Alibaba Cloud - which unveiled a raft of new anouncements at Apsara Conference 2021 - says the data centres will serve as intelligence backbones to support the two nations’ digital economies, and businesses “on their journey to transform and innovate”.
According to Alibaba Cloud local businesses in South Korea of all sizes will be able to deploy mission-critical workloads while enjoying more reliable and secure cloud services with lower latency.
And for Thailand, Alibaba Cloud says the data centre will offer products and solutions that are in line with Thailand 4.0 - the Thai government’s 20-year strategy to promote digital innovation and the development of sustainable technologies.
“As one of the world’s top three cloud service providers, we are committed to bringing our world-class, hyper-scale cloud infrastructure to South Korea and Thailand, so that we can support local businesses to be at the forefront of digital transformation,” said Selina Yuan, General Manager of International Business, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.
“With our business insight serving global customers in multiple key industries from retail to finance, logistics and manufacturing, we believe we can support local customers in South Korea and Thailand to meet their digitalisation needs from both a technology and services perspective.”
To “complement its infrastructure investment”, Alibaba Cloud also unveiled technologies, products and solutions it says make public cloud more accessible to enterprises and developers, by enhancing its security, availability and improving its adaptability in both cloud native and on- premise environments.
In order to support customers “ever growing computational needs in the cloud”, Alibaba Cloud unveiled its fourth generation of ApsaraCompute Shenlong Architecture that carries leading capabilities in terms of container elasticity, storage, Input/output (IO) performance, latency and chip-level security hardening features.
“The self-developed Shenlong architecture is upgraded to support data intensive applications, with storage Input/output Operations Per Second (IOPS) increased by 300% to 3 Million IOPS, network Packets Per Second (PPS) increased by more than 100% to 50 Million PPS, while the storage and network IO latencies are decreased to as low as 30 and 16 microseconds, respectively,” Alibaba Cloud said.
“In the fourth generation Shenlong architecture, Alibaba Cloud also unveiled the industry’s only large-scale Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) networking capability with a latency as low as 5 microseconds, to further accelerate data intensive applications on the cloud. For example, the updated Shenlong architecture with RDMA can increase the computing performance in data-intensive AI and big data spark scenarios by 30% compared to the mainstream performance of the Transmission Control Protocol(TCP) network on the cloud.
“To support enterprises’ hybrid cloud needs, Alibaba Cloud has launched a new database platform DBStack (based on Kubernetes) that can bring cloud native database systems to enterprises' on-premise environments. With DBStack, businesses that are not ready to migrate fully onto public cloud can still enjoy the benefits of public cloud securely and conveniently in their on-premise environment, bolstering the digitalization process for finance, transportation, and the telco industries.”
Alibaba Cloud also announced the upgrading of its PolarDB to showcase the “leading cloud native database” that marks three levels of separation, with further decoupling of memory and CPU cores.
“The three independent layers can be scaled up or down independently with increased elasticity and better availability and scalability,” Alibaba said.
Alibaba Cloud has also launched a new energy-saving solution for corporate customers that it says enhances their energy consumption management and carbon footprint reduction.
“By leveraging Alibaba Cloud’s data analytics and machine learning technology, the solution offers tools to help customers track carbon emissions, analyze energy consumption, predict electricity generation from new energy sources, and receive recommendations for carbon emission reduction plans and related trading mechanisms.
“To continue encouraging collaboration, Alibaba Cloud has open-sourced PolarDB-X (aMySQL-native distributed database) and AI products including DeepRec and Proxima, for developers to benefit from building cloud native, distributed databases and AI-powered searching and advertising services.
“Besides open source key codes, Alibaba Cloud has also launched Alibaba AI, an integrated digital intelligence and AI platform that provides an out-of-the-box setting for enterprises to manage their intelligent assets in a simple, secure and efficient way.The one-stop cloud native system offers a series of AI and digital products, ranging from intelligence production, storage, analysis, and development to management, to help businesses capture and capitalize on new growth opportunities presented by digital transformation.
“Propelled by Alibaba Cloud’s computing and AI power, companies including those in fashion design, medical research and media are already using the platform to unleash the potential of their digital intelligence,” Alibaba Cloud said.
Alibaba Cloud has also unveiled a digital solution aimed at streamlining the organisation and communications for large-scale sports events.
The new solution will be used for the 2022 Asian Games, to be held in Hangzhou next September, serving over 100,000 participants from across the world.
Leveraging DingTalk’s established cloud-based enterprise collaboration platform, Alibaba Cloud says the new sports solution provides a one-stop collaboration tool to connect stakeholders at all stages of the event hosting lifecycle – from organiSers and suppliers to volunteers and venue operators – enhancing the operational efficiency of sports events.
“Alibaba Cloud’s ambition is to transform the experience of sports in the digital era. As part of our continued efforts to achieve this goal, our new DingTalk solution is designed to help users manage and operate large-scale sports events in a more structured manner, leveraging DingTalk as an enterprise collaboration tool as well as utilizing our cutting-edge cloud technologies and infrastructure,” said Selina Yuan.
“Following our success in delivering technological solutions and services to digitalize the Olympics Games Tokyo 2020, we are excited about the opportunity to support the upcoming 2022 Asian Games in Hangzhou.”
“At DingTalk, we are aiming to facilitate the digitalization of organizations and corporations. With the launch of Premium DingTalk for Sports Games and our upcoming cooperation with the 2022 Asian Games in Hangzhou, we are ready to provide the latest in digital platform services to global sporting event organizers,” said Alex Li, Vice President of DingTalk.
