Study on Water Information Cloud of Nanjing Based on CloudStack

Study on Water Information Cloud of Nanjing Based on CloudStack

Qiuxiang Chen, Feng Xu

College of Computer and Information

Hohai University

Nanjing, China

e-mail: chenqiuxiang_1988@https://www.360docs.net/doc/7011739595.html,

e-mail:njxufeng@https://www.360docs.net/doc/7011739595.html,

Abstract-At pres ent, cloud computing technology and its layout have been increasingly improved, but its application in water re s ource s informatization i s ju s t the beginning. Therefore, it is necessary to study on the construction of water information cloud. Taking the pres ent s ituation of Nanjing water resources as the background, this paper proposes a four-layer architecture of Nanjing water information cloud which includes physical layer, infrastructure layer, service layer and pres entation layer. The cloud computing platform is built us ing CloudStack, and three kinds of related s ervice clus ters are advanced according to the requirements of Nanjing water conservancy. Finally, we analyze the application prospects and development orientation of water information clouds.

Keywords-cloud computing; water information cloud; CloudStack; service cluster

I.I NTRODUCTION

Water is closely related to human survival, economic development and social progress, and it has always been a great event for a country. In 21 Century, with the fast development of Internet technology and continued advance of government informatization construction, water informatization construction has achieved certain achievement. Reference [1] points out that, at present stage, a series of problems restricting its development has been exposed in the process of water conservancy informatization, such as the disunity of standard specifications for application software, resources division, sharing difficulty, low efficiency, repetitive construction, etc.

Since the concept of cloud computing was put forward, it has quickly gotten many attentions. It provides transparent service for users, and as long as the users put forward their demands, cloud computing providers can provide services as required. In the whole process, firstly users input demands through a simple interface, then the demands are automatically split into numerous smaller subroutines by the huge network and processing program, and then the subroutines are sent to the data center for processing, finally the results will be return to users. Service providers can process tens of millions or even billions messages in seconds, so that cloud computing can achieve the powerful performance of network services, as well as super computer [2]. In addition, some security techniques are well studied in [3-6].

At present, cloud computing technology and its layout have been increasingly improved, but the application of cloud computing on water resources informatization is still relatively rare. The introduction of cloud computing to the construction of water resources informatization can solve the existing problems such as resource sharing, redundant construction, systems integration, business collaboration, and alternation between old and new system to some extent and

it also can promote the development of water resources informatization.

II.B ACKGROUND

Nanjing is located in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, whose terrain is complex. There are a number of rivers and lakes in its territory, and along the river and lake the dyke is plain and the hinterland is hilly. In addition, precipitation and water resources are unevenly distributed in time and space. These factors make Nanjing a flood-prone area. In order to reduce the impacts of floods and droughts, Nanjing Water Conservancy Bureau has basically established the flood and drought control command system integrated by information collection, network communications, integrated database, and application service. It has also built wide area network between the city’s flood and drought protection offices and each county’s offices, and hydrological telemetry system to automatically collect and process hydrological information , and so on.

At present, Nanjing Water Conservancy Bureau owns ten servers to assume the operation of the existing application systems. An application system basically runs in a server to provide the corresponding service. However, due to the large scale of various systems, large amount of data and the obvious lack of some servers, the application system always takes long time to react. Specific problems are formulated as follows:

?Due to many reasons such as the scattered construction of flood and drought control system, the

non-uniform standards of these systems and weak

global consciousness etc., infrastructure resources

are difficult to integrate and efficient utilization of

these resources cannot be increased, performance of

systems cannot be optimized. Eventually, these

problems influent the results of flood control and

drought control work.

?The development and application of flood and drought control application system are often lack of

coordination between business systems, and can’t

achieve the interconnection between related

2013 12th International Symposium on Distributed Computing and Applications to Business, Engineering & Science

businesses. So that it is difficult to share information resources, and it cannot provide an "integration" approach to the designated users.

The past solution, replacing or adding servers, to a certain extent can improve the response speed of business systems, but it inevitably leads to the redundancy of the servers. The ability of some servers can’t be taken full advantage of, and it also fails to solve these issues like resource sharing and interconnection between related systems. In order to solve these problems, we can use cloud computing technology to integrate dispersed servers into one "server", and integrate the various business systems in the water information cloud platform, then all systems are scheduled as services.

III. S OLUTION

A. Structural Design

The overall framework of Nanjing water information cloud platform as shown in Fig.1 is a multi-tier architecture composed of the physical layer, infrastructure layer, service Overall framework of Nanjing water information cloud

Physical resources layer is in the bottom which provides the physical resources of the entire platform, including servers, PC machines, computers, switches and other network facilities. In a word, this layer provides the physical the virtualization technology, the hardware resources can be divided into the virtual machine. A variety of services can be deployed on virtual machines. Through the portal, each service is managed in a uniform way.

Service layer mainly provides various service clusters. They are platform management services clusters, water-related service clusters, user management and authorization service cluster.

The presentation layer offers a variety of access methods for different service clusters. Users can access the services provided by the cloud platform through PCs, laptops, pads and smartphones. B. Cloud Platform

1) CloudStack

In the water information cloud structure, the cloud platform which is used to process information is of great importance.

CloudStack, cloud system infrastructure, is open source software. With using a modular, portable design criterion, CloudStack is not only compatible with the existing infrastructure resources, but also easy to use, users can quickly install and configure. Modular design allows the user to customize the function of the system as needed, changed or replaced. In addition, CloudStack provides an API that's compatible with AWS EC2 and S3 for organizations that wish to deploy hybrid clouds.

The hardware resources are abstracted and separated into computing resources, storage resources and cyber sources by KVM [7], which are organized as virtual resources; CloudStack integrates and manages these virtual resources to build cloud platform, and provides transparent cloud services for users. It is responsible for the virtual resources mapping to hardware resources, and provides effective security isolation between users.

Logically, the deployment of CloudStack includes five parts as shown in Fig.2: host, cluster, pod, and availability zone and management server [8].

Figure 2. Components diagram of CloudStack

Host is a single computing node which has installed CloudStack Agent and one of the hypervisors supported by the platform like VMware, KVM and XenServer. The hosts are where the actual cloud services run in the form of guest

PC

PAD

Phones

Water-related services

Cloud platform management services

User Management services

Presentation layer

Service layer

VMs VMs

VMs

KVM virtualization platform

Infrastructure layer

Physical resource

layer

Cloud platform computing node

Cloud platform management node

virtual machines. Cluster provides an approach to organize nodes. If many nodes are in the same cluster, they have the same hardware, hypervisor and subnet, and they can access to the shared primary memory. A Pod which is equivalent to a rack consists of one or more clusters and one or more primary memories. A zone is equivalent to a single data center which contains multiple pods and secondary storages. Its biggest advantage is to provide physical independence and redundancy.

CloudStack manages two types of storage. The primary storage connects to a cluster, and it is used to store the root disk image of the VMs and additional data volumes of running virtual machines. The secondary storage stores VMs templates, ISO images and disk snapshots. There must be a secondary storage per zone.

The CloudStack platform can manage three kinds of user roles: The root administrator that has the highest accessing level can manage the entire cloud, including the hosts, clusters, users, domains, service offerings, and templates; The domain administrator can perform administrative operations for users who belong to that domain, but it don’t have visibility into physical servers or other domains; The end users which are unprivileged can only manager their own virtual resources.

CloudStack helps users to manage their own cloud through a web interface and a RESTfull API. The web interface allows the complete access to the CloudStack administrators while end users are only allowed to manage their own virtual resource. Through RESTfull API, the third-party can manage the cloud platform.

2)Build Cloud Platform

a)Preparation

Servers in the cloud platform are divided into two categories: management servers and hosts. Specific configuration is as follows:

TABLE I. T HE CONFIGURATION TABLE

Host Name CloudManager Node

Hardware

CPU IntelG530 2.4GHz IntelG530 2.4GHz RAM 2G DDR3 4G DDR3 Hard Disk 500G 500G

Network

IP 192.168.2.202 192.168.2.203 DNS 192.168.2.1 192.168.2.1 Gateway 192.168.2.1 192.168.2.1

Software

OS RHEL 6.2 64bit

RHEL 6.2 64bit

with KVM software

CloudStack

Management

Server, MySQL

CloudStack Host

Agent

Storage Primary

Storage

NFS,60G

Second

Storage

NFS,40G

b)Management Server Installation

Before installing CloudStack packages, system-related

services are configured first, including IP, host name, local

yum source, and NTP (network time protocol) server. Then

the CloudStack package and MySQL database are installed;

At last, the NFS server is set up and the system virtual

machine templates are prepared.

c)Hypervisor Installation

First install RHEL 6.2 (64bit) with KVM in the host, then

install CloudStack Agent, and NTP should be installed and

edited to ensure all hosts in a pod have the same time.

d)CloudStack Configuration

After installing and running the Management Server

software, enter the CloudStack Web Console address

http://192.168.1.200:8080/client in the browser, then input

the username and password, you can log on the Nanjing city

water cloud. The main page is shown in Fig.3, the logged

user's situation is above the page, and the left is the basic

control column, upper right is some conventional alarm, low

right shows resources’ occupation and usage. To know more,

you can find in [9].

Figure 3. The main page of Nanjing water cloud platform

When creating virtual machines, the user needs to use a

template or ISO file. The administrator can customize the

mirror for the cloud platform to provide users virtualized

instances. In the process of making mirrors, software and

services can be customized. Namely, according to the

specific needs of the development, install the corresponding

development environment or open the related services in the

virtual machine. When the customized mirror is instantiated,

the user can directly use the perfect service platform. This

approach avoids the tedious work to install the software and

improve the work efficiency [10].

C.Water Information Cloud Servicse Cluster

Nanjing water information cloud service clusters can be

divided into three main modules: cloud platform

management service clusters, water-related service clusters,

user management service clusters.

1)Cloud Platform Management Service Clusters

The main role of cloud platform management service clusters is to provide access to the portal for the user, management of the portal, as well as the application of resources. Platform management service clusters are accessed through the web, when the user passes the authority verification, they can customize and get different services according to their authority and identity.

2)User Management Service Clusters

The main function of the service clusters is to provide a unified authentication service of accounts and passwords, and provide the authorization management service for all clusters integrated in the platform. This service is only oriented to cloud platform administrator, and other normal users have no rights to access the management service; they just can get the services corresponding to their authorities. 3)Water-related Service Clusters

Water-related service cluster is divided into 9 specific services by their different functions. The components of water-related clusters are shown as Fig.4. For example, water and rainfall information service provides access to query water and rain information of all reporting stations in Nanjing, and show the result by charts; Project information service which is supported by the database and based on the geographic information system provides a static and real time project information. Data analysis service provides data

Water-related service clusters

Figure 4. The components of water-related clusters

analysis and forecasting of important hydrological sites in Nanjing, such as water level prediction, similarity search and analysis of frequency curve analysis. Flood forecasting service is used to forecast water levels and flows of the Yangtze River and the Chuhe River in Nanjing section. Video surveillance service is used to monitor the key water conservancy projects, to make relevant staff informed of engineering and water situation.

D.Multiple access methods for intelligent terminals

With the rapid development of science and technology, smartphones and tablets are becoming increasingly prevalent, and bring a lot of convenience for people's life and work. In the presentation layer, water information cloud offers PC terminal access method for users, and also provides the access channel for tablets and smartphones. Through intelligent terminals, the staffs can obtain information more timely and access all kinds of application services, and they can response to an emergency more quickly.

IV.C ONCLUTION

Nanjing city flood control and drought prevention information integration platform which is based on cloud can automatically control and optimize use of resources, can allow self-service and on-demand access to dynamic compute and storage resources in the resource pool. What’s more, water-related modules and platform management modules are packaged into cloud services clusters, and water information cloud manages the service clusters in the form of portal, so that users can custom and access to services expediently. During the trial operation, the platform has shown many features. For example, it can offer powerful and comprehensive function; it improves the query speed and provides reliable query results; it applies uniform portal to access services for all users and it also offers friendly man-machine interface.

Cloud computing gathers distributed resources to form a resource pool, then provides resources to the user in the form of services, so that it can achieve the goal of collectivized operation, intensive development, lean management and standard construction. Cloud computing is helpful to collect and share the water information and it can improve service value by converting the data to services. Moreover, "water information cloud" integrates resources to improve utilization rate and reduce energy consumption, so it has considerable development prospects. However, the "water information cloud" is a large and complex system which will face with many problems such as access speed, reliability,

security and availability. In other words, there will be a lot of unpredictability in the future. So, we need deeper research on the operation mechanism and management means of the water information cloud in the future.

A CKNOWLEDGEMENT

This paper is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China: “Research on Trusted Technologies for The Terminals in The Distributed Network Environment”

(G rant No. 60903018) and “Research on the Security Technologies for Cloud Computing Platform” (G rant No. 61272543).

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