Why do television stations want to be a cloud platform?

The building is located in the southwest corner of Beijing’s northeastern Third Ring Road and southwest of Chaoyang Park. Due to its special appearance, passing people can't help but look around to see more, or to touch it. This is the Phoenix Satellite TV Holdings Limited, which enjoys prestige in mainland China. The company (hereinafter referred to as “Phoenix Satellite TV”) Beijing International Media Center is also the new headquarters building of Phoenix Satellite TV in Beijing.

Xiao Xie found that on entering the first day of the building, the company let him open a cloud office account and also deployed a thin client.

However, even if a new employee uses his own computer or iPad to work, there is no problem. Using a personal office device to access the cloud office platform network address link, you can log in to the personal cloud desktop office system, as well as his mailbox and related software for his work. , storage, and other computing resources are all accessed through the cloud desktop.

A cloud desktop service with a 2-core CPU, 2GB of memory, and a 50GB system disk costs about 300 yuan per person per month. Employees can use such accurate accounting for each computing resource, and monthly bills will be sent to Xiao Xie or other employees' companies in a timely manner.

All mysteries are in another identity in this building. He is the first domestic building to realize operational cloud architecture.

Prior to this, Phoenix TV was a typical traditional TV station. The entry process was long and trivial. It needed to fill in the form first. After approval, the company configured or purchased computers (and other related IT equipment) for new employees and waited until they got the computer. The company's IT staff opened mailboxes, related accounts of various companies, and also installed various working software. Nowadays, the IT-related processes for new employees to enter the office take only a few minutes. They are concise, clear, and efficient. The services are all completed in the background. What's more important is that such a cloud architecture is operational.

Established in 1996 and headquartered in Hong Kong, Phoenix Satellite TV Holdings Limited has expanded its business from a global Chinese satellite television channel to a media group including new media and weekly magazines. It has become one of the most influential media in Chinese language media. The content is known for its innovation and cutting edge. In the layout of IT and the Internet, Phoenix TV is also brave enough to innovate.

What is a cloud architecture?

As an integrated media group, Phoenix Satellite TV's staff are scattered all over the world. How to make the headquarters, branch offices, and overseas stations all work on the same platform to improve the overall efficiency of the work. The global interconnected unified management and provision of high-quality full-media information service platform is Wang Hongbo, deputy director of Phoenix TV's information and network management department. The goal of the entire team.

Therefore, Wang Hongbo proposed Phoenix Satellite TV to launch a “2+7” data center global plan, and gradually realize a cloud-based dual-core data center (Hong Kong, Beijing) and seven sub-centers (Shanghai, Taipei, Shenzhen, Los Angeles, Washington, Paris, London) architecture.

Phoenix Satellite TV sets up a distributed data center in three steps: first, building a cloud-based cloud data center in Beijing, and interoperating with the Hong Kong headquarters cloud data center to integrate the back-office services of TV media, new media, and paper media; Physical distribution, a logically unified 2+7 data center architecture; finally providing high-quality information services.

Phoenix TV's initial attempt in 2009 was an opportunity to move its headquarters in Hong Kong. The entire relocation period was particularly tight, with only six months. In particular, the construction period of the renovation and other infrastructure accounted for 95% of the construction time.

Deadline has confirmed that Phoenix Satellite TV must move into the new building in Dapu in March 2009. Wang Hongbo thought at the time to bring all the systems together. According to him, “The word cloud was just a theory and it stayed in the forward-looking report. So we wanted to find a way to centralize the management of the host and put all the systems in the back office. It also adopted Citrix's application virtualization solution and designed an all-in-one network system with an innovative cloud architecture."

In 2009, the relocation of Phoenix Satellite TV's Hong Kong headquarters was successfully completed, and the entire Taiwanese network, which was designed using cloud architecture, won the Asia-Pacific Alliance's highest engineering technology award. Today, the application of cloud at Phoenix Satellite TV's Hong Kong headquarters is more in-depth: the first is the cloud desktop, which provides a daily office platform for more than 700 employees in the Hong Kong headquarters; the cloud server host system provides host computing resources for office and business systems; and the high-performance remote host access system, Provides centralized scheduling resource capabilities for 3D and high-stream video.

In addition, Citrix's XenApp application enables employees to travel to and from the back-office system anytime, anywhere, whether in the office or at home.

The system design of the Beijing New Building in 2014 was a more challenging cloud architecture innovation. The situation in Beijing is more complicated because Phoenix Satellite TV independently uses the entire building in Hong Kong. However, not only dozens of Phoenix-based companies in Beijing are assigned to the new building, but also these companies have different requirements and different needs.

The Phoenix Satellite Television Information and Network Management Department and its partners used the integrated deployment of the modular machine room. Because the plane structure of the engine room is complex, the configuration of the traditional equipment room will result in a messy overall layout and poor cooling effect. The use of an integrated modular room deployment not only shortened the delivery cycle to 4 to 12 weeks, but also increased the space utilization rate by 30%, significantly reducing the PUE (the ratio of energy used by the data center to the energy used by the IT load) and transportation. Dimensional expenses.

On the IT infrastructure platform, the new headquarters building uses virtualization technology to virtualize physical servers and storage devices into large resource pools to provide on-demand services to multiple users and multiple services, reducing user IT spending and increasing capital appreciation. Secure the end-to-end deployment of infrastructure, access, networks, resource pools, virtual machines, and endpoints to avoid data loss and compromise.

Based on the cloud architecture, Phoenix TV built a unified media asset sharing platform, integrated existing IT resources within the group, and provided cloud-based IT services to several Phoenix-based companies, including cloud hosting, cloud desktop, cloud storage, and IPTV. Internet access services, and their respective professional business software services.

In addition to the staff application cloud platform in the new building in Beijing, Fenghuangwang, located in Beijing’s North Fifth Ring, is also using this cloud office platform for daily work. Through the interconnected fiber optic cable between Phoenix International Media Center and Phoenix, the cloud platform deployed more than 1,000 cloud desktop office systems for Phoenix Web employees.

Beijing’s new building with a full range of art scenes will enter most of the companies by the end of 2014. The number of Phoenix Satellite TV IT staff providing services in the background is only 3 people. Even if resident integrators are added, it’s only 10 individuals. Can serve 5,000 people.

Internal private cloud, external public cloud hybrid cloud structure

The new headquarters building in Beijing is funded by the headquarters of Phoenix Satellite TV Group. The same overall system construction is also completed by the Group. How can each participating company allocate the operating expenses of computing resources according to the use of computing resources? This is also really related to whether the building of this cloud architecture is truly operational and sustainable.

The positioning of the cloud architecture of Phoenix Satellite TV's new building in Beijing is a hybrid cloud. On the one hand, it is a private cloud for Phoenix TV, which realizes cost accounting and provides services at various office service levels. Taking the television system's core system program content production and management system as an example, how much resources and space are used in television program production can be calculated;

On the other hand, for external companies, the provision of cloud leasing mainly includes cloud desktop services, network bandwidth leasing services, virtual cloud host server services, cloud storage services, and so on.

The internal private cloud and the hybrid cloud structure of external public clouds have increased the difficulty of service and operation. How can Phoenix quickly and accurately calculate the access to resources?

In order to achieve operations, the design idea of ​​the Beijing New Building office cloud platform is that the personnel office platform is the cloud architecture and the upper layer business is the BOSS system. This is the first time that the BOSS system of the Telecom operators has been applied to the cloud architecture billing operation of a building. IT innovation.

This cloud platform architecture enables multi-tenancy (use), domain management and user isolation, and portal (portal) operation system can automatically process online office applications submitted and submitted cloud office system applications, and achieve user-side tiering Management, that is, companies can manage their own cloud office resources. Through the joint efforts of Phoenix TV's IT department and partners, the operational cloud architecture can be realized.

The cloud platform operation system provides each company with a bill for calculating cloud office system resources. Like a rent bill, it can accurately calculate the system configuration of how many cloud office resources and cloud office resources are occupied, and send it to the corresponding company in time after use.

The operational cloud architecture is not innovative for innovation. It has far-reaching significance for the future development of Phoenix Satellite TV:

1. Overall improve the IT level of the entire Phoenix TV Group (including affiliates). Some small companies and affiliates have relatively small scales and low levels of informatization. They even use more primitive methods of operation. Platform services can help them quickly advance the level of IT and the Internet.

2. Achieve reasonable cost sharing, use computing resources on demand, and reduce waste;

3. This is an important part of implementing the all-media strategy, building an integrated platform and implementing a 2+7 distributed cloud data center. Beijing and Hong Kong are the two most important cloud data centers and back up each other, laying the foundation for the integration of follow-up all-media business processes.

Wang Hongbo, Deputy Director of Information and Network Management Department, Hong Kong Phuang L Holdings Co., Ltd. 1999-2003: Worked in Beijing Zhongke Dayang Technology Development Co., Ltd., served as technical support engineer, project manager, and product manager; from 2003 to present: worked in Hong Kong Phoenix TV Co., Ltd., served as senior network management engineer, and Deputy Director of Network Management.