As the acceleration of the process towards becoming a manufacturing powerhouse continues, the construction of new information infrastructure becomes indispensable. This includes advancing facilities such as networks, computing power, storage, etc., deepening the scale application of industrial internet, and enhancing network security capabilities.
Taking the cement industry, a typical sector in manufacturing, as an example. At present, data centers of cement enterprises generally face four major pain points: first, difficulty in IT architecture transformation. Currently, the business of cement enterprises is mainly deployed on traditional FC architecture, mostly on standalone deployments, lacking reliable high-availability mechanisms, which significantly impacts the stable operation of business. Additionally, cluster expansion is complex and comes with high costs. Second, power outage scenarios easily lead to data loss. Cement enterprises are usually located in remote mountainous areas due to significant environmental pollution, resulting in unstable power supply from the grid, frequent interruptions, and increased risk of data loss due to sudden power cuts. Third, weak IT operation and maintenance capabilities. This is also related to the industry's characteristics. Most IT operation and maintenance personnel in cement enterprises serve dual roles, with limited knowledge of IT fundamentals, resulting in weak management capabilities for underlying IT clusters. Fourth, the existence of information silos. As most information systems in cement enterprises are deployed on standalone servers, business data is not interconnected, leading to the inability to generate interaction between business data. Different systems may have duplicate data, making it inefficient to utilize business data.
Based on this, QingCloud Technology (qingcloud.com) provides the cement industry with a CloudEasy hyper-converged IT architecture, ensuring efficient, convenient, and robust business operations. Firstly, CloudEasy is highly deliverable. QingCloud adopts a distributed architecture deployment to support multiple types of applications, achieving efficient and agile delivery capabilities, with the underlying high-performance NeonSAN providing the best IOPS capability.
Secondly, effective monitoring of UPS is implemented. For cement enterprises that typically deploy external UPS power supplies, effective monitoring is achieved. Automatic shutdown of the entire cluster is implemented according to custom policies, maximizing security.
Thirdly, unified management of operations and maintenance is realized. Considering the weak technical capabilities of operation and maintenance personnel in cement enterprises, QingCloud simplifies its use on the product side, making it as straightforward and intuitive as possible to reflect the health status of the entire cluster. Additionally, from edge cloud to central cloud linkage, headquarters operation and maintenance personnel can inspect each distributed resource through network access, minimizing the workload of branch IT operation and maintenance personnel.
Fourthly, the robustness of the architecture is ensured. CloudEasy has strong self-healing capabilities under extreme physical conditions. In the event of a power outage, CloudEasy's success rate of recovery can reach 99.99%, which can basically meet the sudden power outage scenarios common in remote cement plants.
At Shaofeng Cement Group, QingCloud CloudEasy hyper-converged platform was quickly deployed to build a cloud-ready hyper-converged platform, carrying business systems such as expert optimization, production data connection, and intelligent logistics. Initially consisting of 3 converged nodes, it can smoothly upgrade and expand later. Moreover, the underlying IT architecture has upgrade capabilities, enabling stable upgrade to the enterprise cloud across the board. The full-stack enterprise cloud can also interact with branch CloudEasy, forming a product form with distributed cloud characteristics.
For Shaofeng Cement, the greatest value brought by CloudEasy hyper-convergence lies in utilizing its inherent features such as high availability, live migration, and multiple replicas to support critical business systems, enhancing the stability of business operations. CloudEasy's private cloud platform is integrated with the data center UPS power monitoring system. According to the administrator's set strategy, it effectively monitors the remaining UPS battery level and automatically shuts down virtualization and physical machines in the cluster, ensuring smooth landing of business data during power outages.
Currently, QingCloud has accumulated numerous typical cases in the cement industry, serving clients including Tongren Southwest Cement, Haiyan Taishan Southern Cement, Shaofeng Cement, etc.
As a lightweight private cloud product tailored for small and medium computing scale, QingCloud CloudEasy adopts software-defined technology as its core, integrating computing, storage, and network deeply to meet the high-performance, high-reliability, scalable, simple, and easy-to-use requirements of enterprise digital transformation for IT infrastructure, achieving faster business response, higher flexibility, and lower operating costs.
