H3C Ao Xiangqiao: SD-WAN will eventually move towards a high-level self-intelligent network

SD-WAN became a "hot word" in China in 2016. At that time, the technology was generally considered untested and had an uncertain future, but its potential also prompted some companies to try to deploy it. With the gradual implementation of related products and services, SD-WAN has gradually broken through the barriers and matured. Today, its practicality has been widely recognized by the market.

So, what are the main challenges facing the current SD-WAN practice? When user demands change from "usability" to "ease of use", what innovative technologies will be used to upgrade the SD-WAN solution? 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 H3C Group. From the perspective of H3C, we can not only see the cutting-edge exploration of domestic WAN technology, but also see the logical context of enterprise network transformation in the context of the times.

Ao Xiangqiao, General Manager of Intelligent Management and Operation and Maintenance Product Line of H3C Group

Full implementation: User experience will become the focus of competition

According to Gartner's 2023 China Information and Communication Technology Maturity Curve, SD-WAN has passed the technology germination period, expectation expansion period, bubble burst period, and entered the climbing recovery period. In this regard, Ao Xiangqiao believes that after returning to rationality, SD-WAN is entering a stable implementation stage.

"We think the technology is moving forward at a steady pace. A large number of customers have begun to accept and adopt SD-WAN as part of their network technology architecture. We foresee a steady and continued rise in SD-WAN adoption, which may continue for many years."

As SD-WAN is widely used in various industries, market competition is becoming increasingly fierce. How to effectively solve user pain points and improve user experience will become the key to competition among manufacturers. H3C also maintains a clear understanding of this and strives to consolidate the advantages of combining software and hardware.

"H3C is ahead of most manufacturers in terms of router capabilities, and has formed a strong technical advantage through the combination of software and hardware."

Ao Xiangqiao said that H3C's WAN solution is also constantly iterating, and overall the capability upgrade will focus on two aspects: first, to achieve better and more flexible intelligent connection; second, to achieve better network quality optimization to provide better user experience.

"Our goal is 'intelligent connection, excellent experience'. On the one hand, we make connections more intelligent, meet the large-scale branch access needs of various industries, and improve access convenience. On the other hand, we optimize WAN links to give customers a better experience - for users, we focus on the network usage experience; for operation and maintenance personnel, we want to make network management simpler. These are our two main directions."

In order to provide a more efficient "intelligent and superior" network, H3C is determined to continue to invest and explore in the direction of technology.

Three innovative technologies to solve network connection pain points

How to achieve better intelligent connectivity? H3C believes that efforts should be made in the following three directions.

• Better bandwidth and speed
• Achieve more flexible and reliable orchestration
• Ensure determinism across the WAN

In response to these three major challenges, H3C selected three innovative technologies to provide targeted solutions.

Introducing QUIC to improve Internet service transmission rate

QUIC (a low-latency Internet transport protocol based on UDP) was originally proposed by Google in 2014 to break the performance bottleneck of TCP. Compared with TCP, QUIC adds a variety of congestion control algorithms, greatly reducing the time to establish a connection, which can effectively improve the efficiency of network transmission.

“Although QUIC technology did not replace TCP in the end, it is still an excellent technology that can solve congestion and packet loss problems, improve transmission efficiency and reduce latency. H3C saw this and 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 even when the link quality is poor.”

Ao Xiangqiao introduced that compared with the performance of traditional old-style networks, the "combination technology" of QUIC combined with traditional network slicing, WAN acceleration and other technologies can increase the overall Internet speed by 30 times.

Adopt SRv6 to better implement traffic scheduling and path optimization

SRv6 is an SR technology based on the IPv6 forwarding plane. It combines the advantages of SR source routing and the simplicity and scalability of IPv6, and has good scalability and programmability. Ao Xiangqiao said that in the past few years, H3C has made large-scale applications of SRv6 technology in wide area networks, especially bearer networks. The new challenge now is: Can SRv6 technology be further moved down to branch networks?

"Why should we promote SRv6 technology to branch solutions? The key is that SRv6 technology can achieve end-to-end programmable source routing capabilities. After the branch network technology moves to SRv6, first of all, the end-to-end bearer capacity technology can be normalized, greatly reducing the complexity of the overall WAN link; secondly, it provides more convenient operation and maintenance capabilities. Through IFIT flow detection, it will be more accurate and simple to define network faults; finally, when the branch network, backbone network, and bearer network all use SRv6 technology, we can better implement the link control and scheduling capabilities that combine strong and weak links."

Because SRv6 simplifies network protocol types and has powerful programmability, it can support the different demands of a large number of different businesses. At the same time, SRv6 has also brought a turning point in the development of IPv6 and laid the foundation for the innovative evolution of IPv6+.

Using deterministic technology to control end-to-end delay jitter

With the development of the Internet of Things and the Industrial Internet, network service requirements have changed dramatically, and the traditional "best effort" IP network architecture faces huge challenges. In order to cope with scenarios with high latency and jitter requirements, deterministic networks have emerged. The core of deterministic networks is to provide deterministic service assurance capabilities for applications.

Ao Xiangqiao emphasized: "In deterministic networks, we emphasize controllable latency, not just low latency. When latency is controllable and guaranteed, we can consider how to reduce jitter."

He further explained the design idea of ​​deterministic network: "For example, the WAN link from Beijing to Shanghai is congested. To ensure the customer experience of key services, one solution is to build more routes to eliminate congestion. In reality, there is another idea, that is, when bandwidth is insufficient, congestion exists, and packet loss exists, important services use deterministic flow methods to ensure stable and reliable jitter between the sender and the receiver."

AIGC supports, upgrades experience and optimizes space

In H3C's blueprint, it is necessary to go further in the field of SD-WAN, not only to achieve smarter connections, but also to provide better user experience. Ao Xiangqiao briefly explained this.

First, we need to optimize the WAN to 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 the WAN is not optimized, it may cause serious congestion in the entire network. To address this pain point, H3C can achieve up to 80G single-board data compression and forwarding capabilities based on its own proprietary hardware capabilities, thereby providing better protection for large-scale WAN transmission services.

Secondly, build a digital map to achieve efficient operation and maintenance. Through digital maps, operation and maintenance personnel can simplify the complexity of operation and maintenance, realize refined operation and maintenance, and achieve "one map in hand, no worries about WAN". The map covers the software and hardware resources in the entire network, integrates wired/wireless, wide area/local area networks, and truly realizes the visualization of the entire 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, facing the upsurge brought by AIGC, H3C is also actively exploring the use of it for intelligent interaction innovation, and has already put it into practice in application scenarios such as service launch, operation and maintenance guarantee, and strategy optimization in wide area networks. However, H3C still maintains a cautious attitude towards the possible gains of AIGC.

Ao Xiangqiao said: "AIGC technology is being updated and iterated very quickly, and it is difficult for us to predict the situation next year. Currently, major manufacturers are investing and researching in this field, but we do not think that this technology can completely subvert traditional operation and maintenance or replace manual labor. At present, it may not be able to reach such a height for the time being, but it can indeed solve problems in certain specific scenarios."

He gave an example: For example, in some organizations that lack professional operation and maintenance personnel, AIGC's capabilities can help them analyze problems and sort out their ideas. In some emergencies, it may take a long time to find relevant information or find someone to help. But if there is an interactive mechanism like AIGC, they can quickly obtain relevant information, understand the situation and find feasible ways to deal with it. "Therefore, we need to consider it according to the specific situation."

Ao Xiangqiao mentioned that for customers who want to try AIGC applications, H3C currently provides two services: one is to provide access capabilities based on the public cloud, and try to quickly access the AI ​​mechanism through H3C's cloud-simple operation and maintenance software; the other is to provide localized deployment for more professional customers. "In this case, we will deploy H3C's Baiye Lingxi private domain big model and the overall AIGC architecture at the customer's site, and then interact with the big model based on our SD-WAN system. This method is more expensive, but it has more advantages in terms of data security."

The ultimate evolution of SD-WAN: fully intelligent network

Regarding the future evolution of SD-WAN, Ao Xiangqiao believes that as business forms become more diversified and software system architectures become more complex, simpler networks will be more competitive. Self-intelligent networks will be the technical approach to achieve this vision.

"SD-WAN, or all SDN technologies, will eventually move towards a fully self-intelligent state, that is, self-monitoring all core indicators, self-analyzing data, automatically identifying key faults, and automatically selecting the optimal WAN link, so that the entire network can achieve a fully self-optimizing closed-loop state."

Although there is still a considerable gap to this goal at present, 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 force for promoting the development of wide area networks towards high-level self-intelligence.