Three networking initiatives that will unleash the future of digital productivity

Huawei has upgraded its network offerings and introduced the industry’s first Wi-Fi 7 access point to help organisations accelerate digital transformation

Digital transformation is a concept that reflects a digital-first world. In a digital-first world, information is available everywhere. Connectivity rules. Devices intelligently talk to each other, applications talk to devices, applications and devices talk to users — and it’s all at high speed, with rich media, and essentially no limits.

On a national level, more than 170 countries have introduced their strategies for digital transformation. All of these approaches, whether Thailand 4.0, Singapore Smart Nation, Digital China, or America’s Advanced Manufacturing Strategy, rely on advanced communication capabilities that reach from the data centre and cloud to the point of user contact.

According to Bob Chen, Vice-President of Huawei Enterprise Business Group: “Data is at the core of digital transformation, and data ingestion, transmission, storage, and analysis are key steps. Huawei provides full-stack products and product portfolios to support E2E data processing, accelerating customers’ digital transformation.”

As you look at implementing elements of your organisation’s digital transformation initiatives, we recommend you consider the three areas of the integrated data journey — the data centre, the WAN (wide-area network) and the local campus (whether a corporate facility or educational).

Each area requires its own unique technology, and Huawei has been investing in upgrading its offerings in all of them. We’ll discuss each in turn.

CloudFabric 3.0: For the data centre and cloud

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, one of the definitions of a “centre” is “a facility providing a place for a particular activity or service”. Think about that. Back in the day, data centres were “a facility” providing “a place”. It was all about the physical aggregation of on-premises equipment in the service of an enterprise or organisation.

But today, especially in light of the pandemic, data centres are much more a logical construct than a physical place or facility. Sure, there might be one or more physical locations where on-premises servers and racks are located. But more and more businesses rely on public and private clouds, where location (other than for jurisdictional issues) is nearly irrelevant.

Today’s modern data centre consists of one or more on-premises locations, one or more (often a lot more) cloud-based services (what we now call multi-cloud), and management consoles that are just as likely to be located in a pocket or on a lap as in a network engineer’s cubicle.

This is where Huawei’s upgraded data centre network (DCN), CloudFabric 3.0, comes into play. CloudFabric is designed to help manage general purpose computing and virtual machines, high-performance operations and storage. Huawei’s upgrade focuses on three major aspects of operations.

Easy deployment: Huawei’s Agile Open Container (AOC) platform is a modular framework designed to improve operation and maintenance (O&M) tasks.

It helps solve the problem of managing devices with a central one-click service interface layered over a device interface mechanism that allows network devices from a wide variety of vendors to all work together.

The time-savings potential is astounding. Rollouts across the multi-cloud and data centres, which used to take weeks (or more), can now be accomplished in hours (or even in just minutes).

Easy O&M: Because devices and applications from multiple sources can be configured and monitored together from the same environment, a comprehensive map of network functionality and service quality is available to network engineers.

If something goes wrong on the network, it’s possible to identify the root cause with as little as one click. The benefits from an SLA (service level agreement) perspective are obvious, as are the practical benefits of keeping services up and running.

Where it might have once taken days to identify and fix a point of failure, it’s now possible to identify the condition causing the problem in minutes, allowing network engineers to focus on remedying the situation as quickly as possible.

Easy evolution: All networks have to evolve. That said, many of us have experienced the worried feeling in the pit of the stomach when deploying a network change and hoping and wishing nothing goes terribly, horribly wrong.

But hopes and wishes aren’t best practices. With AOC, it’s now possible to perform dry runs and see the result of network changes without actually causing any interruption in service.

Huawei also offers a multi-data centre controller (MDC) that provides end-to-end software defined network management across hybrid cloud networks. MDC talks to public cloud APIs and provides the ability to manage policies across the entire hybrid cloud environment, all without installing plug-ins or consuming public cloud resources.

CloudWAN 3.0: For wide-area network connections

Data centres, private clouds, public clouds, and hybrid clouds are valuable, of course. But they don’t really become usable until they’re connected to users. That requires wide-area network (WAN) links from cloud and data centre resources to the point of usage. But not all workloads are the same, and neither are their communications needs.

A text-based chat in Slack, for example, requires far less bandwidth than a Zoom video call. Very intermittent, low data IoT sensors may only send a few bytes every day. But a filmmaker backing up 4K or 8K video may need to pump a quarter of a terabyte every afternoon.

This is where Huawei’s CloudWAN 3.0 comes in. Huawei’s upgraded WAN solution includes three key areas of focus that provide sculpting and optimization of WAN connections.

Agile connection: Huawei’s implementation of SRv6 is the merging of two technologies: segment routing and IPv6. With segment routing, the topological and service path is encoded in every packet header. IPv6 provides reachability, especially as IPv4 reaches capacity. Combined, it’s possible to assign an address to every segment where traffic may flow.

Once you do that, it’s possible to assign different paths for different applications, services and classes of service. With the ability to do intelligent path computation, CloudWAN 3.0 gives IT professionals the ability to implement custom service provisioning and set up network functions to be optimised for hosting in edge data centres (i.e. cloudification) — and it can all be done in minutes.

Optimal user experience: Going back to our example of a Slack chat versus a Zoom call, Huawei’s network slicing technology can now be managed with Mbit/s granularity.

Before the upgrade, slicing was possible, but when it was divided by Gbit/s slices, it wasn’t possible to truly optimise traffic. Plus, now hard bandwidth isolation is a feature made available in the CloudWAN 3.0 implementation, allowing any given network the ability to carry different services concurrently.

Agile O&M: IFIT is cool. It’s an IETF-proposed standard network measurement protocol which embeds tracking and diagnostic packets into network traffic. Those packets provide better visibility into network behaviour.

One big benefit is real-time visualisation of SLA performance. But where things really start to get interesting is that the embedded protocol data can help locate network faults, reducing the time to find faults from hours to mere minutes.

Building out such network infrastructure requires a new generation of intelligent cloud-network infrastructure hardware, and Huawei recently introduced a router designed to support these innovations. The NetEngine 8000 M4 router, which won a Runner-up for Best of Show Award in the network infrastructure category at Interop 2022, provides the capabilities we’ve been discussing, including SRv6, IFIT and more granular slicing.

Biznet is an integrated digital infrastructure company in Indonesia building a future-oriented intelligent WAN with CloudWAN 3.0 technologies. According to Agus Ariyanto, Vice-President Network of Biznet: “Built on a flat metro network, Huawei helps Biznet consolidate its leading role in the Industry. Together with Huawei, we’ll explore more regarding emerging technologies and business innovation based on IPE.”

CloudCampus 3.0: For wireless connectivity anywhere on campus

Life on campus (whether a corporate campus or an educational facility) has changed considerably since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Extreme flexibility, enhanced security, and sustainable scalability are all necessary in environments where the way people work and collaborate could change on a weekly basis.

5G and mobile communications are helpful when people are on the go, but when employees and students work on campus, they need reliable Wi-Fi network access no matter where they are. And where they are is changing. With on-location work sometimes limited to a few days a week, traditional offices and cubicles are giving way to meeting spaces and shared study spaces.

There has also been huge growth in IoT devices, with many businesses hosting hundreds or even thousands of sensors, lights, thermostats, robotic systems and more.

Wired networking helps, but it can’t go everywhere. Wi-Fi has been a staple of campus networking, but earlier incarnations had difficulty sustaining traffic levels, data rates and reaching the nooks and crannies where people work and devices live.

Into this environment, Huawei has introduced the industry’s first Wi-Fi 7 access point, the AirEngine 8771-X1T. Wi-Fi 7, otherwise known as IEEE 802.11be Extremely High Throughput (EHT), is a proposed amendment to the IEEE 802.11 standard. Wi-Fi 7 is expected to be able to support both stationary and walking speeds for devices, operate in the 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz frequency bands and sustain speeds nearing 40Gbps (almost Thunderbolt 3 speeds).

According to Steven Zhao, Vice-President of Huawei’s Data Communication Product Line, the adoption of Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7 in the future poses new demands on enterprise services. Huawei proposes the next-generation campus network architecture so that it can meet the upgrading Wi-Fi 7 requirements. While Wi-Fi 7 is yet to be officially announced, Huawei launches this Wi-Fi 7 AP AirEngine 8771-X1T solution at HC Bangkok, which is the industry first.

In addition, Huawei released its Wireless Intelligent Network Architecture White Paper. Liu Jianning, President of Huawei’s Global Enterprise Network Marketing & Solutions Sales Department, said: “One of the most important changes to campus networks is fully wireless,” an environment where sufficient bandwidth and backhaul capability is provided, so all or nearly all devices can be connected without the need for physical wires.

With more and more applications being video-first, the ability to sustain much higher speed transmission rates increases the practicality of using wireless networking throughout campus installations. Huawei has also added central switches and routers that reduce the maintenance cost and time, and allow for automation of networking functions.

Improved networking reach, more bandwidth and easier maintenance can have tangible benefits to people’s lives. One example comes from a German hospital that’s using Huawei’s wireless technology to monitor patients’ vital signs in real time. Rather than requiring nursing staff to chart that data by hand, the wireless network is able to deliver that data continuously and accurately to centralised applications. Not only are charting errors virtually eliminated, but the nurses on site found they walked about 25% less each day.

Unleash digital

“Unleash digital” is the theme of Huawei Connect 2022, and reflects the company’s growing commitment to digital transformation.

As we’ve seen in the years since the pandemic hit, digital services have been not only transformative, but also mission critical to keeping our entire world working. Today, we live in a world where work is both remote and on-premises, where supply chain needs are increased at the very same time as lead times are reduced, where costs are rising as budgets are decreasing. The ability to deliver, utilise and optimise compute services has become a top-line requirement for nearly all organisations of nearly all sizes.

Huawei’s three initiatives — CloudFabric 3.0 for the data centre and cloud, CloudWAN 3.0 for wide-area network connections, and CloudCampus 3.0 for wireless connectivity anywhere on campus — come at a fortuitous time, as we all work to improve productivity, contain costs, and get work done in constantly changing conditions.

According to Zhao:  “Digital transformation is accelerating worldwide. Huawei will continue to increase technical investments, make breakthroughs and innovations, provide the best solutions, and release industry digital productivity.”

For more information on how Huawei’s Intelligent Cloud Network solution can help you on your digital transformation journey, click here.

Matamela Aubrey Mashau is VP of Datacom Product Dept, Huawei SAR