China is a big manufacturing country in the world. In the past 40 years, the scale of China's manufacturing industry has increased by 18 times, and its added value has reached 2.2 trillion US dollars. The proportion of manufacturing in China's GDP is as high as 40%, which shows its importance to the Chinese economy.
At the same time, while China's manufacturing industry is developing at a high speed, it is also generally facing problems such as unreasonable industrial structure, capacity ceiling, low product quality accuracy, indistinct differentiation, and weak core competitiveness. The pressure brought about by the rising costs of manpower, environmental protection, and materials has brought unprecedented pressure to the transformation of the manufacturing industry.
So, where is China's manufacturing industry headed, and what new technologies and innovations will be used to complete the new transformation and upgrading? In the "14th Five-Year Plan and 2035 Long-term Goal Outline", there is actually a clear answer, that is - "coordinated development of cloud services and edge computing services", it can be said that in the future, a new type of infrastructure for cloud-edge-end collaboration will be created , will be an important way to realize flexible scheduling of distributed resources, high-speed interconnection of global data, and penetration of intelligent applications to the edge.
But we must also see that in the process, with more terminals, more connections, and more data, the issue of how to build an efficient and secure infrastructure platform for manufacturing companies has become increasingly prominent, and risks and challenges are increasing. Strengthening enterprise IT information security has undoubtedly become a new topic for the manufacturing industry. In this context, how to plan a secure IT system and build an infrastructure platform to realize cross-core-cloud-edge workload migration and management, and dynamically meet the needs of service innovation in the manufacturing industry has become more "imminent". .
Building a "Zero Trust" Architecture
The main line and direction of the current digital transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry is the integration of industrialization and industrialization promoted by the industrial Internet, that is, on the basis of the successful digital transformation of enterprises, and further through the construction of industrial Internet platforms, cloud computing, big data, Internet of Things, etc. will be accelerated. The industrial connection between technology and modern manufacturing improves the production efficiency and product quality of the manufacturing industry, and finally completes the deep integration of informatization and industrialization, and promotes the full implementation of intelligent manufacturing.
This also means that in addition to the data generated by the core system in the future manufacturing industry, more new data will be generated from the edge, and at the same time, the new computing power will often be deployed based on the cloud. At the same time, with the wide application of these new technologies, more brand-new problems have arisen, including the high cost of mass data transmission, huge uncontrollable delay performance, and the persistence and stability of network connections. It is difficult to guarantee, and the security of the production line and product privacy are at risk.
From this point of view, in the future, the cloud-side-end "Three Lines of Governor" will open up the flood of manufacturing data. Through cloud-edge collaboration, data will be efficiently, real-time, durable and securely interconnected between the cloud, edge, and end. , forming the migration and management of workloads and data across core-cloud-edge, will be a new direction for the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry.
According to Cao Keyong, senior solution architect at VMware, as more and more manufacturing industries form a new architecture of "cloud-edge-device", they are also facing new risks in terms of security, which are mainly reflected in several aspects:
• With the rise of malware and cyber-attacks, businesses are at increased risk of data breaches;
• With the improvement of automation and intelligence in the manufacturing industry, the stability and security requirements of the production line for the core system of the enterprise are also increasing;
• Due to the increasingly large and complex manufacturing supply chain, the risks arising from the third-party supply chain are also increasing;
• Coupled with insufficient safety awareness of enterprise staff, it will also lead to the expansion of the "exposure surface" of safety risks in the manufacturing industry.
The emergence and evolution of the zero-trust architecture based on the concept of "never trust, continue to verify" has begun to become an important concept and magic weapon for building a security protection system under the new "cloud-edge-device" architecture of today's manufacturing industry. In this regard, as the earliest manufacturer to advocate native security, and a company that has verified and practiced in the field of "zero trust" architecture for many years, VMware can be said to have developed quite complete in terms of "zero trust" architecture, and created VMware The "five pillars" of zero trust are trusted users, trusted devices, trusted workloads, trusted transmissions/sessions, and trusted applications and data.
More importantly, based on VMware's "five pillars" of zero trust, VMware has also laid a solid foundation for consolidating the security of the manufacturing cloud-edge architecture. Currently, it can provide manufacturing companies with four reinforcement scenarios, including:
First of all, in terms of basic security encryption and reinforcement, the VMware zero trust security solution can provide manufacturing enterprises with solutions and services such as VMware vSphere virtual machine security encryption, vMotion encryption, VMware vSAN data encryption, and vSphere platform security reinforcement.
Secondly, in terms of modern application security protection, the VMware zero trust security solution can provide cloud-native application security protection for the manufacturing industry. In terms of network security, it can provide load balancing and web protection, gateway firewall and tenant protection, distributed firewall and Application micro-segmentation, etc.; in terms of application security, it can provide Web App/API security, and container terminal security.
Third, in terms of security compliance and offensive and defensive drills in a multi-cloud environment, the VMware zero-trust security solution can also provide security protection on the same network segment for the manufacturing industry, and help enterprises use east-west distributed firewalls and distributed IDS/IPS. Aria Operations for Networks provides security policy recommendation and policy evaluation, etc., while meeting enterprise compliance, achieving level protection or meeting information security standards such as PCI-DSS.
Fourth, in terms of unified identity and remote office cloud desktop security protection, NSX FW/IPS + NSX ALB in VMware's zero trust security solution can also ensure secure access to VDI data in the manufacturing industry; at the same time, it can also provide remote office security protection, etc. .
The so-called "nine-story platform starts from piles of soil." As more and more manufacturing companies begin to accelerate their transformation to "cloud edge device", in order to better protect the information and data security of enterprises in the future, then by building "zero The "trust" framework has undoubtedly become a "key move" for manufacturing companies to ensure business continuity and deal with uncertainties, and its importance is self-evident.
Consolidate the "base" for transformation and upgrading
Of course, it is not "one-off" for manufacturing enterprises to lead to the "zero trust" architecture, and it is also "urgent" to build an efficient and secure infrastructure platform. In this regard, Zhang Lei, cloud computing and hyper-converged architect of Dell Technologies Group, said that many traditional manufacturing companies face six major challenges in the deployment and management of cloud platforms, mainly in the following areas:
One is that spending is rampant. When application developers and business managers can quickly obtain public cloud resources through a credit card, cloud flooding is almost inevitable. Enterprises need a centralized and transparent management platform across data centers and clouds;
Second, management is out of control. Private cloud and different public cloud management platforms are not compatible with each other. API-based cross-IT and cloud management often can only be "supervised" but not "managed". Enterprises need to implement a fine-grained cross-IT and cloud intelligent management platform based on artificial intelligence AIOPs;
Third, business compliance is difficult. Cloud flooding and multi-tenancy of enterprise users increase the difficulty of data protection and business compliance on and off the cloud. Enterprises need software-defined data protection to implement a software-defined data protection management platform across edge-core-cloud.
Fourth, the application migration cycle is long. Based on open source cloud computing, the business migration cycle is long and the risk is high. 40% of enterprises said that business migration takes a year as a cycle. Enterprise users need rule-driven dynamic and transparent migration; fifth, core application modernization is difficult: core application modernization based on open source container technology provides "sensitive state" but cannot meet the dual requirements of stable state and sensitive state of core applications. Enterprise-level users prefer the microservice architecture for core application modernization to ensure core application enterprise-level consistency requirements; Sixth, it is difficult to upgrade intelligent IoT: a large number of edge computing and cloud computing are incompatible with each other, and cannot be upgraded to a cross-edge-core-cloud industry internet platform. Therefore, enterprises need a platform that is ready for the Industrial Internet.
It is precisely because of this change that Dell Technologies has built an efficient, secure, and ready infrastructure platform for the manufacturing industry based on the Dell VxRail hyper-converged solution, which can not only help more manufacturing companies to accelerate the realization of digital and intelligent integration , can also better build a "zero trust" framework, and truly promote the high-quality development of China's manufacturing industry.
Specifically, building a modern data center based on Dell VxRail can better "integrate" and "match" the production stack of the current manufacturing industry. For example, in terms of data collection, VxRail's "control layer" can provide edge computing and IOT capabilities; data application On the one hand, VxRail's "operation layer" can provide desktop cloud, hyper-convergence, and security and automated operation and maintenance; and on data analysis and decision-making, VxRail's "analysis layer" can also provide a big data platform and a data protection platform; more importantly, Dell Technologies can also provide cloud strategy transformation consulting (VCF on VxRail) and application modernization consulting (Tanzu on VxRail) at the "strategic layer" to better empower manufacturing companies to achieve digital and intelligent transformation.
Zhang Lei emphasized that as the only hyper-converged platform jointly developed with VMware in the world and officially certified by VMware that can provide enhanced suites, VxRail, with its powerful performance and diversity of full-deployment scenarios, can provide a set of " Robust” infrastructure platform, and by providing deployment methods such as standard clusters, active-active data center clusters, dual-node clusters, dynamic node clusters, and edge satellite nodes, it can flexibly meet various application scenarios in the manufacturing industry.
Among them, in terms of enterprise cloud migration, the Dell Technology Cloud Platform (VCF on VxRail) can provide integrated architecture and standard architecture deployment modes in order to minimize the threshold for enterprise cloud migration, and support deployment from 4 nodes. You can choose different architectures according to your needs and scale, and you can also easily expand without interruption in the future. Not only that, but the Dell Technologies cloud platform has also created a "full-stack" automated lifecycle management, which enables enterprises to better implement the easy deployment, configuration and lifecycle of the Dell Technologies cloud platform throughout the end-to-end software and Hardware infrastructure stack.
In terms of active-active data centers, VxRail can also use extended cluster technology to implement active-active data centers. It can be seen that a VxRail single cluster can support 96 nodes. Through multi-cluster management, it can manage many clusters distributed in different physical computer rooms at the same time, and can achieve traditional virtualization active-active. At the same time, VxRail provides RecoverPoint protection software, which can also achieve continuous snapshots. It can help manufacturing enterprises strengthen their operation and maintenance capabilities. During the operation and maintenance process, the VVOL function in the solution can also realize data recovery in units of logical volumes without affecting the operation of other virtual machines, thereby maximizing Ensure the stable and efficient operation of the manufacturing industry.
In terms of system security that manufacturing companies are concerned about, the latest VxRail 8.0 version supports VMware vSphere 8.0 and vSAN 8.0 software, so that DPU data processing units and vSphere DSE distributed service engines can be used to enhance system security. The "seamless connection" technological innovation can help manufacturing companies to better create high-performance, low-energy consumption, easy-to-deploy, and easy-to-manage hyper-converged systems and build a "robust" cloud platform architecture.
" VxRail is the first and currently the only hyper-converged all-in-one machine in the market that supports DPU solutions . At present, the three models of VxRail E660F, V670F and P670N support DPU and DSE, which can better accelerate and protect enterprises. workload." Zhang Lei said.
In terms of edge data centers, Dell Technologies can also bring "shoebox-sized" edge data centers to the manufacturing industry by providing VxRail VD-4000 hardened edge computing nodes. The designed edge computing node is also the first "embedded" vSAN witness device and vSAN hyper-converged system with automated lifecycle management; in addition, VxRail VD-4000 also integrates VxRail HCI system software, and the entire system can be implemented in the factory Advance optimization and pre-configuration support satellite node deployment and customer self-deployment to maximize the application requirements of enterprises in edge computing.
Because of this, VxRail is very suitable for manufacturing enterprises to deploy as an intelligent edge centralized and unified management platform. Its advantage is that the core cluster of VxRail headquarters can carry the core applications of production and office, while supporting "on-demand expansion"; and VxRail's various edge deployment solutions , can also simply and quickly complete cross-edge and core deployment, and further shorten the online time of enterprise business; more importantly, VxRail itself has intelligent lifecycle management and automatic upgrade capabilities, which can further simplify the cross-regional deployment of manufacturing enterprises. unified operation and maintenance.
Similarly, enterprises can use VxRail to build a centralized and unified intelligent edge management platform to achieve the following values, including branch sites (organizations) without the need for computer room construction, to achieve intelligent edge management; it can help manufacturing companies strengthen the control of branches/third parties The unified management of the outsourcing platform reduces expenses; it is beneficial for enterprises to quickly build an ecological platform and realize intelligent management.
It is worth mentioning that on this basis, Dell Technologies has also innovatively launched a new model of FOD (Dell APEX Flex on Demand) in 2021 , allowing enterprises to enjoy the same flexibility as public clouds using local Data center or private cloud, thus better assisting enterprise cloud transformation. Dell's pay-as-you-go FOD has three major features : " true pay-as-you-go, free elastic scaling, and economical operating costs ."
In other words, when manufacturing enterprises use Dell Technologies' enterprise-level infrastructure, they can consume according to time or capacity usage, so that the enterprise's private cloud or private cloud data center can have the flexibility of public cloud Agile, thereby greatly reducing operating costs and improving the ability of business innovation.
The full text concludes that the transformation and upgrading of China's smart manufacturing has a long way to go, difficult and great. During this process, Dell Technologies and VMware have joined forces to better build an efficient, secure and agile infrastructure through the "both software and hardware" capabilities, and on the one hand, the new model of VxRail hyper-convergence and FOD on-demand billing platform; on the other hand, with the help of VMware zero-trust security solutions, we can move towards a zero-trust architecture faster and maximize the security of manufacturing information and data. I believe this will accelerate the transformation and integration of digital and intelligent manufacturing in China, and even more It will help more and more manufacturing companies create new models, new formats and new futures, and its value can be said to be "not only about the present, but also about the future."
Shenyao's Science and Technology Observation was founded by a senior technology media person, Shenski, who has 20 years of experience in dissemination of enterprise-level technology content. He has long focused on the observation and thinking of industrial Internet, enterprise digitalization, ICT infrastructure, and automotive technology.
