The development of the IoT, big data, AI, cloud computing and other information technologies has led to the continuous development and innovation of many integrated technologies. Along the tide of digital transformation, software-centric network technology has become a major trend in future innovation and development which has led many companies to join the digital world in response to their own development.

With the digital transformation of enterprises, China’s position in the world’s economy has become more prominent as the scale of China’s digital economy expands year by year. In the past year, the pandemic was a major setback to the informatization and digitalization construction in various industries. However, reflecting at the entire process of fighting the pandemic, the value of digitization during that period has become more significant. As the pandemic gradually subsides, the digital economy based on 5G, artificial intelligence technology, big data analysis, cloud computing, etc. has become a new feature of global development.

Under the new situation, FiberHome has noticed that the traditional networks of telecom operators are facing great difficulties to support and meet the ever-changing needs of Internet applications, rapid business deployment, and service innovation as enterprises are increasingly storing business data in the clouds. Meanwhile, the accelerated construction and integration of 5G, IoT, and artificial intelligence requires the creation of a high-speed, intelligent, and stable network to achieve global connections between enterprises, clouds, and users. This also proposes agile and flexible Intelligent requirements for future private lines.

How to build the cornerstone of industrial digitization through SDN technology? During the 2021 China Cloud Network Intelligence Conference with the theme of "Cloud and Network Intelligence, Aiding Digital Intelligence Innovation", Hu Xi and Liu Yi of FiberHome shared the latest cloud and optical network solutions and intelligent new private lines, flexible SD-WAN solutions. Through years of precipitation in the field of cloud-light integrated technology, FiberHome has clearly interpreted the design concept and vision of "full-intelligence, openness, and agility", while demonstrating the value and innovation of the next-generation SD-WAN scenario that integrates SRv6 technology could provide to enterprises.

FiberHome Cloud Optical Network achieves the coordination and convergence between cloud and optical networks by Introducing cloud computing technology into the network. This greatly improves the layout and maintenance efficiency of the network and significantly reduces the difficulty of network management. Cloud computing can help the network gradually form a cloudification network system with the features of "functional software" ", "Unified Business Orchestration" and "Hardware Cloud Resource Pool". “With the accelerating development process of big data, cloud computing and mobile internet, data center traffics are conjointly increasing. Under such circumstances, more enterprises are building multiple data center to cope with the tide, and High-speed optical networks interconnection between clouds are becoming the best bet. In conjunction with the development of cloud data centers, the form is constantly changing. As the core technology in the field of cloud data center network virtualization, SDN/NFV has become the inherent demand of CT cloud, IT cloud and MEC edge cloud. NFV and SDN technology can respectively improve the flexibility of networking and achieve efficient cloud-network synergy within the core of cloud data centers. While in the MEC edge cloud, subject to the scale and distributed characteristics of data centers, NFV will present a situation where two types of virtual machines and containers coexist, as SDN will be deployed more in the form of multi-cloud management."

FiberHome’s intelligent cloud optical network solution is based on the three-level structure and full-life cycle intelligence of "Data perception, Cloud training, Online reasoning". The solution enhances network programmability, and helps create an end-to-end intelligent, open, and agile cloud-optical network through atomic APIs. As a result, the business launch time is decreased from the previous few days to the current minute level. This has also laid a solid foundation for ensuring the digital transformation and upgrading of enterprises and promoting the efficient operation of the industry. It has become an indispensable driving force in the process of digital transformation and upgrading of the industry. FiberHome's flexible SD-WAN breaks through the bottleneck of the traditional WAN network and builds a new intelligent private line.

Despite the fact traditional SD-WAN has solved the basic needs of enterprise interconnection, Internet access, cloud, rapid deployment and unified scheduling, there are still two pain points:
1. It is difficult to effectively cooperate with the underlay network. At present, SD-WAN mainly overlays a virtual network on the underlying hard pipeline through VLAN or VXLAN technology, which cannot control the underlay network that can determine the transmission delay and transmission path. Resulting in the failure to prioritize key traffic and effective flow path planning at the application level.
2. The VXLAN scheme is complex and inefficient due to the numerous protocols and tunnels. Due to the large number of target nodes, the SD-WAN solution based on VXLAN technology often involves the repeated encapsulation and de-encapsulation of multi-segment tunnels, as well as the cooperation of various network bearer protocols. Therefore, the management complexity of the whole solution is high and forwarding efficiency is low.
 

In order to solve the difficulty that the current SD-WAN cannot give full play to the advantages of the underlying network and meet the goal of network evolution. FiberHome has released the next generation of resilient SD-WAN solution, which integrates SRV6 technology and open programming capabilities, leading SD-WAN into a new era of flexibility, efficiency, simplicity, and openness.

Flexibility: Through utilizing the SRV6 extension head, the network can be programmable. Therefore, the underlying pipeline (Internet, 5G network) can be effectively mobilized, and the convergence of the Overlay and Underlay network can be realized. The large capacity, high bandwidth and low delay of the underlying network can be fully utilized to ensure the stable and reliable operation of the service.

Efficiency: Global path scheduling, on demand path scheduling based on SLA can effectively reduce the time of traffic encapsulation and de-encapsulation in the tunnels and improve forwarding efficiency by up to 40%.

Simplicity: SRV6 end-to-end traffic encapsulation simplifies cross-domain network connectivity; Simplified system operation and maintenance is achieved with FitControl-WAN controller.

Open: The controller adopts standard southward and northward interface, the equipment adopts standard northward interface, to realize the intercommunication and docking of equipment from multiple manufacturers.

Technology is the driving force to promote digital transformation. FiberHome has been dedicated to achieving breakthroughs and innovations in SDN technology for many years. Looking into the future, the integration of cloud and network will become the general trend. FiberHome will continue to explore new technologies, seize the opportunities, face the challenges, and become the most reliable partner for customers in innovation and digital transformation.