China Unicom Uses Alluxio and Spark to Build New Computing Platform to Serve Mobile Users
China Unicom is one of the five largest telecom operators in the world. China Unicom’s booming business in 4G and 5G networks has to serve an exploding base of hundreds of millions of smartphone users. This unprecedented growth brought enormous challenges and new requirements to the data processing infrastructure. The previous generation of its data processing system was based on IBM midrange computers, Oracle databases, and EMC storage devices. This architecture could not scale to process the amounts of data generated by the rapidly expanding number of mobile users. Even after deploying Hadoop and Greenplum database, it was still difficult to cover critical business scenarios with their varying massive data processing requirements.