Case Study
China Mobile Yunnan Data Center
Stratus everRun provides high availability and redundancy for business critical systems at world’s largest mobile operator
China Mobile Ltd. is the world’s largest telecommunications provider, both by market capitalization and number of subscribers, with more than 946 million customers as of September 2020. It is a state-owned enterprise, controlled by the Chinese government, and is listed on the NYSE and Hong Kong stock exchanges. The company offers wireline voice, broadband, roaming, and other related services to customers throughout the mainland of China and in Hong Kong. China Mobile operates data centers around the world, including Singapore and London, as well as multiple sites within China.
Equipment must be 100% protected from temperature changes
At its China Mobile Yunnan Data Center, China Mobile faces the challenge of managing energy consumption and closely regulating heat emitted by mission-critical servers and network equipment. The company relies on Johnson Controls’ MetaSys central monitoring system to control temperature through the water cooling unit which is run during the summer heat. In winter, the system turns to a plate heat exchanger to exchange heat between the warm computer room and the naturally cooler outdoors, which also effectively reduces energy consumption.
Because the Internet Data Center business is critical to the China Mobile Data Center, it became the top priority of the China Mobile Data Center operation and maintenance staff to ensure the safe and reliable operation of Johnson Controls’ MetaSys central monitoring system. Requirements on the system operation and maintenance capabilities of the Data Center also increased in step with the increasing dependence of the Data Center on system services.
Because of the real-time nature of data in the industry, even short system interruptions resulted in many hours of manpower to monitor the water cooling unit; if the temperature got too high, it could completely paralyze the entire computer room. In response, the China Mobile team evaluated high-availability software with the following requirements:
- Continuous operation to solve the problem of a single point of failure
- Efficient and fast operation and deployment
- Simple and convenient operation and maintenance management
- Meeting the Data Center’s requirement for high availability systems
- Meeting business needs and optimizing resource utilization
- Continuous application availability
- Eliminating downtime and benefiting more from virtualization
Stratus’ everRun provides continuous availability and built-in redundancy
The China Mobile team selected Stratus’ everRun fault-tolerance software to minimize downtime and keep Windows and Linux applications running continuously to ensure business continuity and data integrity and achieve mainframe-like availability. It can ensure that there is no business interruption or data loss during operation and provide integrated disaster recovery capabilities.
Stratus everRun was installed on two industry-standard servers without the need for specialized IT staff. It required no application modification and runs in virtual and cloud environments to protect virtual machines, applications, and data. Each server, one active and one standby, runs a virtual machine which monitors the health of the two servers via a heartbeat line. If one server fails, it starts a standby virtual machine. The Stratus everRun software ensures that Johnson’s MetaSys system achieves true continuous availability.
Results
Using fault-tolerant Stratus everRun software, China Mobile achieved continuous availability for its core data center at a low total cost of ownership. The team saves man hours through easy monitoring and management. It achieves zero downtime, except for routine maintenance and system deployment, to provide fully connected building automation.
