/ Chinese City Uses Cloud Computing to Improve Food Safety
Overview
Country or Region: China
Industry: Professional services—IT services
Customer Profile
Chengdu Cloud Computing Center provides a range of cloud computing services for the government of Chengdu, China. The center has 30 employees.
Business Situation
The center wanted to move its Pork Quality and Safety Tracking System to a private-cloud environment to improve processing times and strengthen data safety.
Solution
The center created a private cloud by using Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise with Hyper-V technology and Microsoft System Center data center solutions.
Benefits
· One-week development
· One-third lower costs
· Better protection of public health
· Vast Scalability
· Outstanding reliability / “[With the Microsoft technology–based private-cloud solution,] the city of Chengdu can now monitor the entire ecosystem of pork production, processing, and sales so that the public is better protected.”
Wang Jianbo, Assistant Director, Standing Committee, Chengdu Cloud Computing Center
Chengdu Cloud Computing Center in Chengdu, China, wanted to experiment with building private clouds—virtualized server environments—for hosting applications that need heightened data safety and dynamic configurations of computing resources. It created a private cloud to run its Pork Quality and Safety Tracking System, an application that tracks data related to the 10 billion pigs slaughtered in Chengdu every year. The center used the Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise operating system with Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center data center solutions to build a private cloud in just one week—at one-third the cost of alternative solutions. Users of the Pork Quality application now have instant access via the Internet to as much computing power as they need to analyze food-safety issues. The private cloud has also been extremely reliable, running for more than 2,000 hours without incident.
Situation
Chengdu Cloud Computing Center provides cloud computing services for the municipal government of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in southwestern China. Established in 2009, the center is the first commercial cloud computing center in China in which commercial investors and government are working together to speed, simplify, and economize computing.
A completely “green” computing initiative, Chengdu Cloud Computing Center is slated to become the communications hub of southwestern China. One of the primary missions of the center is to provide regional governments, public institutions, commercial organizations, educational institutions, research institutes, and individual researchers with cloud computing services that may be accessed at any time. In addition, Chengdu Cloud Computing Center provides computing support for industrial simulation, animation rendering, software development and testing, and the incorporation of information technology by small and midsize companies.
To fulfill its mission, Chengdu Cloud Computing Center relies on 600 physical servers that deliver a total computing capacity of more than 140 trillion operations per second. About 100 servers in the center run the Windows Server operating system; some are configured as a supercomputer and run the Windows HPC Server 2008 operating system.
Because some applications require not only the dynamic allocation of virtualized cloud resources, but also a level of confidentiality and control that the center’s public-cloud environment could not provide, Chengdu Cloud Computing Center sought to add a private cloud that could provide the same dynamic configurability but in a more protected single-tenant environment.
The first application that the center chose to deploy in a private cloud is the government’s Pork Quality and Safety Tracking System. About 10 billion pigs are slaughtered for food in Chengdu annually, and each pig wears an identifying radio-frequency ID (RFID) tag that is tied to data about where it was raised, its breed, its weight, when it was slaughtered, who purchased it, how much they paid for it, and so forth. As the pork is processed and shipped to stores and restaurants across Chengdu, this data is added to the system. The Pork Quality and Safety Tracking System is used by thousands of workers in slaughterhouses and pork processing businesses to manage the pork supply chain in Chengdu. Key users are city health workers who rely on the system to ensure the quality and safety of the pork on the public’s plates.
Previously, the Pork Quality application ran on several dual-processor servers in the Government Data Center. These servers were older and could not meet the needs of the application's many users. Response times were slow, and the older servers had inadequate data protection. The Chengdu government wanted to run the Pork Quality application in a more secure private cloud so that it could allocate variable amounts of processing power to various requests and to enhance the safety of application data.
Solution
To build a private cloud for the Pork Quality application, Chengdu Cloud Computing Center evaluated offerings from numerous providers before deciding to use a Microsoft platform. Microsoft was the natural choice because the Pork Quality and Safety Tracking System runs on Microsoft software. The Pork Quality application includes web, database, and middleware tiers. All servers run the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system, and the database runs Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 data management software.
Additionally, the center had already deployed Hyper-V virtualization technology, which is included with Windows Server 2008 R2, on about 30 servers in its data center and liked the performance, cost-effective scalability, and manageability of the Hyper-V environment.
A project team consisting of the heads of Chengdu Municipal Government, experts at Chengdu Cloud Computing Center, and local Microsoft experts planned and began building the private cloud in 2010. The hardware for the Pork Quality private cloud consists of 12 host computers on which the center created 60 virtual machines. The hosts run the Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise operating system; most of the virtual machines run Windows Server 2008 R2. The center estimates that it can expand this private-cloud infrastructure to accommodate eight to 10 virtual machines per host server.
Chengdu Cloud Computing Center also deployed Microsoft System Center solutions to help deploy, manage, and monitor the private-cloud infrastructure. Most notably, Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 provides automated templates and wizards for creating and managing virtual machines, a console for centrally managing all physical and virtual assets, performance troubleshooting tools, and many other server management capabilities.
Another key component of the cloud infrastructure is the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager Self-Service Portal 2.0, which makes it possible for users to requisition computing resources over the web. The portal adds workflow capabilities that facilitate the rapid addition of new users, the pooling of resources, usage tracking and chargeback, and self-service provisioning. The portal can be downloaded from Microsoft at no charge.[1]
Chengdu Cloud Computing Center also deployed Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2, which works in combination with System Center Virtual Machine Manager to obtain alerts on the status and performance of every physical and virtual server in its private-cloud infrastructure.
“Microsoft’s excellent products provide everything from infrastructure to complete solutions for business applications,” says Wang Jianbo, Assistant Director, Standing Committee at Chengdu Cloud Computing Center. “The Microsoft private-cloud solution has been beneficial for managing our dynamic data center using System Center products and taking advantage of the outstanding performance, security, and high cost-performance ratio of SQL Server. We worked closely with Microsoft to ensure that the Pork Quality and Safety Tracking System is fast, stable, and highly reliable.”
When any user of the Pork Quality and Safety Tracking System needs to perform a query or analyze data in the application, he or she submits the request, and the Chengdu private cloud dynamically, intelligently, and automatically allocates the computing and storage resources needed to fill the request. For example, if a member of the public gets sick by eating a pork product, health officials can very quickly trace the affected pork all the way through the supply chain to arrive at the suspected source of the problem.
As oversight of the quality of pork products improves and information coverage becomes more complete, the Pork Quality application will be expanded to handle other food types, such as small domestic fowl, vegetables, and fruit. In the next three years, Chengdu Cloud Computing Center will further expand the use of private-cloud computing to other areas of government, as well as to telecommunications, education, medical, finance, petrochemical, electric power, and other industries.
Benefits
By using Microsoft software, Chengdu Cloud Computing Center was able to move its critical Pork Quality and Safety Tracking System to a private-cloud environment in just one week, for one-third the cost of other alternatives. Chengdu feels that the public is better protected with pork data in a private-cloud environment where the data is safe and accessible by many people. Specific benefits are:
· One-week development. By using Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, System Center Operations Manager, and System Center Configuration Manager, Chengdu Cloud Computing Center was able to create its cloud infrastructure in just one week.
· One-third lower costs. Chengdu Cloud Computing Center estimates that the cost of developing its private cloud using Microsoft software was one-third lower than using other virtualization technologies. “As a global provider of cloud computing solutions, Microsoft possesses leading technology, products, and services,” Mr. Jianbo says. “It can provide customers with comprehensive cloud computing solutions by means of its mature software platforms, substantial Internet experience, and diverse commercial operating models, all of which truly put data at your fingertips.”
· Better protection of public health. The Pork Quality and Safety Tracking System provides the government, commercial enterprises, and the public with a complete platform for nonstop information acquisition, search, and monitoring of pork supply-chain data. “The city of Chengdu can now monitor the entire ecosystem of pork production, processing, and sales so that the public is better protected,” Mr. Jianbo says. “If a problem arises in the food chain, we can more quickly locate the relevant data and solve the problem sooner, thereby protecting the public’s health.”
· Vast scalability. The Pork Quality application now has an almost infinite amount of space for storing and managing data, and an almost infinite amount of computing power for processing application requests. This will enable the city of Chengdu to expand the application with data about additional food types.
· Outstanding reliability. The Pork Quality and Safety Tracking System officially went online in August 2010 with an average load of approximately 40 percent. It has already been operating without incident for more than 2,000 hours. “The Microsoft private-cloud architecture is stable, safe, user-friendly, and highly scalable, and it provides a sound IT foundation for future development,” says Mr. Jianbo. “Our users do not have to worry about data loss or computer virus attacks.”
Microsoft Virtualization
Microsoft virtualization is an end-to-end strategy that can profoundly affect nearly every aspect of the IT infrastructure management lifecycle. It can drive greater efficiencies, flexibility, and cost effectiveness throughout your organization. From accelerating application deployments; to ensuring systems, applications, and data are always available; to taking the hassle out of rebuilding and shutting down servers and desktops for testing and development; to reducing risk, slashing costs, and improving the agility of your entire environment—virtualization has the power to transform your infrastructure, from the data center to the desktop.
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www.microsoft.com/virtualization
[1] Access to and use of the Internet may require payment of a separate fee to an Internet service provider. Local and/or long-distance telephone charges may apply.