Inspur
Spearheading Open Data Center Innovation

From building the world’s fastest supercomputer to being the Top 5 largest server manufacturer globally, Inspur is well positioned to be the fastest growing vendor for Cloud Data Center Solutions worldwide. When listing off some of the gigantic names that Inspur has collaborated with over the years— Cisco, Intel, and Microsoft—it is difficult not to be amazed.

To Dolly Wu, GM of Inspur Cloud Data Center, USA Division, this is just plain fun. “I’ve been in high-tech for over twenty years and love every single moment of it,” she says. “All of the unbelievable innovation in the tech-industry fuels the passion for what I do. I want to lead Inspur to the top spot in technology.”

And she is doing just that. To start, Inspur participates in all the open data center projects of today. They participate in the Open Hardware Projects, which include OCP (started by Facebook), OCS (contributed to OCP by Microsoft), ODCC (started by Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent), Open19 (started by LinkedIn), Intel RSD (open standard for Software Defined Data Center), and OpenPOWER Foundation (organized by IBM). Inspur also leads in contributions to Open Software Projects, including OpenStack and CEPH.

At the center of Inspur’s Cloud Data Center Solutions is their InCloudOS. They use it to integrate OpenStack’s many different modules together into a unified ecosystem, combining storage, networking, and compute into one. InCloudOS works in multiple hardware environments and supports multiple virtualization software, applications, and business models with built-in enterprise grade security, disaster recovery solution, and business resource request capabilities. InCloudOS is the single pane of glass that easily manages heterogeneous data center environments located in different regions of the world.

“Today, we face the challenges of new applications like Artificial Intelligence (AI), deep-learning, and machine-learning,” comments Dolly. “These applications require much more intensive computing power along with mass data storage to implement properly.” To help their clients do this, Inspur designs advanced data center solutions that support higher rack density, are more efficient, and provide better overall TCO.

I want to lead Inspur to the top spot in technology

Inspur also pioneers software-defined data center solutions that can optimize capacity, performance, and power efficiency to workloads and applications to help control escalating data center costs and space.

Inspur has customized solutions for different verticals such as finance, telecom, and education. With one of their clients, China Mobile, Inspur turned a complex business environment into a unified one. China Mobile housed a heterogeneous hardware environment with thousands of x86 servers, ARM servers, OpenPOWER servers, and 10,000 virtual machines. There are eleven large supports systems: BOSS, BOMC, P-BOSS, etc. They also have six data centers in different regions with three different virtualization software and five different types of business models. “We were able to leverage InCloudOS to combine these complex environments into one,” Dolly states. “It increased efficiency by 50-70 percent and decreased operating costs by 30 percent.”

Inspur also built the infrastructure for Alibaba’s e-commerce sites Tmall and Taobao, which generated $17.8 billion sales for China’s “Singles’ Day” (11/11/2016)—the largest online shopping day in the world. Dolly reveals the Alibaba sites processed 175,000 orders per second, which means if the system went down for even a fraction of a second, hundreds of thousands of orders would be lost.

Dolly loves the competition. “I love a challenge,” she says. “I love taking something from nothing to the top. I’m passionate about my work and I believe you need to love your work to do well. I never take no for an answer, if there’s a problem, then there’s a solution.”

With Dolly playing a key role in leading Inspur, the company plans to release a powerful new product line for GPU computing that is coming out in the third quarter of this year. “It will advance the AI and deep-learning solution platforms for the industry,” she concludes.