Huawei has released its advanced CloudMetro platform, designed to help operators accelerate their digital transformation and adopt cloud technology to enable resource pooling and enhanced service agility and automation, and its new 100 Gigabit Ethernet-enabled network functions virtualisation infrastructure (NFVI) solution.
CloudMetro solution
Huawei’s CloudMetro solution moves management and service functions to the network cloud engine (NCE) to enable an on-demand, ‘Lego’-style service provisioning capability. By introducing service function chains to support on-demand service function selection and deployment, the architecture is designed to reduce trial costs, shorten service time-to-market down to days and address carriers’ differentiated service requirements.
The platform offers standard northbound interfaces that are open to third parties, so allowing a wider range of applications to be supported. Huawei also provides lab facilities for remote online integration verification, thereby enabling joint development with partners. Huawei intends to cooperate with industry partners to help deliver mutually beneficial solutions.
Huawei noted that forwarding-control separation allows cloud-based centralised resource control and ondemand dynamic resource scheduling for increased resource utilisation, while unified service management, centralised resource control and flexible resource scheduling across layers, domains and vendors enable selfservice operation and one-touch service provisioning. In addition, the router can be used to construct an E2E, slicing-capable network.
NFVI solution
Huawei also released its 100 Gigabit Ethernet-capable NFVI solution that provides high bandwidth and low latency performance. Based on Huawei’s FusionServer E9000 converged architecture blade server, the solution integrates 100 Gigabit Ethernet switch modules and FPGA acceleration cards, NVMe SSDs and the FusionSphere virtualisation platform, which delivers the performance for carrier-class applications.
Huawei noted that to leverage the operational and business advantages of NFV, it believes the NFVI must be able to accommodate increasing east-west traffic within the data centre by providing a high-speed Ethernet fabric capable of supporting high capacity and lower latency between virtual network function (VNF) elements.
The NFVI 100 Gigabit Ethernet solution leverages Huawei’s FusionServer E9000 which can support 100 Gbit/s per port for external bandwidth of up to 4 Tbit/s, while providing port forwarding latency of less than 600 ns for the entire chassis. In addition, the network can be managed by the SDN controller, and for applications such as network protocol offload and encryption/decryption the NFVI solution features FPGA acceleration cards and NVMe SSDs to reduce the CPU load.
