Case Study: China Railway Corporation achieves a scalable, reliable industrial cloud for modern logistics with OpenStack

China Railway Corporation Builds OpenStack*-based Industrial Cloud to Support Modern Logistics Business Development

China Railway, China’s state‑owned national rail operator with over 124,000 km of track and billions of annual passenger and freight movements, faced growing IT demands from massive web traffic, online services and business transformation. Its legacy mainframe and minicomputer systems could not meet requirements for higher performance, stability, security and scalability, and the organization confronted technical challenges around migrating large, heterogeneous systems to an open x86 environment, stabilizing OpenStack components, deploying ultra large‑scale clusters, and building operational expertise.

To address this, China Railway built the China Railway Cloud on OpenStack (China Railway Cloud OS V1.0 in 2015, V2.0 in 2016) and partnered with technology vendors to optimize hardware, Ceph storage and NFV networking. Phase I deployed ~800 nodes (with stress tests hosting 100,000+ VMs and 1,000+ production VMs) and productionized mission‑critical apps—passenger and freight management, the WWW.95306 freight portal, TMIS traffic prediction and train tracking—while adding an OMS for monitoring, automation and analytics. The cloud improved resource utilization, agility and cost efficiency, met demanding stability and scale requirements, and enabled China Railway’s move to platform‑driven digital services that support ongoing business expansion.

China Railway Corporation