Recently, the news of Futong Dongfang's entry into the cloud computing field has quickly attracted widespread attention in the industry. With award-winning products and the implementation of benchmark projects, it has sparked a race among media outlets to cover the story. The following is the original news article by Li Xiangjing, a reporter from Yesky.

The innovation of Internet technology is driving the transformation of the global IT industry, with cloud computing being one of the key elements. Against this backdrop, the informatization construction of enterprises is showing new characteristics. The construction of informatization is inseparable from the deployment of infrastructure platforms, and under the wave of domestication, the informatization construction of Chinese enterprises is characterized by the integration of interconnectivity and autonomous control. At the recently concluded third session of the 12th National People's Congress, Premier Li Keqiang proposed "to promote the integration of Internet Plus, cloud computing, and big data with modern manufacturing." This has clarified the direction for the future development of the cloud computing industry and has also become the focus of domestic IT manufacturers' competition for discourse power.

Futong is one of the early enterprise-level IT product distributors in China, having experienced the historical period of China's informatization construction through cooperation with major domestic and international manufacturers. Now, with the continuous deepening of the transformation of China's information industry, Futong is also involved, combining years of industry and channel experience, absorbing the technical advantages of major domestic and international manufacturers, and leveraging transformative IT information technology to delve into customer needs and develop independent enterprise-level information products. Among them, the cloud management platform, Supu Cloud Array, and Cloud Array Xincun are representative works of Futong's business transformation efforts. The Futong Cloud Management Platform supports the heterogeneous environments of enterprise customers, Supu Cloud Array provides integrated software and hardware enterprise cloud arrays, and Cloud Array Xincun offers software-defined agile storage. Relying on OpenStack, Futong Cloud provides elastic computing, distributed storage, software-defined networking, and other cloud services, offering users a complete cloud data center solution through sharing, management, scheduling, and allocation of IT resources.

Futong's Vice President and General Manager of the Enterprise Cloud Computing Product Department, Zou Jun, stated that Futong Cloud Computing develops enterprise-level service-oriented products through a combination of technical cooperation and independent research and development. It provides enterprises with high-security, high-reliability, high-performance enterprise products as services, leading the EPaaS (Enterprise Platform as a Service) market. A unique feature of the Futong Cloud platform is its ability to help customers manage heterogeneous virtualization environments and improve resource utilization rates, thereby fully leveraging existing IT resources. Through virtualization technology, it effectively increases the utilization rate of server resources, reduces subsequent server investment, and achieves the goal of green energy saving and emission reduction. Currently, most large and medium-sized enterprises do not use a single virtualization technology; in many cases, they use multiple virtualization technologies such as VMware, Microsoft, Xen, and KVM simultaneously. The Futong Cloud platform, through heterogeneous virtualization management technology, uniformly manages heterogeneous resources, achieving centralized and unified management of computing resources, storage resources, and network resources, simplifying management complexity, reducing the number of maintenance personnel and technical difficulty; while also strengthening high availability to meet the requirements of business continuity.

Figure 1 - Zou Jun, Vice President of Futong Dongfang and General Manager of the Enterprise Cloud Computing Product Department

In fact, we have observed that server manufacturers have also launched their own cloud management platform products, and other companies have similar offerings. In response to this, Zou Jun emphasized that Futong's biggest characteristic is its closeness to users, emphasizing flexible scalability, and the ability to perform customization based on customer needs. The Futong R&D team maintains a close relationship with enterprise customers, listening to their voices and grasping their needs, thereby allowing the products to maximize the satisfaction of enterprise requirements. The Futong Cloud platform features a modular design, with each module being flexible to combine, and can be deployed into a dedicated private cloud or an externally open public cloud according to different business needs, and it can also provide both public and private cloud services simultaneously.

Additionally, to meet the application needs in the cloud computing environment, Futong has launched a new generation of storage architecture products, Supu Cloud Array and Cloud Array Xincun. Zou Jun stated that cloud computing has now shifted from being a concept to being implemented, and storage performance is a key factor that restricts the performance of cloud platforms. Futong storage was created to meet the storage needs within cloud environments. Cloud Array Xincun is a new generation of enterprise-level software-defined storage, providing a highly stable and high-performance cloud array for the migration of enterprise applications to the cloud and virtualized environments. Supu Cloud Array is an integrated machine optimized by Cloud Array Xincun in conjunction with hardware, capable of providing physically isolated virtualized disk arrays for multi-tenant and multi-application scenarios, meeting the high IOPS demands of enterprise-level storage performance.

Supu Cloud Array and Cloud Array Xincun storage products are jointly developed by Futong Dongfang and Zadara Storage. Zadara Storage has strong capabilities in software-defined storage, with more than 30 global data storage centers across four continents and experience in deploying over 10PB of data storage. Its main partners include Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Toshiba. Software-defined storage extracts the control logic from hardware and implements functions such as volume management, RAID, snapshots, replication, and data protection through software. It can be freely managed and scaled via software. Software-defined storage achieves the same functionality and similar performance as expensive traditional SAN and NAS storage devices, but with the lower costs associated with x86 architecture. It also offers greater flexibility and better scalability provided by cloud computing.

Zou Jun stated that Cloud Array Xincun is essentially a new generation of software-defined storage product with high-performance ServerSAN and software-defined capabilities. It utilizes standard industrial X86 server hardware, coupled with intelligent software that centrally manages CPU, memory, and disk resources, and provides them to users as services. According to the users' business needs, it employs a virtual disk array approach to offer intelligent, elastic, and automated unified storage resources for customer operations. Each virtual disk array leverages SSD caching along with conventional mechanical SAS and SATA hard drives, equipped with an enterprise-level high-availability suite that includes features such as snapshots, cloning, and remote replication.

Zou Jun continued to add that the Cloud Array Xincun software solution provided by Futong can be applied to the service operator market, supporting operators in offering storage services to the public. The Cloud Array Xincun software solution supports thousands of storage nodes with storage capacities up to hundreds of PBs and includes a billing module. The most critical aspect is that Cloud Array Xincun pools all nodes to form multiple virtual, dedicated, and private disk arrays known as VPSA on a logical level. Each VPSA exclusively occupies specific CPU cores and designated memory and disks within the nodes, ensuring the stability and data privacy of the VPSA. It also writes data across multiple node hard drives in a high-speed network RAID configuration, thereby enhancing performance and data security.

Futong's integrated software and hardware product, Supu Cloud Array, has a distinct advantage in supporting enterprise-level application scenarios. For applications with high IO demands such as databases, ERP, and VDI, Supu Cloud Array can provide extremely high IO performance, along with secure data isolation for multi-tenant environments and on-demand horizontal scaling. Zou Jun stated that although the trend towards domestic products is very evident at present, foreign manufacturers still dominate the mid-to-high-end storage field. Supu Cloud Array and Cloud Array Xincun will compete with foreign manufacturers in the enterprise-level mid-to-high-end storage domain as domestic brands.

Cloud Array Xincun actually shares a similar philosophy with IBM Spectrum Storage XIV, as both emphasize software-driven and hardware-supported functionality. Both are capable of achieving horizontal scaling to enhance storage performance. Cloud Array Xincun introduces a virtual layer between storage hardware and applications, enabling more flexible storage scheduling. Zou Jun revealed that Cloud Array Xincun already has customer case studies, with its application scenario targeting VDI applications to address the common boot storm issues in VDI environments.

In conclusion, Zou Jun stated that in recent years, Futong has transformed into a technology supplier and solution provider focused on enterprise-level IT products and services. Futong, with years of industry experience, has formulated a transformation strategy for independent products and services based on the needs and trends of the Chinese market. Futong has developed a series of storage products under the Supu brand, JiuMen system software products, and cloud platform management products through a combination of cooperation, integration, and research and development, and has its own intellectual property rights in system hardware and software information products. In the current era of cloud computing and Internet Plus driven by the wave of domestication, Futong is committed to helping enterprise customers achieve the transformation of their IT architecture and contributing to the development of the national information industry. (Article source: http://cio.yesky.com/service/328/55652828.shtml)