Cloud infrastructure spreads its wings

How Huawei KooVerse brings low latency IaaS to customers everywhere

Sponsored Feature Today's data-rich applications and services are more demanding than they have ever been. Consumers and businesses are increasingly sensitive to any form of delay in accessing mission-critical content and workloads, and few if any will tolerate slow or poor performance which negatively impacts their productivity or impairs their entertainment.

But at the same time it can be hard for organizations to build, manage and maintain the fast, stable and secure IT infrastructure needed to support that type of performance in-house, which is why so many are now migrating their IT services into off-premises, cloud-hosted delivery environments.

Research firm Gartner has predicted that worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to expand by almost 21 percent to US$592bn in 2023, having previous swelled by almost 19 percent in 2022. Of those services, spending on IaaS specifically is expected to see the highest growth – up almost 30 percent year on year to just over US$150bn, or 25 percent of the total.

Gartner cited current inflationary pressures and microeconomic conditions as drivers in demand amongst organizations keen to optimize their use of agile, elastic and scalable compute resources during uncertain times.

"Cloud migration is not stopping," commented Sid Nag, Vice President Analyst at Gartner. "IaaS will naturally continue to grow as businesses accelerate IT modernization initiatives to minimize risk and optimize costs. Moving operations to the cloud also reduces capital expenditures by extending cash outlays over a subscription term, a key benefit in an environment where cash may be critical to maintain operations."

KooVerse at Mobile World Congress

This burgeoning global demand for flexible, scalable enterprise cloud infrastructure resources is one of the reasons that Huawei Cloud launched its KooVerse IaaS platform for global organizations last year. And the company has further expanded its proposition with more new services and solutions, including its Landing Zone multitenancy platform and a Cloud on Cloud partnership scheme designed to help telecommunications carriers package their own cloud services for customers using Huawei Cloud resources.

Jacqueline Shi delivering a keynote speech at MWC 2023 - Click to enlarge

"We hope to provide reliable, secure, and sustainable services for our customers, partners, and developers, with everything done on the cloud." said Jacqueline Shi, President of Huawei Cloud Global Marketing and Sales Service, during a keynote speech entitled "Unleash Digital with Everything as a Service" delivered at the 2023 Mobile World Congress event.

KooVerse has grown into a global, distributed cloud infrastructure built on a unified architecture that provides organizations everywhere with a package of compute, storage and network services on demand. It is backed by a mesh of partner connectivity delivered by 2,000 carrier networks that can reach to organizations in over 170 countries.

The extensive footprint of data centers which power the KooVerse platform includes 78 availability zones (AZs) spread across 29 different regions, including Turkey, Mexico, Brazil and Chile. It offers over 2,800 content delivery network (CDN) zones to make sure its customers always have a fast on- and off-ramp for their data, applications and services, which can have a knock-on effect in terms of improving employee productivity and rendering their business operations more efficient.

What's more, Huawei announced last October that it will build and expand an additional European cloud hub in Dublin, Ireland over the next five years, with the support of the Irish Government through the country's Foreign Direct Investment Agency (IDA Ireland). The purpose of the Dublin base is to serve customers across Europe whilst simultaneously helping Irish enterprises expand into new global markets.

Sub-50ms latency ups the game

By using high speed telecoms networks to interconnect both its own data centers, the links between the data centers and end users, the Huawei Cloud which underpins KooVerse offers low latencies that improve application and service response times and performance. And as such, says Huawei Cloud, its ideal for organizations serving up high-resolution, high-quality content to their own customers, such as real-time audio and video, online gaming and educational presentations.

Existing KooVerse customers for example include Booming Tech, the company behind free to play, massive and immersive online tactical action game Conqueror's Blade. Booming Tech relies on the Huawei Cloud global backbone network to connect gaming servers in multiple countries that collectively process requests from 400m gamers worldwide. Another Chinese games company relies on Huawei Cloud to deliver sub-100ms latency to players in Latin America.

Now KooVerse is going further by promising latencies of sub-50 milliseconds to its customers in "high value" regions and those countries served by the Huawei Cloud. The length of the network path from the end user device to the data and application resources which they access on cloud-hosted infrastructure is the primary contributor to high latency which can negatively impact performance.

Some estimates suggest that every 100km of distance between a data center and a public cloud will add 1ms of latency to the connection. So the shorter the distance between the PoPs, the lower the latency of the network links transmitting data between them, and by providing more PoPs – effectively less network hops - a company can significantly reduce that latency.

There's little doubt that high latency can negatively impact the end user experience for any application or service. That's one reason why a sub-50s latency capability is generally regarded within the telco industry as a good threshold for ensuring there is no lag in the delivery of either voice or data communications in current fourth generation (4G) networks that make up the majority of mobile services around the globe (at least for now).

The Huawei Cloud network is built on three layers: CloudOcean, CloudSea and CloudLake. CloudOcean is the core cloud hub that currently delivers 50ms latency from three data centers and millions of servers in Guizhou, Inner Mongolia and Anhui, whilst CloudSea links city hubs in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Thailand, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), South Africa and Brazil. CloudLake is the edge hub which offers ulta-low latencies of under 5ms for Internet of Things (IoT) and industrial IoT (IIoT) workloads like autonomous driving and manufacturing.

Further enhancements are provided by the Tianshu Platform which uses dynamic and intelligent traffic scheduling tools to monitor and control the latency, jitter and packet loss associated with different network segments in order to identify potential problems and reconfigure the route paths to optimize performance.

Disaster recovery on tap

KooVerse has more to offer than just low latency performance for cloud-hosted workloads though. The global network of availability zones, data centers and PoPs provided by Huawei Cloud also combine to deliver the scalability, high speed processing, cloud management and disaster recovery features that enterprises need to ensure their services can be quickly and easily provisioned and brought back online with the minimum of disruption if outages occur.

Constant availability is essential to any company whose success relies on the delivery of always-on applications and immediate access to data for their customers – few participants will tolerate long of frequent interruptions to their gameplay or video streaming services without switching provider for example. KooVerse is backed by the Huawei On-Cloud Disaster Recovery solution and Storage Disaster Recovery Service (SDRS), which uses synchronous replication to keep multiple copies of server instances in different AZs and data centers which can be quickly brought online.

To that end, Huawei Cloud supports Recovery Point Objective (RPO) = 0, which means a one-click switchover from one production system to another in the event that the primary goes down, equivalent to 99.999999999 percent reliability, says Huawei. An RPO refers to the maximum amount of data which is considered acceptable when an infrastructure failure or outage occurs before an organization suffers any negative impact to its operations. Any subsequent data loss is usually measured in terms of time, and a zero RPO for data recovery promises that those losses are absolutely minimal.

The combination of KooVerse, Huawei Cloud and Everything as a Service has been specifically designed to keep organizations connected to their mission critical data, applications and services from wherever they happen to be, without delay or interruption for as long as they want.

You can learn more about Huawei Cloud by clicking here.

Sponsored by Huawei.