OpenStack foundation holds ‘OpenStack Summit Austin 2016’ from April 25 to 29 at Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas. In this event, recent OpenStack version ‘Mitaka’ and various cases of application related to OpenStack are introduced.

‘OpenStack Summit Austin 2016’ from April 25 to 29 at Austin Convention Center in Austin is an event where more than 7,500 participants from more than 55 countries are attending. In this global event, enterprise IT strategy, cloud application development, telecom ecosystem and NFV architecture aspects, and new projects and technologies in community are covered. Also, at developer’s working session, it will be discussing roadmap of ‘Newton,’ which is the next release on probably October 2016.

In this OpenStack Summit Austin 2016, various OpenStack introduction cases are introduced. Among them, in ‘State Grid Corporation of China Embraces OpenStack to Avoid Vendor Lock-In’ session, an introduction case of China SGCC(State Grid Corporation of China) is highlighted. Mainly having been using the validated proprietary products to IT system, SGCC introduced OpenStack for maintaining function and performance and optimizing vendor dependency or cost aspect so that it can implement automated private cloud.


SGCC in China is a power supply related company with the world’s largest scale, and among 500 companies in Fortune, it has the scale of ranking the seventh. Moreover, SGCC basically uses validated proprietary products to IT system, and it introduced that it decided to integrate open source technologies for optimizing costs and removing vendor dependency. Also, it is added that OpenStack is one of the cases realizing SGCC’s automated self-control private cloud.

As power supply, which is special area, influences the whole society both directly and indirectly, ‘reliability’ and ‘safety’ are pointed out as the overriding considerations. Reliability, solving vendor dependency, and cost optimization are the tasks that a new architecture has. Although introducing OpenStack based new architecture, the system should be still stable. It blocks subordination to specific technology of specific vendor through open source, and aims at cost reduction.

The existing IT system is as big and complicated as scale of a company. To be specific, the whole system, which is composed of middleware, storage, and database, has more than 100 information systems, more than 500TB data and 1000 hosts are distributed each in 26 states. These systems had dependency of a specific vendor, because the existing system had used Unix based ‘minicomputer’ for reliability, and the migration from Unix to Linux is one of the key points of this project.


The existing infra is based on the composition of connection with storage through Unix based mini-computer and duplexed fibre-channel connection. This composition is certainly proven, but it has still some disadvantages to responding to changes. For the last five years, new hardware and software technologies came out innumerably, and SGCC revealed that it had considered the movement to IaaS. However, it is added that high cost is an obstacle when upgrading the existing infra into a recent product.

The new infra had big change of switching the system based on Unix to the system based on x86 and Linux. As Unix based minicomputer is switched to x86 based system, the perspective that focuses on ‘quality’ is changed to ‘quantity’ perspective that secures much more computing resources, and the use of proprietary software is changed to ‘open source base.’ Moreover, the most critical parts when introducing open source are a cost problem, and ‘mystery’ area in proprietary software.

SGCC’s journey has continued for the last 2-3 years. In 2014, it converted Unix system and storage to x86 system and server SAN configuration, and removed database system. In December 2014, it started to consider an introduction of OpenStack. In September 2015, it selected a partner, and began an introduction of OpenStack in earnest. By February 2016, it is currently operating more than 1,000 VMs in OpenStack based infra composed of more than 200 physical systems, and it is going to integrate big data, cloud, SDx, etc. in the future.


SGCC introducing their OpenStack based infra with ‘EasyStack’. They selected EasyStack as partner due to the aspect of professionalism at enterprise private cloud, which is positioned at leader of OpenStack related ecosystem in Asia. Moreover, it reflected that it provides reliable OpenStack version that well knows enterprise, accepts and controls requirements of various parts by itself.

Currently, in infra with the level of phase 1, five controllers and total more than 200 nodes, which are consisted of more than 130 nodes and about 60 storage nodes based on x86, are connected. And they are connected to the composition of two core switches and three 10G switches per rack. Per standard rack, about 10 servers are installed, and storage and compute node are mixed and composed in the rack rather than separating them. Network composition is divided into internal VM’s network connection, external connection, storage network, network for distribution, network for management, etc.

As advantages of OpenStack, flexibility that can match applications, customize aspect, a quick requirement response through open API, etc. are mentioned. The advantages such as container, application monitoring, and distribution and management aspects are also mentioned, and the advantage that open source provides is added. In infra composition, it used OpenStack’s Nova, Cinder and Keynote with a base of x86 hardware, and it integrated Zabbix, Docker, API for DevOps, etc.

As a task in the future, OpenStack cluster will be extended to the composition with more than one thousand nodes per states and 50 thousand total grid scales, and an upgrade to the recent stabilized version is being planned. In storage, Ceph’s upgrade and integration of database cloud, advanced QoS, etc. are introduced. Moreover, stabilized version, good hardware, integration of SDN, the use of SSD, etc. are technically recommended. Besides, advancement of DevOps aspect, reconstitution and management of IT corporation fitted to cloud environment, management perspection and method reestablishment are recommended about IT technology.

Copyright © acrofan All Right Reserved