In recent years, cloud host has gradually become the first choice of enterprise deployment business because of its flexibility, ease of use and low cost advantages, but some enterprises with high requirements for business performance will still choose to use the exclusive physical machine. Although the traditional physical machine has natural high performance and strong isolation characteristics, in fact it is difficult to meet the needs of the rapid development of enterprises due to the lengthy deployment process and poor flexibility and expansibility.
To this end, UCloud recently launched a new Bare Metal Physics Cloud 2.0, which combines the high performance of physical machines with the elasticity of virtual machines. The system disk and data disk both support RSSD cloud disk based on the RDMA network, replacing the original local disk, with up to 400,000 IOPS; The back end is distributed three-copy storage, more secure and reliable data, and supports minute-level installation, online disk capacity expansion and fault migration; The network performance reaches the level of 40Gbps after bonding; At the same time, it has no virtualization overhead, and users still fully enjoy the resources, ensuring physical isolation and exclusive performance.
From Gateway based to Bluefield Smart Network Card based Bare Metal Physics Cloud 1.0
How to provide high throughput, low latency physical network and virtual network for a large number of cloud computing tenants is a proposition that UCloud has been working on since its inception. At first, the traditional physical cloud solution based on the gateway was too expensive, the 10,000MB network card could not meet the development needs of enterprises, and the bandwidth bottleneck of the VPC gateway was not flexible enough to deploy, and it did not support limitations such as computing and storage separation.
Since 2018, UCloud has been actively exploring the high performance bare metal physics cloud solution based on NVIDIA Bluefield DPU, and successfully launched Bare Metal Physics Cloud 1.0 in the first half of this year.
UCloud is based on the Bare Metal Physical Cloud 1.0 developed by NVIDIA Bluefield DPU. Through the multi-core ARM CPU integrated with DPU, UCloud can quickly migrate the physical cloud infrastructure software from x86 to DPU, which meets the network requirements of physical cloud customers with high bandwidth and low latency. It also uses NVIDIA ASAP² technology to offload Openvswitch Kernel and GRE tunneling hardware to DPU, enabling physical cloud users to seamlessly access the NVGRE Overlay virtual network. UCloud is also the first public cloud vendor to apply this technology.
Bare metal physics cloud 1.0 is widely used in big data, database and other scenarios, and has withstood the Singles’ Day exam and won widespread praise from users. Among them, the big data cluster set up by a customer using bare metal physical cloud 1.0 has reached 200 sets.
Bare Metal Physics Cloud 2.0 with RSSD high-performance cloud disk
Bare metal physical cloud 2.0 inherits the advantages of version 1.0. It not only replaces the original mode of the traditional physical cloud independent gateway to open the public cloud network, but also upgrades the internal network bandwidth. After bonding, it can reach the level of 40Gbps.
In terms of storage, NVME devices are simulated through the control surface, ASIC chips are used for high-speed transmission on the data surface, and distributed storage cluster at the back end is connected through Uisk based on ROCEV2 lossless network, and flexible and extensible RSSD cloud disk service is accessed for the bare metal physics machine. Bare metal cloud disk has been tested to achieve a high throughput of about 400,000 IOPS, truly achieving both flexibility and performance.
Bare Metal Physics Cloud 2.0 vs. Traditional Physics Machine
As can be seen from the above comparison table, the naked gold physical cloud is the same as the traditional physical machine, which is exclusive to the physical machine without the loss of virtualization. The problems of traditional physical machines are very obvious. First of all, it often takes half an hour to apply for traditional physical machines from the console to the completion of installation, which results in low efficiency of business expansion. Secondly, the internal network bandwidth is only 10G, resulting in high network concurrency services such as big data often face network performance bottlenecks; The local disk does not support further capacity expansion, resulting in a new server if the business needs capacity expansion; In terms of data backup security policy, because traditional physical machines rely on local RAID, disk failure usually affects business and the risk of disk data loss is higher.
In view of these limitations of traditional physics machines, Bare Metal Physics Cloud 2.0 has been attacked one by one from multiple perspectives:
1. Realization of no-installation process: the operating system will be pre-installed in cloud disk, second level direct copy mirror copy;
2. Minute-level physical machine delivery: the operating system cloud disk is mounted immediately, with only server startup time;
3. Fast recovery time: when the server fails, you only need to mount the cloud disk to another server to start, and you can realize the minute-level rapid recovery;
- Flexible and easy capacity expansion: compared with local disk, RSSD cloud disk can be fast disk capacity expansion at any time, up to 32T*20;
- Data security and reliability: the back end adopts distributed storage cluster to provide three copies, high data reliability. And the future will support UCloud’s data ark service, data can be restored to any second.
In addition, the bare metal physics machine can also enjoy the capabilities of cloud host, support direct interconnection with other cloud products, and build a virtual private network; Through the management console of the Web interface, the user’s threshold is reduced.
The launch of UCloud bare metal physical cloud can solve the needs of some enterprise users who have high requirements for computing performance and data security, especially applicable to the core database business, big data analysis, financial securities and other scenarios. At present, bare metal physical cloud 2.0 products have been launched in the public beta of Beijing Second Availability Zone B. Please look forward to the release of more available areas in the future