Telco Cloud Transport Network
Huawei's Telco Cloud Transport Network Solution aims to provide carriers with a simplified, ultra-broadband, open, and secure telco cloud network. This network involves Huawei iMaster NCE-Fabric, high-performance CloudEngine series switches, large-capacity NE9000/NE40E routers, and high-performance, user-mode vSwitches. This solution implements network automation in DCs using the Virtualized Infrastructure Manager (VIM) and iMaster NCE-Fabric, of which the latter provides flexible control to implement on-demand and efficient deployment of VNFs and Physical Network Functions (PNFs). This solution provides a data center network featuring full automation, large capacity, resource pooling, fast capacity expansion, and refined O&M for communication between NEs on a telco cloud.
Key Features
Simplified Service Provisioning
iMaster NCE-Fabric is the core component of Huawei's Telco Cloud Transport Network Solution. It can manage NEs, CE switches, and vSwitches to meet flexible networking requirements of large-, medium-, and small-sized telco clouds. It can collaborate with a cloud platform to automatically bring VMs online or offline, and supports multiple automatic access modes of single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) devices and vSwitches. In addition, iMaster NCE-Fabric interworks with the MANO to automatically advertise VNF routes and enable VNF-Cloud-Network synergy, implementing E2E automatic provisioning and elastic scaling of telco cloud services.
Load Balancing
By taking into account all service characteristics of the telco cloud transport network, iMaster NCE-Fabric can load balance service traffic based on leaf nodes and VMs. For host VNFs, spine and leaf nodes are fully meshed through physical ports, and IP routes are used to form Equal-Cost Multi-Path Routing (ECMP) paths, implementing load balancing for leaf nodes. For routed VNFs, multiple IPU-VM IP addresses are searched for as next-hop IP addresses based on a VNF's logical interface address. The MAC address corresponding to each IPU-VM IP address is then found based on the ARP entry for VXLAN packet forwarding, allowing multiple IPUs to load balance traffic.
High Network Reliability
The active and standby iMaster NCE-Fabric clusters are deployed at different sites. When a site-level fault (for example, power failure) occurs at the active site, the standby cluster switches to the active state to implement geo-redundancy switchover on the management plane. At the network access side, servers are dual-homed to the network to provide fast switchover upon link or node faults. What's more, iMaster NCE-Fabric supports hardware-based BFD, where BFD sessions are established between leaf nodes and VMs to detect VM faults. At the gateway side, DC gateways are also deployed in active-active mode to synchronize their table entries in real-time. In this way, if a DC gateway fails, services are quickly switched to the other DC gateway. To sum up, Huawei's Telco Cloud Transport Network Solution provides reliability protection at different levels (including the device level, network level, and service level) on the forwarding plane, and supports geographic redundancy on the management plane, delivering carrier-class reliability.