Huawei launched its new CloudWAN 3.0 solution to help enterprises build a flexible, reliable, and deterministic network, addressing the numerous challenges enterprises face during digital transformation in the cloud era and ultimately injecting new momentum into their digital development.
Snow Yang, Vice President of Huawei’s Router Domain, Data Communication Product Line, unveiled this solution in his keynote speech titled “Huawei CloudWAN 3.0 Solution Empowers Connectivity for Numerous Industries”.
As millions of enterprises are moving to the cloud and production networks are evolving towards IP, digital transformation is gathering speed among enterprises and entering a critical period. WANs are the foundation of digital economy, but are facing with three new trends and challenges:
First, as the cloud and network are separated on a traditional network, it can take months to provision network services, even though cloud services can be provisioned in minutes. The agile nature of cloud services cannot be used to its full advantage. Second, as production systems are cloudified, the requirements on network experience increase significantly, but it is difficult to implement isolation for security and SLA assurance between different services. Third, as the scope of network connections expands, so does the scale of the network, and exponentially O&M becomes difficult to the point where manual O&M alone is insufficient.
To cope with these new trends and challenges, Huawei’s newly upgraded CloudWAN 3.0 solution, powered by IPv6 Enhanced Innovation (IPE), provides four capabilities: one-hop cloud access, one-fiber multipurpose transport, one-click fast scheduling, and one-network wide connection. This E2E all-scenario solution is designed to accelerate enterprise digital transformation.
One-Hop Cloud Access
In the past, it took several months for enterprises to connect to clouds, involving more than 10 stages and multi-level cross-department collaboration. With the help of CloudWAN 3.0, technologies overcome process barriers. Specifically, SRv6-based cloud path technology eliminates the need for E2E cross-domain configuration and allows services to be provisioned in just minutes. This ultimately leads to agile access to multiple clouds for the enterprises. Furthermore, Huawei’s latest innovative virtual link/virtual node technology allows Huawei devices to mix with non-Huawei devices on the live network, enabling intelligent path computation across other vendors’ devices. This significantly reduces costs as devices do not need to be replaced network-wide, and improves intelligent O&M capabilities, enabling enterprises to quickly and efficiently move their services to clouds.
One-Fiber Multipurpose Transport
Traditional production and office services are carried on multiple independent physical networks. The coexistence of these networks causes repeated construction and difficult O&M. CloudWAN 3.0 slicing stands out from the rest, addressing this issue with four industry-leading advantages: over 1000 hierarchical slices, slice ID-based slicing (eliminating the need for address planning), 10 Mbps slicing granularity, and full port coverage, enabling one network to carry multiple services and hard isolation between office and production services. Slicing maximizes the utilization of network resources while adapting to a broad array of industry applications. Huawei’s latest 10GE port FlexE technology enables enterprise traffic to immediately enter a slice after leaving an enterprise egress, extending slicing to the last 500 meters. Huawei has invested great efforts into its FlexE hard slicing technology, making it the only vendor that provides slicing across full port series — 10GE, 50GE, and 100GE — in the industry.
One-Click Fast Scheduling
An enterprise may find it difficult to select the cloud path with the lowest latency and the cloud with the optimal computing power at the same time during cloud access. Unbalanced load on network links and in cloud pools — an issue that has plagued the industry for a long time — results in wasted investment. Huawei’s CloudWAN 3.0 solution uses Huawei’s unique intelligent cloud-map algorithm to compute paths based on both cloud factors (such as the cost and computing power of cloud pools) and network factors (such as bandwidth and latency). Powered by SRv6 and SDN technologies, this solution can quickly identify services and schedule them to the most suitable cloud pools, evenly balancing cloud-network loads, maximizing resource utilization, and helping enterprises reduce their TCO.
One-Network Wide Connection
Huawei is committed to using big data and artificial intelligence technologies to perform correlative analysis on the original discrete and fragmented network data, and to build digital twins atop physical networks, in order to fully digitalize networks and build resilient WANs. Huawei’s CloudWAN 3.0 solution collects 80,000 network KPIs to get a full understanding of service quality in real time with a visual display of SLAs across the network. In addition, the root causes of faults can be located quickly before the faults become issues through Huawei’s unique knowledge graph algorithm. Moreover, this solution uses big data and artificial intelligence to predict faults several days or even months in advance.
At the conference, Mr. Jose Carrillo Ortiz, CTO of PTV Telecom in Spain and Mr. Zhang Shicong, CTO of the National New-Type Internet Exchange Point (IXP) in Hangzhou, shared the problems they encountered during digital transformation as an ISP and IXP, respectively, as well as the practices for successfully building intelligent cloud WANs with Huawei. In addition, Arkadiusz Giedrojc, CTO of Huawei’s Enterprise Marketing & Solution Sales Dept in CEE & Nordic European Region, clearly demonstrated the key capabilities of Huawei’s CloudWAN 3.0 solution.
Huawei has nearly 30 years of expertise in the WAN field and will continue to build the competitiveness of its WAN products and solutions. Around the world, Huawei’s CloudWAN 3.0 solution has been applied in more than 200 government networks, over 50 electric power data networks, and 13 of the top 30 financial institutions. It is also widely used in transportation, education, healthcare, manufacturing, coal, and other industries for digital transformation. Looking into the future, Huawei will continue to innovate based on IPE to empower connectivity for numerous industries, leading WANs into the intelligent cloud-network era, and ultimately helping customers accelerate digital transformation and achieve business success.
