Huawei enhances intelligent cloud-network solution to reduce TCO and enable optimal resource utilization

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At the 7th Ultra-Broadband Forum (UBBF 2021), Huawei unveiled new features for its intelligent cloud-network solutions and all-scenario NetEngine series of intelligent routers, enabling greater TCO savings and optimizing the utilization of network resources.

Kevin Hu, President of Data Communication Product Line, Huawei, said, “Digitalization has become a global development trend, with more than 50 countries and regions, including China, the Middle East, and the European Union, having already released their own digital strategies. Consequently, digitalization is driving profound changes in the lifestyle, production, and governance of every person, home, and organization.”

However, digitalization also introduces several challenges, and Kevin added that the new intelligent cloud-network solution is designed to address these challenges with four new capabilities: all-service super edge CO, tenant-level hard slicing, SRv6-powered network programmability, and cloud-network integration.

In a conventional scenario, the limited space inside a CO equipment room makes it difficult for existing nodes to provide comprehensive service processing capabilities. The NetEngine 8000 M series addresses this by providing multi-service processing capabilities that are originally provided by different devices, such as BRAS, CGN, IPsec, and SR. Thus, in an ideal scenario, a single CO can access up to128k home subscribers, 10K enterprises and 100 4G/5G sites. This can enable CO rental cost saving $200K/year and reduce network device power consumption by up to 70 percent, according to Kevin.

With the Tenant-level hard slicing capability, the NetEngine A800 series intelligent access router provides multiple types of services while ensuring physical-level isolation between them and deterministic service SLAs. The tenant-level hierarchical slicing can be used for over 1000 services and applications, ensuring refined service assurance, and doubling the monetization capability. The elastic slice scaling and minute-level lossless dynamic capacity expansion allow network resources to be adjusted based on customer service requirements, achieving zero waste of network resources, and improving bandwidth utilization by more than 30 percent. “The ‘one-box-for-multi-service capability’ significantly simplifies enterprise networks and reduces TCO by 40 percent,” Kevin said.

The intelligent cloud-network solution also provides SRv6-powered network programmability. SRv6 service chaining is used to enable flexible network programming based on services, implementing integrated orchestration of multiple services and providing additional value-added service types. SRv6 Policies support real-time path selection, optimal latency, and differentiated experience assurance. With the new SRv6-powered network programmability, enterprises can access clouds with just one hop and within a single day, dramatically speeding up service provisioning. It can also accelerate cloud and network resource utilization by 30 percent, according to Kevin.

In a conventional network scenario, the fixed homing relationships between resources and networks make it challenging to flexibly schedule inter-DC traffic in a cloud-network integration scenario. The hybrid service operations of existing networks are ill-equipped to meet today’s differentiated service requirements. To address this, Huawei has enhanced the Network as a Service. With cloud-oriented simplified APIs, the integration workload of the OSS and BSS domains is reduced by more than 80 percent, more than 10 cloud SPs are pre-integrated, and more than 20 OSS/BSS domain vendors are interconnected, Kevin said. In this way, cloud-network services with visualized network-wide status can be quickly provisioned for customers, and services can be flexibly adjusted to provide differentiated DICT options.

In his keynote speech, Kevin Hu also introduced the NetEngine series intelligent routers for all scenarios, helping operators build intelligent cloud-networks in the digital era. These devices include intelligent cloud access routers (NetEngine A800 series), all-service aggregation routers (NetEngine 8000 M series), and intelligent backbone routers (NetEngine 8000 X16).

Rajani Baburajan