Project Introduction

On 5 January 2018, with a clear mouse click by duty staff at the Xuzhou city and county two-level road-network center, the Xuzhou Highway Management Office road-network facilities operations-management system officially went live.

Unlike previous system deployments, this time Xuzhou Highway Office bought not a single server and added not a single network device, achieving “zero investment” in hardware. Deployment time also fell from the original one to two days to less than half an hour now, skipping hardware installation, network commissioning, operating-system installation, and other steps. All of this came from Jiangsu “Highway Cloud,” completed at the end of 2017. A few mouse clicks in the Highway Cloud management system can build a publishing environment for an application system in a few minutes.

Jiangsu Highway Cloud is an industry private cloud built by the Highway Bureau of the Jiangsu Provincial Department of Transport under the province-wide “Transport Cloud” architecture, and is the first cloud platform in China to serve ordinary-highway industry applications across a province. The Highway Bureau of the Jiangsu Provincial Department of Transport is a functional department of the provincial Department of Transport, responsible for industry management of highways across Jiangsu. It already has a province–city–county three-level network covering highway management and maintenance nodes across Jiangsu, and has achieved provincial centralization of highway management, construction, maintenance, collection, and other business systems.

Business Challenges

With implementation of the national informatization development strategy and transformation of the ordinary-highway industry, highway departments have made full use of big data, cloud computing, and other new-generation information technologies and have piloted innovation in road-administration patrol, bridge monitoring, road-network operations analysis, and other real business scenarios. However, servers, storage, databases, middleware, and other infrastructure needed to run information systems often cost hundreds of thousands or even more than a million yuan, creating a high barrier to informatization. Many good ideas and plans from front-line production could only remain as ideas and could not be put into practice.

Solution

To break this bottleneck, the Highway Bureau of the Jiangsu Provincial Department of Transport launched research and construction of “Highway Cloud” in the second half of 2016. The construction team, targeting ordinary-highway cloud-computing application needs and scale, organized 9 units and carried out targeted evaluation of 18 categories and 58 indicators at the IaaS (infrastructure as a service) layer, PaaS (platform as a service) layer, and management and control system. After three rounds of testing and discussion, Sugon stood out, won the bid for Jiangsu Highway Cloud, and completed deployment and commissioning on 28 December 2017. On 5 January 2018, the first city-level application officially went live.

(1) Sugon provided ParaStor300 distributed storage and DS900 high-end storage as core hardware for the cloud platform.

(2) Sugon Cloudview software was used to build a compute-resource virtualization layer, virtualizing CPU, memory, and other hardware and pooling Highway Bureau infrastructure. It can also uniformly manage the customer’s existing VMware virtualization resource pool, protecting prior investment.

(3) Sugon Cloudview cloud-management software was used to build infrastructure service-delivery capability, achieving unified management of the provincial Highway Bureau data-center resource pool, including lifecycle management and resource allocation of virtual and physical resources, and flexible orchestration and scheduling of compute, storage, and network, including elastic scaling and automatic load balancing.

(4) Highway Cloud also built service-management capability, providing service lifecycle management, and unified infrastructure operations capability, aggregating cloud and non-cloud resource monitoring from the provincial bureau and city highway offices for unified operations, with flexible rights and domain separation. For this project Sugon provided the Jiangsu Highway Bureau with multi-layer administrator privileges serving different operations-management levels of the highway system. It also built a unified portal, providing cloud-platform administrators and users with an access interface for resource management, monitoring and operations, service requests, application deployment, self-service, and other functions.

Project Highlights

A point of Highway Cloud that customers particularly valued was the use of a self-developed SDN (software-defined networking) module. It provides multi-tenant VPC (virtual data center) functions, including IP management, DHCP, security groups, and load balancing. Security groups can provide NIC-level fine-grained security protection for virtual machines, effectively preventing attacks based on IP and ports on the internal network. Sugon’s SDN solution combines software-driven networking and security with policy-based provisioning tightly integrated into virtual data-center management. It also provides a highly scalable virtual network that simplifies provisioning, lowers operating cost, and reduces the need for dedicated appliances. The launch of Jiangsu Highway Cloud reduced duplicate investment in informatization infrastructure at the Jiangsu highway city and county levels, lowered the barrier to entry, and avoided the awkwardness of county-level informatization having to be complete in every function despite a small scale. It also enables unified supervision and flexible allocation of software and hardware resources, raising utilization and system stability. The grass roots can focus more on production application innovation. Good business ideas can go live quickly through iterative application development, greatly shortening the wait for hardware resources. As applications on Jiangsu Highway Cloud increase, innovative business-management methods and public-service means will be better able to learn from one another, forming a mutually reinforcing development landscape and boosting highway modernization.

Sugon’s SDN module is implemented entirely in software, achieving effective allocation and management of network and security mechanisms inside the virtual data center based on defined policies. It also provides a highly scalable virtual network that simplifies provisioning, lowers operating cost, and reduces the need for firewalls, load balancers, and other hardware.