News

Huawei Leverages SDN for Cloud Fabric, IoT Solution

• By David Ramel
• 05/22/2015

Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. is making heavy use of software-defined networking (SDN) technologies in several products announced this week at its annual conference, including a new cloud fabric architecture and an Internet of Things (IoT) solution.

The giant Chinese telecommunications vendor's new Cloud Fabric 3.0 Architecture helps companies quickly innovate and implement new services and supports the efficient integration of IT resources in cloud computing scenarios, the company indicated.

The integrated hardware/software solution comprises two primary components: the "Fully-Connected Data Center SDN Solution" and "100G Connection & 25G Access System," a portfolio of hardware switches and servers.

The SDN solution combines several software-defined technologies, including a storage network called the Software Defined Storage Network (SDSN), a datacenter LAN and a datacenter interconnect network.

"Huawei's new SDSN helps simplify network management significantly," the company said. "It centrally deploys fiber channel (FC) protocol stacks on Huawei's Agile Controller, implementing unified control and management of storage networks. In addition, the SDSN eliminates the drawback of a limited number of traditional FC storage network nodes (less than 239), which significantly improves network capacity."

At the same Huawei Network Congress (HNC) 2015 conference in Beijing, Huawei also launched what it described as "the world's first SDN-based agile IoT solution" to facilitate communication between Internet-connected objects such as devices and sensors and provide easier network management and maintenance.

"IoT is the future of our increasingly digitized world and networks are key to driving value creation for enterprises," company exec Li Xianyin said. "With Huawei's IoT technologies and offerings, we hope to support the digital transformation of traditional industries and the development of the IoT ecosystem."

An integral part of the IoT solution is a lightweight, open source OS called LiteOS, optimized to be smaller, faster and consume less power than similar offerings. Only yesterday, The Information coincidentally reported Google is working on just such a similar offering.

"The LiteOS is an open source system that provides a unified development platform," the company said. "The system fosters the development of the IoT system as partners can obtain code from the open source community free of charge and quickly build their own IoT products."

Huawei, the largest telecommunications equipment maker in the world, has been active in SDN and its companion technology, network functions virtualization (NFV), on many fronts. Last year it partnered with another company to launch what it said was China's largest commercial SDN network. And last week, it teamed up with PLUMgrid Inc. for an OpenStack automation solution that makes use of both new-age technologies.