When the concept of “cloud computing” first came around, many people failing to fathom its intricacy rather called it “cloudy computing”. Now an even larger myriad of new concepts about computing have popped up, such as edge computing and fog computing, which is all the more confusing. Despite all the fancy terms, one core rule is always true with any means of computing: It must be fast, precise, and simple to implement. However, computing is a highly professional technology, so it must better be treated by the professionals, say, by vendors like Huawei. Users do not care about the ins and outs of how computing is done. They just want the results. This is also key to the continuous evolution of computing.
As the informatization journey has advanced this far over the past two decades and more, enterprises are well aware of the importance of fully harnessing IT technologies. The value of IT infrastructure is that it is now one of the pillars for any business. As business runs on the surface and IT is rather on the underlying layer, IT infrastructure has long been deemed as a cost-consuming part of an organization.
Nowadays, things have changed. As the human society has moved from the information era to the data era, data now becomes the raw material, the new energy. Based on this precondition, IT is not only a pillar but also a driving force for business value creation. Enterprises’ focus on IT infrastructure has also shifted from effectively utilizing the IT resources to making IT a means to better support business growth and innovation. From a cost consideration to the focus of value creation, IT, or computing, has taken on a new shade of meaning. Therefore, it calls for a new name that would more authentically and accurately convey this nuance.
Just when the industry is fumbling for the right word to articulate this trend, Huawei comes up with an idea, which sheds the light to show us the way.
Early this year, Huawei IT Product Line put forward a new mission: to herald in an intelligent future with smart IT. To put it simply, what Huawei means is that IT is not IT if it is not intelligent; once you are empowered with intelligent IT, you are on track toward an intelligent future. Artificial intelligence technologies are really like a catalyst and booster that take computing a gigantic step forward.
Intelligent Computing Is a New Beginning
If “heralding in an intelligent future with smart IT” strikes you as being too vague or appears to you more like a slogan, “intelligent computing” may make this expression more concrete to you. Or, let me put it this way — intelligent computing can be regarded as a realistic method to herald in an intelligent future. It’s the beginning of bringing an intelligent future to life.
The Global Industry Vision 2025 (GIV 2025) released by Huawei predicts that by 2025, the total number of global connections will reach 100 billion, video traffic will account for 89%, and 86% enterprises will use AI, creating a digital economy valued at USD23 trillion. Of course this upcoming tide will not leave the computing industry untouched. Computing used to be a pure expenditure-consuming IT capability of enterprises. However, now and onwards, computing will be the pivotal force to fuel the business model innovation of enterprises for them to gain quick wins in the future landscape.
It is based on this judgment and perception that Huawei proposes the concept of intelligent computing. To sum up, intelligent computing addresses the issues from two aspects: the technology aspect and the industry aspect.
From the technology perspective, it’s an indisputable fact that global data center construction is picking up speeds, on an increasingly larger scale. It’s not rare to see equipment rooms with thousands of and even over one million servers. The rapid development of services requires IT infrastructure with rapid deployment, fast rollout, and easy management capabilities. When IT infrastructure grows to volumes and complexity beyond the scope of normal human capabilities, it is essential to have an intelligent, autonomous IT infrastructure encompassing compute, storage, and O&M. Such an IT infrastructure is expected to help better guarantee Service Level Agreement (SLA), reduce IT expenditure, and boost efficiency.
Yet there is also another subtle change. With the emergence of new intelligent services such as AI, the traditional x86 architecture centered around CPU capabilities is no longer the optimal choice for massive computing requirements. Instead, heterogeneous computing based on various computing units such as GPU, FPGA, and ASIC is emerging. Therefore, the IT infrastructure needs to break through the computing boundaries and grow technical capabilities such as heterogeneous computing, cloud enablement, and edge intelligence. The IT infrastructure should be able to provide abundant compute power on premises, in the cloud, and at the edge, fully enabling collaboration in between.
On July 6, 2017, Huawei announced the Boundless Computing strategy and a series of solutions. Huawei has been laying the groundwork for intelligent computing.
From the industry perspective, it must be pointed out that the nature of the enterprise digital transformation is intelligent transformation. Even the most die-hard traditional industry needs market insights, precise customer positioning, and an efficient supply chain in order to gain business success. To make all these happen, intelligence comes in the first place. Large-scale industrial production is gradually turning to personalized flexible production. “+ Intelligence” has become the key ingredient to the core competitiveness of enterprises in every industry. IT infrastructure is gradually transforming into intelligent solutions and enabling industry intelligence. And this is an unstoppable trend.
Intelligence is not a function or a product, but rather a most fundamental productivity, which will lead to large-scale new industries. Intelligence is also a genetic element that will be implanted in everyone’s daily life and work. Intelligent computing will lead us to the door to intelligent IT infrastructure.
Intelligent Computing Is Already Around
Actually, just like with all novel things, the fancy terms about computing, rather than gaining popularity, may inadvertently keep people at bay because the terms are confusing in so many different ways. The best solution to this problem is to put the new terms into real practice and concrete implementation. This is how cloud computing finds its way out. After it goes from the hyped phase to the practical phase, it has been ever since regarded as no more than a pragmatic, effective, and helpful means to help people live, work, and play with more ease and fun. Cloud has become a new critical infrastructure.
What Huawei Has in Store to Make Intelligent Computing a Reality?
It’s terribly wrong to assume that intelligent computing is just empty talks so far. It has brought an intelligent, brand new look to Shenzhen traffic. Huawei has applied edge computing to smarten up transportation, and developed a big data-fueled solution to tackle city congestion. The Huawei intelligent transportation solution has enabled Shenzhen Traffic Police Corps to leverage Huawei’s FusionServer high-performance intelligent video analytics servers to collect real-time traffic data, store, filter, and process traffic information, and send it back to the Huawei-developed big data traffic platform. The solution accurately provides information about the mobile object spatiotemporal engine and real-time traffic volume computing, improving traffic control efficiency. Statistics show that the peak duration decreases by 15% for some key road sections in Shenzhen, and the traffic speeds on some major roads in districts such as Dameisha and Longhua increase by 9%.
Still look for something more? Then you must take a look at the Huawei Atlas intelligent cloud hardware platform. It is another powerful enabler in Huawei’s intelligent computing product portfolio. Huawei has worked with industry-leading partners such as Yitu and SenseTime to build integrated facial recognition solutions for different application scenarios based on Atlas. Atlas has played an important role in the construction of safe cities and smart cities. It is reported that Atlas also plays a key role in the building of Shenzhen’s “City Transportation Brain”. The project was awarded the Safe City Award at Smart City Expo World Congress 2017. Over the past year, Huawei has teamed up with multiple heavyweight ecosystem partners based on the Atlas hardware platform. Atlas will serve as the cornerstones of Huawei’s intelligent computing hardware and provide high-value AI applications for industry customers.
Intelligent Computing Propels the Journey to an Intelligent Future
In fact, heralding in an intelligent future through smart IT is not just a slogan. It is the main theme of Huawei’s IT infrastructure in the future. It also has its own technical support, that is, Huawei’s “One Cloud, One Lake, One Platform” architecture. “One Cloud” refers to the converged cloud resource pool, which implements unified delivery, management, and services of the infrastructure through intensive construction. “One Lake” refers to the data lake. It aggregates data from all parties and provides the entire-lifecycle processing capability to help customers transform data resources into data assets. “One Platform” is an application enabling platform that integrates basic data services, general middleware, and industry middleware to enable customers and industry ISVs to quickly innovate services based on multiple types of middleware.
The “One Cloud, One Lake, One Platform” architecture provides the essential support for the Huawei intelligent servers. These include the renowned Huawei FusionServer V5 series intelligent servers and KunLun Mission Critical Servers, and also the new-generation G series heterogeneous computing platforms, as well as intelligent edge video analytics solutions.
However, intelligent computing is far more than just adding a GPU core to servers. Intelligent computing is composed of multiple layers: Based on accelerator components, build application-oriented intelligent servers; leverage entire-lifecycle management to implement intelligent O&M; provide flexible resource orchestration to reinvent smart cloud data centers oriented to cloud services; synergize hardware and software to make data center management more intelligent. In a word, Huawei’s intelligent computing initiative is to build a full-stack AI intelligent cloud hardware platform to infuse more intelligence into data centers.
On May 31, Huawei held an intelligent computing media communication in Beijing, announcing its ambition to pave a way fast forward to an intelligent future with Boundless Computing. From the beginning, with the launch of the Boundless Computing strategy, to HUAWEI CONNECT 2017, with the demonstration of all kinds of Intelligence + Computing practices, all the way through to early this year, at the Huawei analyst conference, with the proposition of heralding in an intelligent future through smart IT, Huawei now has added the key touches to its intelligent computing blueprint. Huawei has cultivated this deep-rooted mindset to fully harness intelligent technologies to contribute to a better world.
Today, we are again impressed by the new-generation Huawei intelligent computing products. The latest KunLun V5 Mission Critical Server continues its benchmarking stability and reliability. It incorporates innovative RAS2.0 technology to support advanced RAS features, such as proactive fault warning engine, intelligent memory monitoring, and online replacement of key components. KunLun V5 delivers reliability rivaling that of traditional UNIX servers. It also offers physical partitioning and logical partitioning, allowing multiple databases and applications to be consolidated onto KunLun to implement unified management, simplify O&M, and improve resource utilization. KunLun V5 embraces an open ecosystem based on the x86 architecture. It supports mainstream operating systems, virtualization, databases, and application software, greatly reducing the TCO.
Huawei has also released ES3000 V5, one of its three accelerator components, to provide higher performance, more ease of use, and smarter features. Compared with the previous-generation products, ES3000 V5 improves the performance by 50%. Huawei provides an application-oriented reference architecture, enabling customers to select an appropriate architecture based on application scenarios. ES3000 V5 supports intelligent multi-stream, atomic write, and intelligent O&M to ensure service QoS and customer O&M experience.
Huawei has updated its vision to bringing digital to every person, home and organization for a fully connected, intelligent world. As one of the pillars to pivot this vision, Huawei’s intelligent computing will enable industry intelligence, accelerate the intelligent transformation of enterprises, and smooth the journey towards an intelligent world.
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Source: Huawei Enterprise Blog
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