Smart Radio and Television Cloud Platform Solution

I. Introduction

Currently, cloud platforms have become increasingly important to the innovation and transformation for various industries due to the gradual transition from traditional information services to cloud-based services or even cloud-native services. Cloud platform infrastructure has become a core asset for operators such as China Broadnet. It plays a significant role in improving the competitiveness of traditional toC and toB services, as well as supporting a variety of new services, such as 5G and enterprise and government ICT. In its Guidance Opinions on Promoting the Development of Smart Radio and Television, the National Radio and Television Administration highlighted the development of the radio and broadcast cloud platform. In recent years, the industrial cloud platform of China Broadnet has grown vigorously. A large number of services have been migrated to the cloud to reduce costs and increase the efficiency of business operations. Besides, China Broadnet can provide diverse innovative services based on the cloud platform.

Smart radio and television development requirements, middle and long-term service demands, overall thinking, solutions, and technologies related to the construction of China Broadnet cloud platform are major concerns for the current industry and are discussed in this article.

II. Service demands and overall thinking for the construction of China Broadnet cloud platform

The service demands related to provincial China Broadnet networks and cloud platforms can be summarized as follows:

China Broadnet internal IT support businesses: A number of business systems are involved in this project, including the business support system (BSS), the operation support system (OSS) and the management support system (MSS). According to the current industrial practice of operators, the internal IT support businesses of operators can be deployed in the cloud with no small-sized servers. This type of business focuses on security, stability, and a broad range of IaaS & PaaS service types. The integrated security services of cloud platforms can meet the internal information security requirements of enterprises and national security classified protection requirements. The cluster and redundancy mechanisms of cloud resources provide corresponding guarantees. Business needs can be met with the IaaS and PaaS services that can be delivered on the current cloud platform. The services include cloud services related to big data, multi-type databases, and AI analysis.

Various traditional toC services of China Broadnet: The business systems involved mainly include Internet CDNs, interactive television CDNs and various value-added business systems related to individual user broadband and interactive television businesses. The cloud-based deployment of these businesses requires high performance and high traffic, and has specific requirements for cloud-based services such as large-capacity cloud storage, high-performance bare metal (that is, physical server) and security.

Various traditional toB services of China Broadnet: The main service forms include leasing of various traditional ICT basic resources, web portal hosting, video conference, and data disaster recovery. Most traditional toB business forms can be delivered through cloud-based deployment, while a small portion is still delivered through the deployment of traditional IT architectures. These businesses focus on the diverse needs of IaaS services.

New government and enterprise ICT business of China Broadnet: Most emerging services such as smart city, smart community, industry cloud service, government cloud service, enterprise cloud migration service, and IoT operate on advanced business platforms built on cloud computing and big data technology. These businesses rely on sophisticated and specialized IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS cloud services for specific industries, and require China Broadnet to build a specialized cloud service platform through ecological cooperation.

The reconstruction of 5G and fixed networks of China Broadnet: Cloud migration is the most significant difference between 5G and traditional mobile networks. SDN, NFV, and cloud computing technologies will enable 5G to decouple and migrate a large number of network components to the cloud and to deploy its core networks on cloud platforms at the carrier level. Besides, to innovate the toC and toB businesses, large-scale 5G MEC edge clouds will be deployed to bear services with high bandwidth, low latency, high reliability and large-scale connection. In addition, operators are now reconstructing the traditional bearer networks that are closed, rigid and complicated. The networks are built with the core of DCs and separate network control and forwarding, decoupling of services and networks, and cloud-based deployment of network resources through cloud computing, SDN, NFV and other technologies, satisfying the requirements of business growth and innovation and reducing total costs. The convergence of cloud and bearer networks including 5G has become a trend. The deployment of cloud-based network elements involved in 5G and network reconstruction requires a carrier-class cloud platform with high requirements for reliability, stability, scalability, security, and service processing efficiency.

Telecom operators have similar requirements to China Broadnet. Telecom operators have developed perfect cloud platform construction ideas and have continuously promoted their implementation in order to meet such needs. According to the full-business operation requirements, the cloud platform construction of the three major operators is divided into three categories:

l Private cloud: A private cloud resource pool is primarily designed to meet the internal IT support business requirements of the operator. It is mainly divided into national regions and provincial levels.

l Telecom cloud: Telecommunication cloud, also known as network cloud and communication cloud, consists of regional and provincial clouds that are constructed according to the unified planning of the group to support mainly 5G core networks and 5G edge services. It is constructed in multiple layers including regional clouds where 5G core networks are deployed in its DCs, and three-level distributed edge clouds (of a city, district, county or integrated access room), for deploying the nearest MEC and other edge service resources for users.

l Public cloud and new government and enterprise cloud: The clouds adopt the N+31+X deployment mode to provide multi-level business support capabilities. The clouds can provide public cloud services by constructing a unified resource pool for regions nationwide. To meet the ICT service demands of new government and enterprise clouds, government and enterprise industry clouds are constructed as required in provinces, cities and counties. Besides, the clouds also meet the informatization requirements of all industries by building a business ecology.

In general, the cloud platform construction ideas of operators can be summarized as classifying the service categories as per the attribute and classifying the hierarchy as per the coverage. According to the business requirements of China Broadnet and the construction ideas of the three major operators, H3C believes that constructing the China Broadnet cloud platform completely according to the ideas of the operators at the present stage is unrealistic and unnecessary, but it can be the ultimate target of evolution.

For a provincial radio and television operator, the 1+1+X layout based on the general ideals for the mid-term planning of the cloud platform is recommended. This means constructing a provincial central cloud DC and a provincial backup cloud DC, and deploying edge cloud DCs in cities or counties according to business development needs. By doing so, DCs are physically distributed and integrated in management.

l Provincial central cloud DCs: Provincial central clouds are built according to the full-business mode. The cloud DCs provide cloud services for all businesses, excluding 5G core networks (which can be deployed in the regions uniformly divided by China Broadnet). The services include various internal IT support services, toC broadband and interactive television services, toB traditional services, government and enterprise industry clouds, and smart industry informatization services.

l Provincial backup cloud DCs: The cloud DCs can be constructed in provincial capital cities or medium- and large-sized cities, and are mainly used as the service and data expansion and backup centers for provincial central cloud DCs or be used in the deployment of inter-DC active-active services as required.

l City- and county-level edge cloud DCs: The edge cloud DCs have a small scale of dozens or thousands of servers. The DCs mainly serve broadband and interactive video CDN resources, ICT services of local government and enterprise customers, and future deployment of 5G MEC. With the increase of edge cloud nodes, it is necessary to deploy a unified multi-cloud management platform for the unified management of edge cloud resources and services.

III. H3C Smart Radio and Television Cloud Platform Solution

The H3C cloud platform solution is widely used in the construction of important cloud platforms or cloud data centers in various industries, including the government clouds of 15 national ministries and commissions, the Netsunion finance cloud of the People's Bank of China (for three places and six centers), the converged media clouds of 22 provincial radio and television stations, Hohhot and Harbin bases of China Mobile, and the government and enterprise industry clouds of the three major operators in many provinces and cities. In the radio, television and network industry, we have also served the provincial radio and television cloud platforms of Zhejiang Wasu Radio and Television Network Co., Ltd., Sichuan Cable TV Network, Fujian Broadcasting & TV Network Group, and Hunan Broadcasting System.

Based on the understanding of the construction requirements for the cloud platform of China Broadnet, rich practical experience in various industries and long-term technological accumulation, we proposed the H3C smart radio and television cloud platform solution. The core characteristics of this solution can be summarized as "multi-level distributed management, cloud, computing and big data integrated services, and full-business operation." The overall layout of this solution adopts the 1+1+X layout mentioned above, as shown in the figure below. Among them, X represents a certain number of edge cloud nodes deployed on demand in a city, district, county or integrated access room. These edge cloud nodes differ in business type and size; therefore, their technical solutions are also different. The edge cloud nodes themselves have a compliance relationship in management design.

The solution architecture of provincial and prefecture-level cloud DCs is designed as follows. The overall solution meets the needs of services such as internal IT support services, public services, smart enterprise and enterprise ICT services, 5G services, fixed network cloud migration and reconstruction services.

Planning and design of the infrastructure layer

The digital infrastructure layer of cloud DCs includes H3C high-performance servers, SDN networks and massive storage. H3C can offer a full range of competitive computing, network, security and storage products in the industry, and can conduct converged management of such resources. The cloud network is one of the challenges in constructing cloud DC infrastructures. An SDN data center network is deployed on a cloud DC and interfaces with the upper cloud management platform (H3C CloudOS) through the H3C SNA (the SDN controller cluster) to implement automatic scheduling and management of the network and various security resources (such as firewall and load balancing). The SDN network egress of the data center can adopt the dual-egress design on demand to realize load sharing or failover backup for different services at the egress.

The DCI networks of cloud DCs also realize the unified scheduling and management (including the strategic control of paths and traffic) of all interconnected edge devices and DCI networks of cloud DCs based on the SDN WAN controller.

To realize inter-cloud DC backup or active-active of services, the solution also implements the service backup and active-active network planning between the two cloud DCs, and can be deployed and applied between provincial cloud DCs and provincial backup cloud DCs or the prefecture-level cloud DCs as required.

In addition to the virtualization and unified management network resources realized through the SDN technology, servers and storage devices in cloud DCs also need to rely on the virtualization technology to achieve a unified virtual resource pool for dynamic resource allocation, reallocation and recycling. Computing virtualization adopts H3C CAS virtualization software, including Cloud Virtualization Manager (CVM, a virtualization management platform) and Cloud Virtualization Kernel (CVK, a virtualization kernel). CAS provides a virtual computing resource pool with complete functions, excellent performance, high stability, security and reliability and also performs comprehensive and simple management of the resource pool. The virtual storage resource pool deploys H3C OneStor distributed and converged storage system software based on the large-capacity x86 server cluster, which provides external converged storage services with high performance, large capacity and diversification as well as block storage, file storage, object storage and other storage services, satisfying the needs of various cloud services. OneStor adopts the distributed architecture that provides a powerful guarantee for the reliability, availability, automatic O&M and high performance of the whole storage system. OneStor provides northbound OpenStack Cinder, Swift and Manila plug-ins or interfaces related to block storage, file storage, and object storage services, realizing the connection and incorporation of H3C CloudOS and the standard OpenStack architecture cloud platform.

Cloud Management Platform Planning and Design

The solution adopts the multi-cloud layout of provinces, cities, counties and integrated access rooms, and the planning of the cloud management platform is also hierarchical. The edge cloud DC has a small scale and adopts H3C UIS-Cloud, a lightweight cloud management platform. For large-scale cloud DCs for provinces and prefecture-level cities, H3C CloudOS, a platform integrating AI, big data and cloud computing (ABC) is deployed. The H3C CMP multi-cloud management platform is deployed in provincial centers and serves as the unified management platform for smart radio and television clouds of provincial China Broadnet networks.

The local cloud management platform of cloud DCs adopts H3C CloudOS with the ABC integrated architecture that converges the full-stack functions of the traditional cloud computing platform, big data platform and AI platform. It provides rich cloud, computing and big data integrated services northbound for various upper-layer radio and television businesses, and realizes the heterogeneous large-scale cloud DCs and the unified management and intelligent scheduling of massive resources. Currently, an increasing number of intelligent business applications not only require the traditional common IaaS and PaaS cloud services, but also require the support of various types of big data and AI platforms.

The big data system converged through H3C CloudOS adopts the hybrid computing framework combining the streaming computing engine, the offline computing engine and the distributed database engine. It can provide various businesses of smart radio and television with complete big data services, including collection, conversion, computing, storage, analysis, mining, visualization and O&M management. In addition, the deep integration of cloud computing and big data system greatly improves business launch efficiency and resource utilization, and help users build massive data processing systems.

H3C CloudOS can also converge the H3C AIOS AI service platform to provide one-stop AI full-process services for China Broadnet, including algorithm development, model training, model management, model reasoning and AI market.

The top-layer cloud management platform needs to interface with the local cloud management systems of cloud DCs in provinces and prefecture-level cities and the edge cloud nodes in districts, counties and integrated access equipment rooms, to uniformly operate and manage the resources, businesses and organizations of provincial cloud DCs of China Broadnet. The platform can also be used as the unified self-service entrance for cloud tenants who can submit orders and work order applications, and manage and monitor existing cloud resources.

In this solution, the H3C CMP multi-cloud management platform is used as the top-layer cloud management platform. It interfaces with and incorporates the heterogeneous local cloud platforms of China Broadnet in different regions and the external public cloud resources used by these platforms through CMP. CMP provides the operation portal and self-service portal for top-layer cloud management.

Cloud DC O&M Management Planning and Design

The CloudOS and CMP cloud management platform mentioned above can realize the statistical analysis and status monitoring of cloud platforms and various virtual IaaS and PaaS resources allocated to tenants, meeting the O&M management requirements of cloud resources. However, O&M management of only virtual resources is far from enough for the overall O&M management of the entire smart radio and television cloud platform. The main requirements of overall O&M management include several aspects of three-level cloud DC and edge cloud nodes in provinces, cities and counties:

Resource O&M: Automatic O&M management (equipment deployment, status monitoring, alarm processing, fault locating and configuration upgrade) for physical resources, virtual resources and various on-cloud business application resources by region and role (including tenants).

Service O&M: The deployment of on-cloud business systems will use various physical and virtual resources on the cloud; therefore, it is difficult to find the problems directly as a business abnormality may involve several links. To solve the abnormality, it is necessary to intelligently correlate it with the business and comprehensively analyze the status and historical data of various resources involved in the business to find the hidden troubles.

Standardization and facilitation of O&M services: To comply with the IT system O&M service standards of ITIL or the radio and television industry, it is necessary to build platforms and tools including CMDB, asset management, process management and knowledge base to help build a standardized O&M service system. Considering the efficiency and convenience of O&M work, it is necessary to provide convenient mobile O&M tools for O&M personnel.

This solution adopts the H3C U-Center intelligent O&M platform as the unified intelligent O&M management platform of the smart radio and television cloud platform. U-Center can provide full-domain intelligent O&M management and satisfy the integrated, automatic and intelligent management requirements of the large-capacity distributed cloud platform.

Cloud Security Planning and Design

"Full-service" delivery requirements bring challenges to the delivery efficiency of security management and control and security services of the China Broadnet cloud platform.

For security management and control, the cloud platform not only requires solving the security risks of traditional IT systems, but also faces more complex security problems. On the cloud platform, the sharing of various resources by multiple tenants results in blurred security boundaries. It is unable to use the deployment modes of traditional security devices to secure and separate different logic service partitions. The centralized deployment of computing resources requires the higher performance of security protection devices, so the security capabilities need to dynamically expand with the computing resources. For different business applications, the security path needs to be flexibly customized to meet the differentiated protection requirements. Security policies need to dynamically migrate with virtual machines, to ensure that the corresponding security policies remain valid after the dynamic migration of virtual machines.

The security construction of the smart radio and television cloud platform is generally based on the information security classified protection specification issued by the National Radio and Television Administration, the Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission and other ministries and commissions, especially the cloud computing classified protection 2.0 specification. The solution of H3C adopts the full-stack active security technology of cloud platforms to comprehensively realize physical host security, virtual host security, host operating system and application security protection, physical network security, virtual network security, DC egress security and out-of-band management system security, ensuring the compliance of the overall cloud platform and cloud tenant businesses with the three-level classified protection requirements. On the cloud platform, security is no longer a capability, but a service, that is, "security as a service (SaaS)." To rapidly respond to business demands, various businesses have high requirements for the delivery and change efficiency of security services.

IV. Provincial Radio and Television Cloud Platform Practice

Wasu Group Distributed Edge Cloud Platform

"One Cloud in the Whole Province" constructed and operated by Wasu Cloud Technology Co., Ltd. under Wasu Digital TV Media Group is one of the strategic projects of the Wasu Group Smart Radio and Television Digital Economy Three-Year Development Plan Outline (2019-2021). The platform's layout is based on the province and is oriented to the whole country, forming "one-place, multi-area" distributed deployment and intensive management. Its contents cover computing, storage, network, security, and application.

In 2019, Wasu Group adopted the H3C Smart Radio and Television Cloud Platform Solution to start the construction of its "One Cloud in the Whole Province" platform. The platform consists of the central cloud platform in the provincial subsidiaries and the edge cloud nodes in the city- and county-level companies for unified service scheduling and unified platform management. It provides rich IaaS and PaaS services for the internal support systems and business operation systems of Wasu Group and its subsidiaries and industrial applications of government and enterprise customers. At present, the construction of the top-layer multi-cloud unified management platform, Hangzhou main central cloud platform and some city- and county-level edge cloud nodes has been completed.

Sichuan Cable TV Network Smart Radio and Television Cloud Platform

In 2016, Sichuan Cable TV Network started the planning and construction of the provincial smart radio and television cloud platform, and cooperated with H3C on the overall cloud platform solution. Its smart radio and television cloud platform was put into use within only three months. With this cloud platform, Sichuan Cable TV Network can reduce its investments in resources. Besides, its business system features high reliability, rapid deployment and launch, and convenient O&M management and control.

Currently, the cloud platform has already carried over 80% of the business applications of Sichuan Cable TV Network. At the same time, it also continuously promotes Sichuan Cable TV Network to develop more personalized new products and services for users. For example, the county-level converged media centers under Sichuan Cable TV Network have set up eight platforms for the network- and domain-wide public opinion monitoring and analysis, production commanding and scheduling, and converged media content management. The "smart radio and television" module also includes "smart party building," "smart government," "smart community" and other smart application services as well as 23 types of digital public services in 5 major categories such as "digital library," "earthquake warning" and "smart healthcare." Hence, it becomes a system providing all-around services covering converged media, government and services.