The first of the trio Antarctic Survey Telescopes (AST3) has been deployed to Dome A, Antarctica in January 2012. This largest optical survey telescope in Antarctica is equipped with a 10k x 10k CCD. The huge amount of data, limited satellite communication bandwidth, low temperature, low pressure and limited energy supply all place challenges to the control and operation of the telescope. We have developed both the hardware and software systems to operate the unattended telescope and carry out the survey automatically. Our systems include the main survey control, data storage, real-time pipeline, and database, for all of which we have dealt with various technical difficulties. These include developing customized computer systems and data storage arrays working at the harsh environment, temperature control for the disk arrays, automatic and fast data reduction in real-time, and building robust database system.