Shulou(Shulou.com)12/24 Report--

SD-WAN became a buzzword in China in 2016, when the technology was widely seen as untested and uncertain, but its potential prompted some companies to try to deploy. With the gradual landing of related products and services, SD-WAN is also gradually breaking down the maze and becoming mature. Up to now, its practicability has been widely recognized by the market.

So, what are the main challenges facing the current SD-WAN practice? When users' demands change from "available" to "easy to use", what innovative technologies will SD-WAN solutions upgrade with? What is the ultimate form of SD-WAN evolution?

Around the above topics, at the 6th SD-WAN & SASE Conference, 51CTO interviewed ao Xiangqiao, general manager of the intelligent management and operation and maintenance product line of Xinhua third Group. From the perspective of Xinhua 3, we can see not only the cutting-edge exploration of domestic WAN technology, but also the logical context of enterprise network change under the background of the times.

Ao Xiangqiao, General Manager of Intelligent Management and Operation and maintenance Product Line of Xinhua third Group

Comprehensive landing: user experience will become the focus of competition

According to the information and communication technology maturity curve of Gartner 2023 in China, SD-WAN has gone through the period of technology germination, expected expansion and bubble bursting, and has come to the period of climbing and recovery. In this regard, ao Xiangqiao believes that after returning to rationality, SD-WAN is entering a stable landing stage.

"We believe that this technology is moving steadily forward. A large number of customers have begun to accept and adopt SD-WAN as part of their network technology architecture. We foresee that the future of SD-WAN will be steady and rising, which is likely to continue for many years."

With the deep application of SD-WAN in various industries, its market competition is becoming more and more fierce. How to effectively solve the user pain points and improve the user experience will become the key for manufacturers to compete. Xinhua San also maintains a clear understanding of this, and strives to consolidate the advantage of the combination of software and hardware.

"Xinhua San leads most manufacturers in router capability, and forms a strong technological advantage through the combination of software and hardware."

Ao Xiangqiao said that Xinhua III's wide area network plan is also constantly iterating, and the overall capability will be upgraded around two aspects. First, to achieve a better and more flexible intelligent connection; second, to achieve better network quality optimization, so that the user experience is better.

"our goal is' intelligent connection and excellent experience'. On the one hand, make the connection more intelligent, meet the large-scale branch access needs of various industries, and improve access convenience. On the other hand, to achieve WAN link optimization, so that customers have a better experience-for users, we focus on the network experience; for operators, we need to make network management easier. These are our two main directions."

In order to provide a more efficient "intelligent and excellent" network, Xinhua San is firmly committed to continuous investment and exploration in the direction of technology.

Three innovative technologies to crack the pain point of network connection

How to achieve a better intelligent connection? Xinhua three believes that forces should be sent from the following three directions.

Better increase bandwidth and speed

To achieve a more flexible and reliable arrangement

Ensure the certainty of the entire WAN

In the face of these three major challenges, Xinhua three selected three innovative technologies to solve the problem.

Introducing QUIC to improve the transmission rate of Internet services

QUIC (UDP-based low-latency Internet Transport Protocol), a new technology proposed by Google in 2014, was originally created to break the bottleneck of TCP performance. Compared with TCP,QUIC, a variety of congestion control algorithms are added, which greatly reduces the connection time and can effectively improve the efficiency of network transmission.

"although in the end, QUIC technology did not replace TCP, but it is still an excellent technology, which can solve the problems of congestion and packet loss, improve transmission efficiency and reduce delay. Xinhua saw this, so it introduced QUIC technology into SD-WAN to solve the problem of uneven quality of WAN links, and ensure that users can still get a good experience in the case of poor link quality."

According to Aoxiang Bridge, compared with the performance of the traditional old network, the "combination technology" composed of QUIC combined with traditional network slicing and WAN acceleration technology can increase the overall Internet speed by 30 times.

Using SRv6 to better realize traffic scheduling and path optimization

SRv6 is a SR technology based on IPv6 forwarding plane, which combines the advantages of SR source routing and the characteristics of simple and easy expansion of IPv6, and has good scalability and programmability. Ao Xiangqiao said that in the past few years, Xinhua San has made a large-scale application of SRv6 technology in the wide area network, especially the bearer network, and now the new challenge is: can the SRv6 technology be further moved down to the branch network?

"Why do you want to promote SRv6 technology into branch solutions? The key point is that SRv6 technology can achieve end-to-end programmable source routing capabilities. After the branch network technology moves towards SRv6, first of all, it can realize the normalization of end-to-end carrying capacity technology, which greatly reduces the complexity of the overall WAN link; moreover, it provides more convenient operation and maintenance capabilities, and it will be more accurate and simple to define network faults through IFIT current detection. Finally, when the branch network, backbone network and carrier network all use SRv6 technology, we can better do the link control and scheduling capability of the combination of strong and weak. "

Because SRv6 simplifies the types of network protocols and has strong programmability, it can support a large number of different demands of different services. At the same time, SRv6 has also brought a turnaround for the development of IPv6 and laid the foundation for the evolution of IPv6 + innovation.

Using deterministic technology to make end-to-end delay jitter controllable

With the development of the Internet of things and the industrial Internet, the needs of network services have changed greatly, and the traditional "best-effort" IP network architecture is facing great challenges. In order to cope with the scenarios with high delay and jitter requirements, deterministic networks emerge as the times require. The core of deterministic network is to provide deterministic service guarantee for applications.

Aoxiang Bridge stressed: "in the deterministic network, we emphasize the controllability of the delay, not just the small delay. When the delay is controllable and guaranteed, consider how to reduce its jitter."

He further explained the design idea of the deterministic network: "for example, there is congestion in the WAN link between Beijing and Shanghai, and one solution is to build more routes to eliminate congestion in order to ensure the customer experience of critical business. In reality, there is another way of thinking, that is, in the case of insufficient bandwidth, congestion and packet loss, important services use the method of deterministic flow to ensure the stability and reliability of jitter at the sender and receiver. "

AIGC blessings, upgrade experience optimization space

In the blueprint of Xinhua 3, we need to go a step further in the field of SD-WAN, not only to achieve smarter connections, but also to achieve a better user experience. Aoxiang Bridge makes a brief description of this.

First of all, do a good job of WAN optimization, and then improve the Internet experience. One of the main technical means to achieve this goal is data compression. In the DCI interconnection scenario, there may be a large number of data backup requirements, if there is no WAN optimization, it may cause serious congestion of the whole network. In view of this pain point, Xinhua three can achieve up to 80g single board data compression and forwarding capability based on its own proprietary hardware capabilities, thus providing a better guarantee for WAN transmission services with large amounts of data.

Secondly, build a digital map to achieve efficient operation and maintenance. Operation and maintenance personnel through digital maps can simplify the complexity of operation and maintenance, achieve fine operation and maintenance, so that "a picture in hand, WAN worry-free." The map covers the software and hardware resources of the whole network, integrates wired / wireless, wide area / local area network, and truly realizes the visualization of the whole network. At the same time, it provides users with a unified operation and maintenance entrance to achieve the purpose of centralized management and unified governance.

In addition, in the face of the upsurge brought about by AIGC, Xinhua San is also actively exploring the use of it for intelligent interactive innovation, and has been put into practice in the wide area network application scenarios such as business online, operation and maintenance guarantee, strategy optimization and so on. However, Xinhua San has maintained a cautious attitude towards the possible gains from AIGC.

"the iterative speed of updating AIGC technology is so fast that it is difficult for us to predict the situation next year," ao Xiangqiao said. "at present, all major manufacturers are investing and studying in this field, but we do not think this technology can completely subvert the traditional operation and maintenance or replace labor. For now, it may not be able to reach such a high level for the time being, but it can solve problems in some specific scenarios."

He gives examples: for example, in some organizations that lack professional operation and maintenance personnel, the ability of AIGC can help them analyze problems and sort out their ideas. In some emergencies, it can take a long time to find relevant information or ask for help. But if there is an interaction mechanism like AIGC, they can quickly get relevant information, understand the situation and find feasible ways to deal with it. "therefore, we need to consider it on a case-by-case basis."

Ao Xiangqiao mentioned that for customers who want to try AIGC applications, Xinhua 3 currently offers two services: one is to provide access based on public cloud, and the other is to provide localized deployment for more professional customers. " In this case, we will deploy Xinhua 3's large model of rhinoceros private domain and the overall AIGC architecture at the customer site, and then interact with the model based on our SD-WAN system. This method is more expensive, but it has more advantages in terms of data security. "

The Ultimate Evolutionary form of SD-WAN: completely self-intelligent Network

As for the future evolution direction of SD-WAN, Aoxiang Bridge believes that when the business form is more and more diversified and the software system architecture is more and more complex, the simpler the network is, the more competitive it is. And the self-intelligent network will be the technical idea leading to this vision.

"SD-WAN, or all SDN technologies, will eventually move towards a completely self-intelligent state, that is, self-monitoring all core indicators, self-analysis of data, automatic identification of key faults, automatic selection of the optimal WAN link, and the whole network reaches a completely self-optimized closed-loop state."

Although there is still a considerable gap from this goal, actively introducing various innovative technologies, deploying programmable network infrastructure, and embracing AI to promote the automation and intelligence of network functions will be the key driving forces to promote the development of WAN to high-level self-intelligence.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.