Ecology is the key
At present, the core architecture for enterprise core business and the innovative architecture for cutting-edge emerging applications each have their own strengths. The core business of the enterprise produces dense data, and the innovation and transformation has brought high-speed growth of sparse data. The demand for a converged architecture that combines the advantages of the core and innovative architectures is increasing. In addition, cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, blockchain and other emerging technologies have also promoted new changes in server architecture technology.
In December 2019, Inspur Business Machines Co., Ltd. (abbreviated as: IPS) 2019 customer conference was held in Hangzhou. The theme of this conference was “Cloud Unbounded, Made in China, Xiezhiyuan” as the theme. New trends in architecture.
Inspur Business Machines Co., Ltd. was jointly established by Inspur and IBM. The Chinese server manufacturer controlled by Inspur officially started operations on May 2, 2018, relying on Inspur and K1 server, which are independently developed in China. IBM, which has developed one of the three international server architectures, mainly develops, produces, and sells Inspur K1 high-end UNIX server systems that support POWER processors and Itanium processors, and Linux servers based on OpenPOWER technology.
According to public information, there are currently two major brands of IPS, namely K1 Power and Inspur Power. K1 Power is a machine based on POWER9 chip, while Inspur Power is a machine based on OpenPOWER9 chip. IPS also has two major product lines: Scale up and Scale out. All models except the E950 and E980 are horizontally expanded product lines.
Specifically, K1 Power focuses on selling features such as superior performance, stability and reliability, the industry’s most secure virtualization technology, the ability to build large-scale core system resource pools, and support for cloud-native applications. With its high-speed bandwidth advantages, OpenPOWER can widely support open source databases, big data analysis, HPC, AI and other innovative applications and heterogeneous acceleration to meet the various computing and storage needs of enterprises. Because it is also used in government, finance, internet, telecommunications, manufacturing, medical and other industries.
Based on this, IPS has created three clouds-core business cloud, innovative business cloud, and HPC / AI hybrid application cloud. It hopes to provide the bottom layer for enterprises to cloud through K1 Power vertical expansion and OpenPOWER horizontal expansion integration Basic support.
According to official information, IPS core business cloud is applicable to financial industry core platforms, running enterprise-level databases, supporting SAP HANA database partition operation, more flexible resource allocation, building private clouds, industry clouds, and providing services to the outside world; IPS core business cloud relies on vertical expansion series of servers, includingIt has the strongest internal performance, highest vertical scalability and fully redundant design. It is a flagship server product suitable for large-scale key applications and databases. It also includes a series of products that are suitable for building scale-out resource pools and can run thousands of databases. Its performance makes A single machine can host tens of thousands of containers, and supports OpenStack, adapting to the industry’s mainstream cloud management platform, and enabling heterogeneous unified management.
IPS also provides a variety of industry solutions. Many customers in the financial, medical, and transportation industries use K1 Power to build disaster recovery backup centers, active-active architectures, and three key centers for key business deployments. For example, well-known companies in the industry, such as Zhaoyin Yunchuang, Xingye Shujin, and Tiexinyun, use K1 Power to build resource pools and provide external services. IPS tells that K1 Power has already carried 80% of the core business of the financial industry customers, occupying more than 60% of the Unix market in China, ranking first, and also achieved leapfrog growth in the government industry.
The IPS innovative business cloud can meet the needs of emerging applications such as open source databases and cloud natives. IPS said that its OpenPOWER product series is agile, expands on demand, and is compatible with mainstream open source databases in the industry. It can achieve more than twice the performance improvement in scenarios such as big data analysis and open source databases. Among them, distributed storage is an important part of data analysis. , AS13000-P, a distributed storage solution created by IPS’s FP5466G2 server with AS13000 storage software, achieves a 1.7 times performance improvement over general platforms; for example, the customer Unicom Tiangong Cloud supports up to 350 million users and is the world’s largest single unit. The telecom business operation support system also uses IPS’s OpenPOWER product.
The HPC / AI hybrid application cloud covered by IPS full scene can rely on CPU-GPU NVLink high-speed interconnection and high I / O bandwidth design to break the data exchange bottleneck in parallel training. The NXZIP compression speed on the CPU is 15 times faster. Performance improvement, 9 times more deep learning performance improvement, and 46 times Snap ML machine learning acceleration performance improvement. At present, IPS has created multiple HPC / AI hybrid application cloud customer cases in areas such as safe cities, tobacco, and education. For example, IPS cooperated with Baidu to create an AI training room all-in-one deep learning platform to provide users with AI deep learning cloud services; cooperated with the Alibaba Institute in the 22nd International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Aided Intervention in 2019 .
According to previously disclosed information, the current market share of IPS in the domestic non-x86 minicomputer market has reached 65%. In an interview with reporters, Hu Leijun, general manager of Inspur Commercial Machines Co., Ltd. said that the global server decline in the first half of this year, and the domestic server sales revenue and sales growth only Linux and IPS. In the past few years, the POWER business of POWER and OpenPOWER has been more than ten percent in the past many years.This year’s decline not only stopped the downward trend, but also showed a warming-up trend, which has a different meaning for IPS.
This also explains to a certain extent, one of the reasons why the current IPS attracts much attention from the industry. Competition in the server architecture market is still one of the key topics in the industry. The current market of server architecture can be divided into two major camps of x86 and non-x86 architecture. The non-x86 architecture market also includes UNIX-based system organizations such as POWER, ARM-based server architecture, and Oracle’s SPARC server architecture. Because of Intel ’s continued investment in technology and ecology, the x86 architecture is far ahead. Although Intel faces new competition from AMD EPYC, it is still a dominant company.
The UNIX system has also been in the limelight in the early years, but in the rapid advance of x86, the market share has been shrinking, and the main players have been losing ground. Only IBM’s Power System has been fighting and even sold directly in 2014 x86 business. IPS is one of the main players in the current Power architecture and one of the most important “teammates” of the IBM Power System. The establishment of a joint venture in 2018 is evident.
Server competition is largely ecological competition. Hu Leijun told, “The focus of future competition is first and foremost ecology.” This customer conference is also a kind of ecological display. At the conference, IPS participated with representatives from ZTE Corporation, Beijing Ningsi Software Co., Ltd., China Railway Xinhongyuan (Beijing) Software Technology Co., Ltd. and Beijing Dongfangtong Technology Co., Ltd. The round table also hopes to demonstrate this ecological cooperation in Power’s physical infrastructure, operating system, database, middleware and industry applications. At the same time, IPS also stated that it hopes to achieve industry breakthroughs from the business scenario to the optimization of user applications through channel strategy upgrades and enhanced cooperation with ISVs.
At the conference site, he also participated in Hu Leijun, General Manager of Inspur Commercial Machine Co., Ltd., Fu Bin, Deputy General Manager of Inspur Commercial Machine Co., Ltd., Li Hui, General Manager of Inspur Storage Product Line, Interviews with senior executives such as Yu Zhen, Director of ISV Business Development, Partner Business Department of Inspur Commercial Machine Co., Ltd., and Qiao Xin, General Manager of Inspur Information Database Product Line . Some of these questions we think are valuable. So also did asComb down.
About business progress
Q1: What is the development and market situation of the company so far?
Hu Leijun: In the first half of this year, the global server market declined, and domestic server sales revenue and sales growth were a surge. The actual wave is not one, but two. Global server growth is two, one is Linux, and the other is called IPS. For IPS, the meaning is even more different, because it has two meanings. First, we are growing when the market is falling. In addition, the POWER businesses of POWER and OpenPOWER have experienced double-digit, 10% declines in the past many years. This year not only stopped the downward trend, but also recovered.
The overall ecology and business development situation, the size of customers, and the number of industries. Since the IPS started operations, the types of products used in the industry have been increasing, so the overall situation is improving and picking up.
In addition, we have not only the product line of the K1 Power compact series growing rapidly, but OpenPOWER has also achieved orders of thousands of units and nearly 100 million orders in various industries. This is a notable breakthrough and can form a large scale. The application is very fresh for the distributed horizontal expansion business platform in the market, and it has brought better choices to customers. In the future, customers will have at least two types of bids with Apple for general server CPU selection. Different CPU.
At the same time, around OpenPOWER applications, the ecology of AI, big data, storage, open source databases, and Linux-based open source databases is becoming more and more complete. Except that OpenPOWER products cannot be run under the Windows ecological environment, common applications that can be seen now can run smoothly, and under certain application scenarios, the performance exhibited by the OpenPOWER series products and the reliability of the entire system are also It is obvious to all.
In addition, the product portfolio has greatly improved over last year, and the product categories and models have also increased steadily. The original products were mainly general-purpose products, but now also cover AI, storage, and cover such memory-intensive CPUs as memory computing applications, which can be targeted at applications with higher memory capacity.
So, the whole is a better leap.
Q2: How is OpenPOWER selling in the financial market?
Fu Bin: OpenPOWER has been launched for more than two years. Inspur itself uses OpenPOWER as a server. After the establishment of IPS, we accelerated research and development. In less than two years, the product series has evolved from the original two-way server to the current distribution Storage, GPU-powered servers, and five or six servers already on the market. Among domestic financial customers, from the perspective of customer applications, whether it is distributed or cloud computing, we do various tests from customers. From the perspective of OpenPOWER’s own products, most of the current distributed X86 servers are used in production environments. In many scenarios, we have found the advantages of OpenPOWER for benchmarking X86 servers, whether in product design, chip technology, or other advantages. Many cases were mentioned in the morning, all of which were measured by customers.
In terms of applications, whether it is an open source database or distributed storage, there are also some small core applications. We have some ISVs that have developed many things based on OpenPOWER.
So now, we have made some breakthroughs. In some joint-stock banks, city commercial banks, rural commercial banks, and big banks, we have made some breakthroughs, but we cannot say that we are the mainstream server platform in the industry. After all, We are still in some applications. But we can see what the application benefits are. It is the focus of the customer’s future investment, whether it is an open source database, a GPU database, or a distributed storage. In fact, it is the focus of the customer’s investment in the next few years. Therefore, I believe that in these emerging applications, we hope to bring better growth through efforts.
Hu Leijun: For K1 Power, the original traditional small machine, has been clouded in the past few years. Basically, the customer’s upgrade revolves around PowerVM and KVM. The customer has basically included all the stock and new increments To the research and development platform.
Q3: What is the market status and return plan of Inspur’s storage cloud?
Li Hui: First of all, from the perspective of Inspur’s storage business, we will take the direction of distributed storage as the main direction of the core. We have seen the cloud and distributed architecture, as well as the massive data seen in another dimension. Now After digital transformation, it includes big data, applications at home and abroad, big data has a lot of its own data mining analysis in the application process, as well as data identified by AI, especially in finance. The application of finance to AI is mainly big data. Applications, including high-definition video applications, are also increasing in unmanned terminals. Among financial customer groups, distributed storage is definitely the future direction.
In the past, our financial customers mainly focused on core key clouds. From last year to now, we have also followed customers. The cloudification of customer data centers is a trend. In addition, some storage and use of massive data is also a type of trend. For more than a year, we have begun to do more application exchanges for some users based on distributed storage in some joint-stock systems and city commercial banks, including testing of some products. There are two main aspects. The first is how to put unstructured data in distributed storage, and how to make distributed support based on the entire unstructured data life cycle storage model. Second, how to use cloud infrastructure to support distributed architecture and storage. We conduct with large customersAfter communication and testing, in the future we will treat the financial industry as a joint application of distributed storage and operators.
Q4: Are there any big orders this year?
Fu Bin: There are still in the second half of the year, mainly depending on customers’ purchases. Some customers are framework purchases, so they usually have a large amount. Some customers are continuous. After the one-year planning is completed, distributed procurement is implemented, and the accumulated amount is relatively large.
Q5: Are there opportunities for expansion in other markets?
Fu Bin: You just asked a very good question, that is, new content of business or innovation of new business. In fact, everyone knows that the K1 Power minicomputer used to run the core database and core business applications, such as ECP and ERP. These are traditional fields, and now with the update of the technical route, many customers gradually update the entire hardware environment. At the same time, many customers are undergoing cloud transformation, re-integrating existing resources through resource pools and clouding, and strengthening management, scheduling and resource availability. This part is done by each customer according to IT planning. .
In terms of emerging business, we mainly expand in several directions. On the one hand, when new systems are applied to manufacturing companies, new applications will be introduced. In this part, we see a relatively large room for growth. Second, China’s IT construction has been going on for decades, and foreign countries have taken longer. The core IT architecture of most large enterprises, whether it is the application architecture or the hardware infrastructure, is basically stable, regardless of the current What ’s the situation? It ’s impossible to overthrow it. It ’s not the same as building an Internet company from scratch. Many have been built for many years, and many applications have been developed for many years. Now they can also meet application needs. Many large customers don’t see that the number of customers will double in the next three months, and their core business data is basically growing steadily. In this case, if you choose to upgrade and optimize the existing system, it will be better for him in terms of economic benefits and return on investment.
Of course, another part of the customer ’s IT investment is due to the Internet and the popularity of mobile applications. Many companies that traditionally do not deal directly with end users have seen the need to communicate with end users through mobile terminals. There are many investments. OpenPOWER’s products have found some directions in the past few years, and have also formed some breakthroughs, such as artificial intelligence GPU data, databases made through GPUs, and GPU databases are the support behind many applications. In the past one or two years, through cooperation with domestic customers, we have found the special advantages of OpenPOWER application scenarios, such as gene sequencing, gene sequencing itself and data characteristics, and algorithms and the entire program application characteristics, making the POWER chip’s own decompression module and decompression Cooperate with software to obtain many times of performance improvement. Under the same investment situation, if the application is deployed in OpeOn the nPOWER platform, it can be improved several times over that deployed on the traditional X86 platform.
Some application vendors are talking about this morning. Whether it is in open source databases, artificial intelligence, or gene sequencing, we have found breakthrough scenarios. So this part is the bigger growth point we see in the future.
The other area is distributed storage. We and Li Hui have seen a lot of performance and advantages in terms of product integration. With the popularization of 5G, the demand for storage will grow significantly and rapidly. In the high-growth part, distributed storage is the most important growth engine, so we hope to take a fast ride together to increase our market share.
Q6: Where is the market growth opportunity for Inspur commercial machines in the future?
Aftershocks: The first problem is that in the current market of 5G and AI, the fastest growth of global AI servers is Inspur. 5G, China has just begun. From the perspective of AI, Power has a clear position in the AI field. Under the high-performance, high-capacity, and multi-concurrency conditions mentioned this morning, Power has very high performance compared to the AI server of the general platform. And because Power has innovative technology, the performance will be very high, and we think that the AI aspect will bring a lot of growth points to Power.
Speaking of the financial industry, where the core key applications are made in the financial industry, Power servers do occupy a relatively large proportion in the financial industry. At present, of course, it is also facing with many of our partners from the perspective of domestic software ecological development, which is an important cooperation opportunity. I’ll wait for a few partners to share the prospects of cooperating with the ecological industry in the financial industry .
When it comes to telecommunications, in fact, Power used to have a certain share in the telecommunications industry, and Inspur has also grown rapidly in the telecommunications industry. With the innovation of Power, OpenPOWER is now under the entire system of Inspur, and the speed of innovation is very fast. It has made breakthroughs in telecom centralized mining and mobile centralized mining. It is estimated that the investment of 5G, the share of the entire wave in the telecommunications industry, and the high performance of OpenPOWER, the telecommunications industry must bring high growth.
About ecological construction
Q1: There are multiple architectures in the server. What is the key to future competition?
Hu Leijun: The focus of future competition is ecology first. Ecology determines everything. In which fields and directions, and in which ecology you invest, determines the future development direction of the product and determines the market area. Not investing in ecology, expanding more partners in ecology, and basically losing half of your chances in future struggles. There is now a huge stock market, which is declining in the stock market, or that a solid foundation cannot be gradually established in the stock market, and there is basically no chance of winning. The other is the incremental market, such as the rapid development of AIThe rapid growth, the rapid growth of distributed storage, the growth of various emerging open source-based application markets, in the emerging incremental market, watch the technological progress of each.
Technological progress is nothing more than two aspects. Just looking for differences in support technology, everyone is almost the same. However, in terms of structural design, writing software code on the same platform can be divided into high and low, good and bad, and optimization for different applications. Another difference is that in the diversity of pure computing, many people now add accelerator boxes to processors. Technical openness and inclusiveness largely determine future changes.
From my personal point of view, the future of computing must be full of diversity. Many years ago, everyone was an independent and closed architecture. Later, X86 came to make a common standard product. Now at such a threshold, in the future, we will face a variety of different application requirements. On the premise that the threshold of our design technology and the threshold of supporting technology are lowered, more people have the opportunity to practice doing something different. The demand for computing platforms will also diverge and evolve, creating many opportunities. Just from the ecology of the processor industry, a more diverse environment will be established. In a diverse environment, as long as you choose it properly, you can always find your own living space.
Q2: How about ecological construction now? What is the future focus or direction?
Hu Leijun: For K1 Power and OpenPOWER, we have entered a new product cycle. The main feature of the new cycle is that the technical characteristics are no longer as much ahead of others as before. The original comparison was that the X86 frequency was higher than others Double the system’s scalability, sometimes an order of magnitude larger than competitors. In this case, some applications can only be afforded by the K1 Power small machine. Others chase your goal, everyone comes to fit you, everyone has to move into your ecosystem, you are attractive because you have a market.
The situation is different now. The value of the product must be closely integrated with the partners in the ecology, and even with the end user. Second, if the ecology is to grow, if the application is to grow, extra effort must be paid, and others will not automatically find you. Third, how to make good use of the system platform can only be achieved through the efforts of both parties. It is no longer possible to rely on unilateral efforts and rely on closed technology platforms to allow application partners to keep trial and error. Finally, the future should be a diverse market. The single-machine world will not be a very scientific existence in the context of the entire technology. The coexistence of multiple platforms and the competition between multiple technologies are a long-term form in the future. Customers have more choices and customers are happy to comment. The current industry background basically guides the computer industry in this direction. We have actually seen various attempts.
There are various chip-level open source that we have seen recently, which are a sign of future diversity.
About independent innovation
Q1: How to treat independent innovation and localization?
Hu: We do not define localization. We just need to do independent research and development, organize our own supply chain, we have to organize our own service system, organize our own ecosystem, organize our own operation and sales system, and ensure that we have the ability to develop independently on existing technology platforms This is our pursuit. We do not pursue who labels us and is certified as a domestic industry. What I need is that as an enterprise, I have the ability to master my own operations, whether it is from research and development, production, or from the operational dimension.
Qiao Xin: Along with the previous topic, the independent research and development capabilities of Chinese server manufacturers have changed a lot over the years. The original time, it may be in our products, quality, technology, and foreign There are still some gaps in the product, but on the other hand, there are basically no gaps in the research on X86 servers. Everyone is the same, and we may be better than Dell in some aspects, as is the case with mobile phones. In fact, Inspur was able to get the first prize of national scientific and technological progress, and also made breakthroughs in key technical points and core technologies of small computers, interconnected technologies, operating system technologies, and architecture technologies.
As for the question you just asked, we have mastered the key technology of the small machine. Here the chips and processors used by the small machine are now able to connect up to two domestic CPUs. If the customer wants to use 4 , 8, 16 pieces, definitely still need to use foreign technology. Inspur also has plans to make minicomputers based on domestic processors, but the key difficulty here is not ours. The main point is on domestic processors. In this respect, Inspur is the most professional for server and minicomputer, but we need to find the corresponding chip manufacturer upstream, and the needs of customers are there. This also involves what we just said. Finance is now talking about localized substitution. Localized substitution refers to OA, which is to be a nationally produced substitution. However, in general applications and core applications, it still says that you go to find an alternative path. The alternative path should be step by step. What kind of it is difficult to say that domestic chips are used in general applications or core applications. Therefore, Inspur is also actively practicing domestic substitution, but it is not very aggressive and it has a path to replace it.
Aftershocks: Indeed, technology, R & D, and development all have cycles and time. We also have to admit that from the perspective of China’s overall technology industry, especially in terms of information technology, there is still a gap with foreign countries. However, Inspur is now striving to make domestic self-developed servers, and pushing Power chips and domestic self-developed servers to such a high-end level is already remarkable in China. Because in the technology of making minicomputers, no other country in the world can do it, and China can do this very well. And our goal is not to replace all the domestic ones, because IOur positioning is not just made in China, our OpenPOWER actually has a global mission. So you may not be able to answer the questions you care about, but we are doing solid technical innovation step by step. We have a spirit of craftsmanship and always do one thing.
Hu Leijun: In the first half of this year, the global server market declined, and domestic server sales revenue and sales growth were a surge. The actual wave is not one, but two. Global server growth is two, one is Linux, and the other is called IPS. For IPS, the meaning is even more different, because it has two meanings. First, we are growing when the market is falling. In addition, the POWER businesses of POWER and OpenPOWER have experienced double-digit, 10% declines in the past many years. This year not only stopped the downward trend, but also recovered.
The overall ecology and business development situation, the size of customers, and the number of industries. Since the IPS started operations, the types of products used in the industry have been increasing, so the overall situation is improving and picking up.
In addition, we have not only the product line of the K1 Power compact series growing rapidly, but OpenPOWER has also achieved orders of thousands of units and nearly 100 million orders in various industries. This is a notable breakthrough and can form a large scale. The application is very fresh for the distributed horizontal expansion business platform in the market, and it has brought better choices to customers. In the future, customers will have at least two types of bids with Apple for general server CPU selection. Different CPU.
At the same time, around OpenPOWER applications, the ecology of AI, big data, storage, open source databases, and Linux-based open source databases is becoming more and more complete. Except that OpenPOWER products cannot be run under the Windows ecological environment, common applications that can be seen now can run smoothly, and under certain application scenarios, the performance exhibited by the OpenPOWER series products and the reliability of the entire system are also It is obvious to all.
In addition, the product portfolio has greatly improved over last year, and the product categories and models have also increased steadily. The original products were mainly general-purpose products, but now also cover AI, storage, and cover such memory-intensive CPUs as memory computing applications, which can be targeted at applications with higher memory capacity.
So, the whole is a better leap.
Q2: How is OpenPOWER selling in the financial market?
Fu Bin: OpenPOWER has been launched for more than two years. Inspur itself uses OpenPOWER as a server. After the establishment of IPS, we accelerated research and development. In less than two years, the product series has evolved from the original two-way server to the current distribution Storage, GPU-powered servers, and five or six servers already on the market. Among domestic financial customers, from the perspective of customer applications, whether it is distributed or cloud computing, we do various tests from customers. From the perspective of OpenPOWER’s own products, most of the current distributed X86 servers are used in production environments. In many scenarios, we have found the advantages of OpenPOWER for benchmarking X86 servers, whether in product design, chip technology, or other advantages. Many cases were mentioned in the morning, all of which were measured by customers.
In terms of applications, whether it is an open source database or distributed storage, there are also some small core applications. We have some ISVs that have developed many things based on OpenPOWER.
So now, we have made some breakthroughs. In some joint-stock banks, city commercial banks, rural commercial banks, and big banks, we have made some breakthroughs, but we cannot say that we are the mainstream server platform in the industry. After all, We are still in some applications. But we can see what the application benefits are. It is the focus of the customer’s future investment, whether it is an open source database, a GPU database, or a distributed storage. In fact, it is the focus of the customer’s investment in the next few years. Therefore, I believe that in these emerging applications, we hope to bring better growth through efforts.
Hu Leijun: For K1 Power, the original traditional small machine, has been clouded in the past few years. Basically, the customer’s upgrade revolves around PowerVM and KVM. The customer has basically included all the stock and new increments To the research and development platform.
Q3: What is the market status and return plan of Inspur’s storage cloud?
Li Hui: First of all, from the perspective of Inspur’s storage business, we will take the direction of distributed storage as the main direction of the core. We have seen the cloud and distributed architecture, as well as the massive data seen in another dimension. Now After digital transformation, it includes big data, applications at home and abroad, big data has a lot of its own data mining analysis in the application process, as well as data identified by AI, especially in finance. The application of finance to AI is mainly big data. Applications, including high-definition video applications, are also increasing in unmanned terminals. Among financial customer groups, distributed storage is definitely the future direction.
In the past, our financial customers mainly focused on core key clouds. From last year to now, we have also followed customers. The cloudification of customer data centers is a trend. In addition, some storage and use of massive data is also a type of trend. For more than a year, we have begun to do more application exchanges for some users based on distributed storage in some joint-stock systems and city commercial banks, including testing of some products. There are two main aspects. The first is how to put unstructured data in distributed storage, and how to make distributed support based on the entire unstructured data life cycle storage model. Second, how to use cloud infrastructure to support distributed architecture and storage. We conduct with large customersAfter communication and testing, in the future we will treat the financial industry as a joint application of distributed storage and operators.
Q4: Are there any big orders this year?
Fu Bin: There are still in the second half of the year, mainly depending on customers’ purchases. Some customers are framework purchases, so they usually have a large amount. Some customers are continuous. After the one-year planning is completed, distributed procurement is implemented, and the accumulated amount is relatively large.
Q5: Are there opportunities for expansion in other markets?
Fu Bin: You just asked a very good question, that is, new content of business or innovation of new business. In fact, everyone knows that the K1 Power minicomputer used to run the core database and core business applications, such as ECP and ERP. These are traditional fields, and now with the update of the technical route, many customers gradually update the entire hardware environment. At the same time, many customers are undergoing cloud transformation, re-integrating existing resources through resource pools and clouding, and strengthening management, scheduling and resource availability. This part is done by each customer according to IT planning. .
In terms of emerging business, we mainly expand in several directions. On the one hand, when new systems are applied to manufacturing companies, new applications will be introduced. In this part, we see a relatively large room for growth. Second, China’s IT construction has been going on for decades, and foreign countries have taken longer. The core IT architecture of most large enterprises, whether it is the application architecture or the hardware infrastructure, is basically stable, regardless of the current What ’s the situation? It ’s impossible to overthrow it. It ’s not the same as building an Internet company from scratch. Many have been built for many years, and many applications have been developed for many years. Now they can also meet application needs. Many large customers don’t see that the number of customers will double in the next three months, and their core business data is basically growing steadily. In this case, if you choose to upgrade and optimize the existing system, it will be better for him in terms of economic benefits and return on investment.
Of course, another part of the customer ’s IT investment is due to the Internet and the popularity of mobile applications. Many companies that traditionally do not deal directly with end users have seen the need to communicate with end users through mobile terminals. There are many investments. OpenPOWER’s products have found some directions in the past few years, and have also formed some breakthroughs, such as artificial intelligence GPU data, databases made through GPUs, and GPU databases are the support behind many applications. In the past one or two years, through cooperation with domestic customers, we have found the special advantages of OpenPOWER application scenarios, such as gene sequencing, gene sequencing itself and data characteristics, and algorithms and the entire program application characteristics, making the POWER chip’s own decompression module and decompression Cooperate with software to obtain many times of performance improvement. Under the same investment situation, if the application is deployed in OpeOn the nPOWER platform, it can be improved several times over that deployed on the traditional X86 platform.
Some application vendors are talking about this morning. Whether it is in open source databases, artificial intelligence, or gene sequencing, we have found breakthrough scenarios. So this part is the bigger growth point we see in the future.
The other area is distributed storage. We and Li Hui have seen a lot of performance and advantages in terms of product integration. With the popularization of 5G, the demand for storage will grow significantly and rapidly. In the high-growth part, distributed storage is the most important growth engine, so we hope to take a fast ride together to increase our market share.
Q6: Where is the market growth opportunity for Inspur commercial machines in the future?
Aftershocks: The first problem is that in the current market of 5G and AI, the fastest growth of global AI servers is Inspur. 5G, China has just begun. From the perspective of AI, Power has a clear position in the AI field. Under the high-performance, high-capacity, and multi-concurrency conditions mentioned this morning, Power has very high performance compared to the AI server of the general platform. And because Power has innovative technology, the performance will be very high, and we think that the AI aspect will bring a lot of growth points to Power.
Speaking of the financial industry, where the core key applications are made in the financial industry, Power servers do occupy a relatively large proportion in the financial industry. At present, of course, it is also facing with many of our partners from the perspective of domestic software ecological development, which is an important cooperation opportunity. I’ll wait for a few partners to share the prospects of cooperating with the ecological industry in the financial industry .
When it comes to telecommunications, in fact, Power used to have a certain share in the telecommunications industry, and Inspur has also grown rapidly in the telecommunications industry. With the innovation of Power, OpenPOWER is now under the entire system of Inspur, and the speed of innovation is very fast. It has made breakthroughs in telecom centralized mining and mobile centralized mining. It is estimated that the investment of 5G, the share of the entire wave in the telecommunications industry, and the high performance of OpenPOWER, the telecommunications industry must bring high growth.
About ecological construction
Q1: There are multiple architectures in the server. What is the key to future competition?
Hu Leijun: The focus of future competition is ecology first. Ecology determines everything. In which fields and directions, and in which ecology you invest, determines the future development direction of the product and determines the market area. Not investing in ecology, expanding more partners in ecology, and basically losing half of your chances in future struggles. There is now a huge stock market, which is declining in the stock market, or that a solid foundation cannot be gradually established in the stock market, and there is basically no chance of winning. The other is the incremental market, such as the rapid development of AIThe rapid growth, the rapid growth of distributed storage, the growth of various emerging open source-based application markets, in the emerging incremental market, watch the technological progress of each.
Technological progress is nothing more than two aspects. Just looking for differences in support technology, everyone is almost the same. However, in terms of structural design, writing software code on the same platform can be divided into high and low, good and bad, and optimization for different applications. Another difference is that in the diversity of pure computing, many people now add accelerator boxes to processors. Technical openness and inclusiveness largely determine future changes.
From my personal point of view, the future of computing must be full of diversity. Many years ago, everyone was an independent and closed architecture. Later, X86 came to make a common standard product. Now at such a threshold, in the future, we will face a variety of different application requirements. On the premise that the threshold of our design technology and the threshold of supporting technology are lowered, more people have the opportunity to practice doing something different. The demand for computing platforms will also diverge and evolve, creating many opportunities. Just from the ecology of the processor industry, a more diverse environment will be established. In a diverse environment, as long as you choose it properly, you can always find your own living space.
Q2: How about ecological construction now? What is the future focus or direction?
Hu Leijun: For K1 Power and OpenPOWER, we have entered a new product cycle. The main feature of the new cycle is that the technical characteristics are no longer as much ahead of others as before. The original comparison was that the X86 frequency was higher than others Double the system’s scalability, sometimes an order of magnitude larger than competitors. In this case, some applications can only be afforded by the K1 Power small machine. Others chase your goal, everyone comes to fit you, everyone has to move into your ecosystem, you are attractive because you have a market.
The situation is different now. The value of the product must be closely integrated with the partners in the ecology, and even with the end user. Second, if the ecology is to grow, if the application is to grow, extra effort must be paid, and others will not automatically find you. Third, how to make good use of the system platform can only be achieved through the efforts of both parties. It is no longer possible to rely on unilateral efforts and rely on closed technology platforms to allow application partners to keep trial and error. Finally, the future should be a diverse market. The single-machine world will not be a very scientific existence in the context of the entire technology. The coexistence of multiple platforms and the competition between multiple technologies are a long-term form in the future. Customers have more choices and customers are happy to comment. The current industry background basically guides the computer industry in this direction. We have actually seen various attempts.
There are various chip-level open source that we have seen recently, which are a sign of future diversity.
About independent innovation
Q1: How to treat independent innovation and localization?
Hu: We do not define localization. We just need to do independent research and development, organize our own supply chain, we have to organize our own service system, organize our own ecosystem, organize our own operation and sales system, and ensure that we have the ability to develop independently on existing technology platforms This is our pursuit. We do not pursue who labels us and is certified as a domestic industry. What I need is that as an enterprise, I have the ability to master my own operations, whether it is from research and development, production, or from the operational dimension.
Qiao Xin: Along with the previous topic, the independent research and development capabilities of Chinese server manufacturers have changed a lot over the years. The original time, it may be in our products, quality, technology, and foreign There are still some gaps in the product, but on the other hand, there are basically no gaps in the research on X86 servers. Everyone is the same, and we may be better than Dell in some aspects, as is the case with mobile phones. In fact, Inspur was able to get the first prize of national scientific and technological progress, and also made breakthroughs in key technical points and core technologies of small computers, interconnected technologies, operating system technologies, and architecture technologies.
As for the question you just asked, we have mastered the key technology of the small machine. Here the chips and processors used by the small machine are now able to connect up to two domestic CPUs. If the customer wants to use 4 , 8, 16 pieces, definitely still need to use foreign technology. Inspur also has plans to make minicomputers based on domestic processors, but the key difficulty here is not ours. The main point is on domestic processors. In this respect, Inspur is the most professional for server and minicomputer, but we need to find the corresponding chip manufacturer upstream, and the needs of customers are there. This also involves what we just said. Finance is now talking about localized substitution. Localized substitution refers to OA, which is to be a nationally produced substitution. However, in general applications and core applications, it still says that you go to find an alternative path. The alternative path should be step by step. What kind of it is difficult to say that domestic chips are used in general applications or core applications. Therefore, Inspur is also actively practicing domestic substitution, but it is not very aggressive and it has a path to replace it.
Aftershocks: Indeed, technology, R & D, and development all have cycles and time. We also have to admit that from the perspective of China’s overall technology industry, especially in terms of information technology, there is still a gap with foreign countries. However, Inspur is now striving to make domestic self-developed servers, and pushing Power chips and domestic self-developed servers to such a high-end level is already remarkable in China. Because in the technology of making minicomputers, no other country in the world can do it, and China can do this very well. And our goal is not to replace all the domestic ones, because IOur positioning is not just made in China, our OpenPOWER actually has a global mission. So you may not be able to answer the questions you care about, but we are doing solid technical innovation step by step. We have a spirit of craftsmanship and always do one thing.
Aftershocks: The first problem is that in the current market of 5G and AI, the fastest growth of global AI servers is Inspur. 5G, China has just begun. From the perspective of AI, Power has a clear position in the AI field. Under the high-performance, high-capacity, and multi-concurrency conditions mentioned this morning, Power has very high performance compared to the AI server of the general platform. And because Power has innovative technology, the performance will be very high, and we think that the AI aspect will bring a lot of growth points to Power.
Speaking of the financial industry, where the core key applications are made in the financial industry, Power servers do occupy a relatively large proportion in the financial industry. At present, of course, it is also facing with many of our partners from the perspective of domestic software ecological development, which is an important cooperation opportunity. I’ll wait for a few partners to share the prospects of cooperating with the ecological industry in the financial industry .
When it comes to telecommunications, in fact, Power used to have a certain share in the telecommunications industry, and Inspur has also grown rapidly in the telecommunications industry. With the innovation of Power, OpenPOWER is now under the entire system of Inspur, and the speed of innovation is very fast. It has made breakthroughs in telecom centralized mining and mobile centralized mining. It is estimated that the investment of 5G, the share of the entire wave in the telecommunications industry, and the high performance of OpenPOWER, the telecommunications industry must bring high growth.
About ecological construction
Q1: There are multiple architectures in the server. What is the key to future competition?
Hu Leijun: The focus of future competition is ecology first. Ecology determines everything. In which fields and directions, and in which ecology you invest, determines the future development direction of the product and determines the market area. Not investing in ecology, expanding more partners in ecology, and basically losing half of your chances in future struggles. There is now a huge stock market, which is declining in the stock market, or that a solid foundation cannot be gradually established in the stock market, and there is basically no chance of winning. The other is the incremental market, such as the rapid development of AIThe rapid growth, the rapid growth of distributed storage, the growth of various emerging open source-based application markets, in the emerging incremental market, watch the technological progress of each.
Technological progress is nothing more than two aspects. Just looking for differences in support technology, everyone is almost the same. However, in terms of structural design, writing software code on the same platform can be divided into high and low, good and bad, and optimization for different applications. Another difference is that in the diversity of pure computing, many people now add accelerator boxes to processors. Technical openness and inclusiveness largely determine future changes.
From my personal point of view, the future of computing must be full of diversity. Many years ago, everyone was an independent and closed architecture. Later, X86 came to make a common standard product. Now at such a threshold, in the future, we will face a variety of different application requirements. On the premise that the threshold of our design technology and the threshold of supporting technology are lowered, more people have the opportunity to practice doing something different. The demand for computing platforms will also diverge and evolve, creating many opportunities. Just from the ecology of the processor industry, a more diverse environment will be established. In a diverse environment, as long as you choose it properly, you can always find your own living space.
Q2: How about ecological construction now? What is the future focus or direction?
Hu Leijun: For K1 Power and OpenPOWER, we have entered a new product cycle. The main feature of the new cycle is that the technical characteristics are no longer as much ahead of others as before. The original comparison was that the X86 frequency was higher than others Double the system’s scalability, sometimes an order of magnitude larger than competitors. In this case, some applications can only be afforded by the K1 Power small machine. Others chase your goal, everyone comes to fit you, everyone has to move into your ecosystem, you are attractive because you have a market.
The situation is different now. The value of the product must be closely integrated with the partners in the ecology, and even with the end user. Second, if the ecology is to grow, if the application is to grow, extra effort must be paid, and others will not automatically find you. Third, how to make good use of the system platform can only be achieved through the efforts of both parties. It is no longer possible to rely on unilateral efforts and rely on closed technology platforms to allow application partners to keep trial and error. Finally, the future should be a diverse market. The single-machine world will not be a very scientific existence in the context of the entire technology. The coexistence of multiple platforms and the competition between multiple technologies are a long-term form in the future. Customers have more choices and customers are happy to comment. The current industry background basically guides the computer industry in this direction. We have actually seen various attempts.
There are various chip-level open source that we have seen recently, which are a sign of future diversity.
About independent innovation
Q1: How to treat independent innovation and localization?
Hu: We do not define localization. We just need to do independent research and development, organize our own supply chain, we have to organize our own service system, organize our own ecosystem, organize our own operation and sales system, and ensure that we have the ability to develop independently on existing technology platforms This is our pursuit. We do not pursue who labels us and is certified as a domestic industry. What I need is that as an enterprise, I have the ability to master my own operations, whether it is from research and development, production, or from the operational dimension.
Qiao Xin: Along with the previous topic, the independent research and development capabilities of Chinese server manufacturers have changed a lot over the years. The original time, it may be in our products, quality, technology, and foreign There are still some gaps in the product, but on the other hand, there are basically no gaps in the research on X86 servers. Everyone is the same, and we may be better than Dell in some aspects, as is the case with mobile phones. In fact, Inspur was able to get the first prize of national scientific and technological progress, and also made breakthroughs in key technical points and core technologies of small computers, interconnected technologies, operating system technologies, and architecture technologies.
As for the question you just asked, we have mastered the key technology of the small machine. Here the chips and processors used by the small machine are now able to connect up to two domestic CPUs. If the customer wants to use 4 , 8, 16 pieces, definitely still need to use foreign technology. Inspur also has plans to make minicomputers based on domestic processors, but the key difficulty here is not ours. The main point is on domestic processors. In this respect, Inspur is the most professional for server and minicomputer, but we need to find the corresponding chip manufacturer upstream, and the needs of customers are there. This also involves what we just said. Finance is now talking about localized substitution. Localized substitution refers to OA, which is to be a nationally produced substitution. However, in general applications and core applications, it still says that you go to find an alternative path. The alternative path should be step by step. What kind of it is difficult to say that domestic chips are used in general applications or core applications. Therefore, Inspur is also actively practicing domestic substitution, but it is not very aggressive and it has a path to replace it.
Aftershocks: Indeed, technology, R & D, and development all have cycles and time. We also have to admit that from the perspective of China’s overall technology industry, especially in terms of information technology, there is still a gap with foreign countries. However, Inspur is now striving to make domestic self-developed servers, and pushing Power chips and domestic self-developed servers to such a high-end level is already remarkable in China. Because in the technology of making minicomputers, no other country in the world can do it, and China can do this very well. And our goal is not to replace all the domestic ones, because IOur positioning is not just made in China, our OpenPOWER actually has a global mission. So you may not be able to answer the questions you care about, but we are doing solid technical innovation step by step. We have a spirit of craftsmanship and always do one thing.
Hu Leijun: The focus of future competition is ecology first. Ecology determines everything. In which fields and directions, and in which ecology you invest, determines the future development direction of the product and determines the market area. Not investing in ecology, expanding more partners in ecology, and basically losing half of your chances in future struggles. There is now a huge stock market, which is declining in the stock market, or that a solid foundation cannot be gradually established in the stock market, and there is basically no chance of winning. The other is the incremental market, such as the rapid development of AIThe rapid growth, the rapid growth of distributed storage, the growth of various emerging open source-based application markets, in the emerging incremental market, watch the technological progress of each.
Technological progress is nothing more than two aspects. Just looking for differences in support technology, everyone is almost the same. However, in terms of structural design, writing software code on the same platform can be divided into high and low, good and bad, and optimization for different applications. Another difference is that in the diversity of pure computing, many people now add accelerator boxes to processors. Technical openness and inclusiveness largely determine future changes.
From my personal point of view, the future of computing must be full of diversity. Many years ago, everyone was an independent and closed architecture. Later, X86 came to make a common standard product. Now at such a threshold, in the future, we will face a variety of different application requirements. On the premise that the threshold of our design technology and the threshold of supporting technology are lowered, more people have the opportunity to practice doing something different. The demand for computing platforms will also diverge and evolve, creating many opportunities. Just from the ecology of the processor industry, a more diverse environment will be established. In a diverse environment, as long as you choose it properly, you can always find your own living space.
Q2: How about ecological construction now? What is the future focus or direction?
Hu Leijun: For K1 Power and OpenPOWER, we have entered a new product cycle. The main feature of the new cycle is that the technical characteristics are no longer as much ahead of others as before. The original comparison was that the X86 frequency was higher than others Double the system’s scalability, sometimes an order of magnitude larger than competitors. In this case, some applications can only be afforded by the K1 Power small machine. Others chase your goal, everyone comes to fit you, everyone has to move into your ecosystem, you are attractive because you have a market.
The situation is different now. The value of the product must be closely integrated with the partners in the ecology, and even with the end user. Second, if the ecology is to grow, if the application is to grow, extra effort must be paid, and others will not automatically find you. Third, how to make good use of the system platform can only be achieved through the efforts of both parties. It is no longer possible to rely on unilateral efforts and rely on closed technology platforms to allow application partners to keep trial and error. Finally, the future should be a diverse market. The single-machine world will not be a very scientific existence in the context of the entire technology. The coexistence of multiple platforms and the competition between multiple technologies are a long-term form in the future. Customers have more choices and customers are happy to comment. The current industry background basically guides the computer industry in this direction. We have actually seen various attempts.
There are various chip-level open source that we have seen recently, which are a sign of future diversity.
About independent innovation
Q1: How to treat independent innovation and localization?
Hu: We do not define localization. We just need to do independent research and development, organize our own supply chain, we have to organize our own service system, organize our own ecosystem, organize our own operation and sales system, and ensure that we have the ability to develop independently on existing technology platforms This is our pursuit. We do not pursue who labels us and is certified as a domestic industry. What I need is that as an enterprise, I have the ability to master my own operations, whether it is from research and development, production, or from the operational dimension.
Qiao Xin: Along with the previous topic, the independent research and development capabilities of Chinese server manufacturers have changed a lot over the years. The original time, it may be in our products, quality, technology, and foreign There are still some gaps in the product, but on the other hand, there are basically no gaps in the research on X86 servers. Everyone is the same, and we may be better than Dell in some aspects, as is the case with mobile phones. In fact, Inspur was able to get the first prize of national scientific and technological progress, and also made breakthroughs in key technical points and core technologies of small computers, interconnected technologies, operating system technologies, and architecture technologies.
As for the question you just asked, we have mastered the key technology of the small machine. Here the chips and processors used by the small machine are now able to connect up to two domestic CPUs. If the customer wants to use 4 , 8, 16 pieces, definitely still need to use foreign technology. Inspur also has plans to make minicomputers based on domestic processors, but the key difficulty here is not ours. The main point is on domestic processors. In this respect, Inspur is the most professional for server and minicomputer, but we need to find the corresponding chip manufacturer upstream, and the needs of customers are there. This also involves what we just said. Finance is now talking about localized substitution. Localized substitution refers to OA, which is to be a nationally produced substitution. However, in general applications and core applications, it still says that you go to find an alternative path. The alternative path should be step by step. What kind of it is difficult to say that domestic chips are used in general applications or core applications. Therefore, Inspur is also actively practicing domestic substitution, but it is not very aggressive and it has a path to replace it.
Aftershocks: Indeed, technology, R & D, and development all have cycles and time. We also have to admit that from the perspective of China’s overall technology industry, especially in terms of information technology, there is still a gap with foreign countries. However, Inspur is now striving to make domestic self-developed servers, and pushing Power chips and domestic self-developed servers to such a high-end level is already remarkable in China. Because in the technology of making minicomputers, no other country in the world can do it, and China can do this very well. And our goal is not to replace all the domestic ones, because IOur positioning is not just made in China, our OpenPOWER actually has a global mission. So you may not be able to answer the questions you care about, but we are doing solid technical innovation step by step. We have a spirit of craftsmanship and always do one thing.