Home warehouse system was provisioned with sufficient resources.
Heilan Home also chose the Huawei KunLun SAP HANA
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Heilan Home has realized massive efficiencies in its digital operations following the deployment of the Huawei KunLun SAP HANA appliance as its core enterprise database platform.
solution as the core platform for its ERP transaction system. At a 30 percent average annual growth, the resource utilization of the old ERP system was causing great bottlenecks. The company responded by deploying a KunLun-based 12 TB SAP HANA appliance for its ERP platform. Heilan Home began to reap massive supply-chain efficiencies, including warehouse and commodity management. The KunLun Mission Critical Server, engineered with RAS 2.0 reliability, was provisioned with 8 CPUs to keep Heilan Home’s business on track throughout the company’s digital transformation, and has helped the company to confidently prepare for future commercial and technological growth.
KunLun eliminated the performance bottlenecks created by Heilan Home’s legacy ERP system and enabled real-time data write and analytics through HANA, helping Heilan Home fully tap into the wealth of information collected from casual shoppers and committed customers.
• Real-time data write and analytics: Service data is recorded in real time, and the time to generate warehouse data reports has been reduced from more than 10 hours to minutes or less. The reports function as a timely reference for decision-makers charged with managing a fine-grained supply chain, which translates into better front-end experience for customers.
• Efficiency boost: ERP performance improved 4-fold, financial settlements have been sped up 50-fold, and main-data-read performance has increased 20-fold. There has also been a leap in logistics efficiency, as the time needed to deliver truckloads of cargo from depots to factories is slashed by 80 percent.
• Adopting innovative applications: The large memory capacity and superior performance of the KunLun SAP HANA platform enables Heilan Home to retain historical sales data for analysis using the new ERP system. New and past-season products are often received quite differently by different regions and outlets. By using ERP real-time analytics, the KunLun SAP HANA solution can intelligently select the most-suitable target outlets for promoting past-season products. The result is an optimized distribution of goods and an increase in the sales of past-season products by about 15 percent.
• 24/7 High Availability (HA): KunLun SAP HANA promises maximum service uptime by supporting online replacements, component upgrades, and automatic device replacement for failed core components.
• Meeting the next 3 to 5 years of business needs: KunLun eliminates current business growth bottlenecks and supports future business growth.
• Open platform: The open platform avoids lock-ins and maximizes ROI.
“Huawei’s KunLun Mission Critical Server has passed SAP HANA certification,” said Zhang Xiaofan, manager in charge of the Heilan Home ERP upgrade project. “The KunLun-based 12 TB SAP HANA appliance and SAP applications have helped us eliminate system performance bottlenecks and made our continuous business growth possible. In the future, we will leverage innovative ICT solutions to enhance technical support for our business growth and innovation.”▲
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Huawei KunLun Honored with the ‘SAP HANA on Huawei KunLun I&II Optimization’ AwardS hanghai, China, November 7, 2017, Huawei showcased its KunLun SAP HANA appliance on the SAP Labs China Co-Innovation
Day, and received the ‘SAP HANA on Huawei KunLun I&II Optimization’ award from SAP, in recognition of Huawei’s excellent performance in the domain. This is the only award conferred to IT infrastructure, and it signifies the achievements that SAP and
Huawei have made in the mission-critical system space through close collaboration and continuous innovation. The Huawei KunLun servers set a new standard for reliability and enable enterprises to run their SAP business-critical applications with unrivaled continuity and stability, minimizing unplanned downtime and delivering outstanding system robustness.
On the SAP Labs China Co-Innovation Day, Huawei demonstrated the latest Huawei-SAP joint innovation to the audience and partners on site: the world’s only SAP HANA appliance that supports memory hot swap. The SAP HANA scale-up solution and Huawei KunLun Mission Critical Server are brought together to form the world’s only SAP HANA with memory module hot swap capabilities. The solution deepens the SAP-Huawei collaboration in the enterprises
mission-critical system space and delivers user experience with new levels of reliability and performance to global enterprise customers.
The KunLun Mission Critical Server is specifically engineered for critical workloads such as enterprise database, decision support, and business processing. KunLun supports 8, 16, and 32 Intel® processors, up to 32 TB ultra-large memory, and is also the industry’s only all-flash 16 TB SAP HANA appliance. It can
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effortlessly process the in-memory computing workloads even with data of challenging large scale. In addition, the KunLun 9008-based SAP HANA appliance updated the world’s BWoH test record. In the concurrency stress test phase, Huawei KunLun obtained an excellent test score by executing 7,927 queries per hour. The queries involved data volumes of over 400 billion records and the performance was 1.9 to 4 times that of competitor products.
Up to now, the strategic collaboration between Huawei and SAP has led to solutions that are recognized and trusted by customers across the globe. The Huawei SAP HANA solution has been widely
applied to various industries such as retail, manufacturing, energy, high-tech, and finance. The Huawei SAP HANA appliance has been serving over 1,000 SAP customers across more than 20 industries in over 40 countries worldwide. The customers include world-renowned enterprises such as China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC, 137 TB SAP HANA); Telecom Italia (TIM, 16S, 12 TB); Russian Railways (16S, 12 TB); ECI, Europe’s largest department store (16S, 8 TB); Fonterra of New Zealand; and CEPSA. Huawei SAP HANA appliances are powering the digital transformation of over 40 of the Fortune Global 500 companies.▲
Huawei received the ‘SAP HANA on Huawei KunLun I&II Optimization’ award from SAP, in recognition of Huawei’s excellent performance in the domain. It signifies the achievements that SAP and Huawei have made in the mission-critical system space through close collaboration and continuous innovation.
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H uawei’s legacy of relentless innovation and helping industry customers brace for digital transformation continues with the KunLun Mission Critical Server.
On November 24, 2017, a KunLun-focused seminar ‘Paving the Way to Digital Transformation’ took place in Hangzhou, China. Customers and partners from many sectors, including government, finance, transportation, education, and manufacturing gathered at the InterContinental Hangzhou Hotel to discuss how to best leverage KunLun to help customers accomplish digital transformation.
KunLun has been engineered and built for customers’ mission-critical applications. It is based on the x86 ecosystem, and features high performance, rock-solid reliability, and openness. KunLun offers 4 to 32 CPUs for customers’ core applications, and serves as a scale-up computing platform with up to 32 TB of memory. These features and capabilities help to guide customers smoothly through digital transformation.
Since its release less than two years ago, KunLun is now widely deployed and well regarded by customers across industries worldwide. The more customers learn about and select the KunLun Mission Critical Server, the more they are finding themselves on a fast and stable path through their digital transformation.
KunLun Seminar: Paving the Way for Digital Transformation
Speeches from ExecutivesAt 9:00 a.m., the seminar began. Dong Libin, Vice President, Data Center Marketing and Solution Sales Department, Huawei Enterprise Business Group, gave the opening speech. He detailed the challenges that confront customers in the digital transformation process and Huawei’s solution to address these challenges: the KunLun Mission Critical Server.
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Keynote Speech: ‘Guangdong Rural Credit Union Deploys Front-end Database Cloud’Du Shaohua, Huawei Server Solution Architect, shared details about the Guangdong Rural Credit Union success story. He elaborated on the challenges facing the credit union’s integrated front-end business system, and how KunLun helped the customer successfully migrate core services to a cloud based on Oracle’s 12c multi-tenant technology. Du also introduced the OpenStack-based KunLun cloud database solution.
Keynote Speech: ‘Success Story — Henan Traffic Police Corps 6-in-1 System Data Consolidation’Lu Dong, manager of the 6-in-1 system database consolidation project for the Henan Traffic Police Corps, shared the success story of how KunLun helped the customer. Lu introduced the project background and further described device selection, data consolidation based on KunLun, and KunLun performance after deployment.
Keynote Speech: ‘KunLun SAP HANA Best Practice Service Platform’Guo Lei, Chief Architect, SAP Big Data Platform Business Group, described how the 12 TB KunLun SAP HANA now supports the ERP system for the Heilan Home men’s clothing brand, including reducing the time needed to generate general warehouse reports from over 10 hours to minutes or less while boosting operational efficiency.
Keynote Speech: HGST Senior AdvisorYe Fujun, Senior Technical Advisor, HGST (a Western Digital brand), delivered a talk about ‘Addressing Mission-Critical Storage Workloads and Requirements.’
Keynote Speech: ‘KunLun Mission Critical Server, Ultimate Reliability with No RISC’Zhang Dixuan, Director, Huawei Server Solution Development Department, delivered the keynote speech. He introduced the features of the KunLun product and solutions, including the UNIX-to-x86 migration solution with high fault tolerance, the in-memory computing solution, the dedicated cloud solution for mission-critical applications, and the service consolidation solution. Zhang also gave a roundup of customers’ successful practices with KunLun, and shared Huawei’s prospective R&D plan for KunLun.
Keynote Speech: ‘Embrace New Financial Technologies with an Open Architecture’Hu Xueyong, Vice Director, Data Center Division, Postal Savings Bank of China (PSBC), introduced PSBC’s experience with IT architecture, and the tactics for architectural transformation, as well as a real-world application of KunLun in PSBC’s service systems.
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Join Forces for Greater SuccessAt the end of the seminar, company representatives came to the stage to toast for more joint efforts and ever-greater future success.
A Tour of the Global Computing OpenLab in the Hangzhou Research CenterFollowing the morning KunLun seminar, customers visited the Huawei ‘Global Computing OpenLab’ at the Hangzhou Research Center. Cheng Longfei and Chen Ben, senior engineers from the KunLun server R&D department, demonstrated the server to guests by giving a live demonstration of the KunLun CPU and memory hot-swap features.
After the afternoon KunLun demonstration, Huawei R&D engineers introduced their guests to KunLun application solutions in various industries, including finance, social security, medical care, and public security. Other products highlighted in the demonstrations included Huawei NVMe SSD disks, the SAP HANA appliance, E9000 blade server, and X6800 high-density server.
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Also on Huawei ‘IT Day,’ Liu Yuanhui, senior expert of Huawei server solutions, introduced the KunLun server to customers.
Customers crowd around KunLun server at the DTC exhibition in Russia.
KunLun took the spotlight at the 2017 Huawei ‘IT Day’ conference in Canada.
At CeBIT 2017, Huawei joined forces with Infosys, a world-leading banking application system provider, to showcase the Infosys Finacle core banking system running on the Huawei KunLun Mission Critical Server. The joint solution offers a rich array of functions to help global financial organizations drive down O&M costs, deliver better user experience, and accelerate their digital transformation.
At the Interop 2016 exhibition in Tokyo, the Huawei KunLun 9032 won the Gold Prize for Best of Show as a result of its leading Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS) design; its 32-socket scale-up performance; and compatibility with an open ecosystem.
KunLun Global Exhibition Roundup
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e.huawei.comHuawei EnterpriseLeading New ICT, The Road to Digital Transformation.
Huawei KunLun Mission Critical Server is a new-generation computing platform that embraces the x86 ecosystem and delivers the high reliability, ultimate performance, and scalability required by critical business. KunLun helps global enterprises get better positioned for the digital transformation.
KunLun SAP HANA Appliance: Scale-Up FirstHuawei-Hundsun Securities Core Transaction Solution Spurs Innovations with Assured Reliability and PerformanceECI Shifts to a New Paradigm for Future Retail with Huawei KunLun
01/2018
Navigating CriticalEnterprise BusinessThrough DigitalTransformation
Navigating CriticalEnterprise BusinessThrough DigitalTransformation
Inaugural Issue