Ruijie helps Sichuan Light Industry and Chemical Industry build an Ethernet all-optical campus network to accelerate the development of new education infrastructure

When it comes to smart campus construction and education modernization, what is your first reaction? How can advanced technologies and means such as the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing, and 5G be integrated into campus?

In July this year, the Ministry of Education issued the "Guiding Opinions of the Ministry of Education and Six Other Departments on Promoting the Construction of New Education Infrastructure and Building a High-quality Education Support System", which emphasized that the high-quality development of education requires a focus on the new infrastructure system, that is, the new education infrastructure. Among the many new education infrastructures, the network, as the basic support for information construction, has become increasingly important and has become one of the overall goals of education modernization and education informatization in the next five years.

In recent years, colleges and universities have launched a frenzy to strengthen the construction of basic education networks. What will the future network look like? How will the future network be built? What should be paid attention to in the future network? Colleges and universities that are at the forefront of national informatization have set their sights on all-optical networks.

The Exploration of All-Optics: A Long Way to Go with Small Steps

Six years ago, Sichuan University of Science and Chemical Technology was already at a crossroads in terms of network construction options. They had been planning for six years on how to proceed with the campus network.

Sichuan University of Science and Chemical Engineering, located in Zigong, the "Millennium Salt Capital", has three campuses: Libaihe, Huidong, and Yibin. The school has a long history of running schools and excellent educational traditions. It has won the national "Basic Capacity Building Project for Colleges and Universities in Central and Western China" project twice in a row. It is one of the first batch of innovative reform pilot universities in Sichuan Province. It is a general full-time university with coordinated development of multiple disciplines and more than 40,000 students. This year, the school's Libaihe campus, which covers an area of ​​1,100 acres, adopted an all-optical network solution to build a campus basic network, serving student dormitories, student cafeterias, libraries, art colleges, music colleges, multimedia buildings, stadiums and theaters, etc., which can support the teaching scale of 15,000 students in the entire campus.

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Image: Li Baihe Campus of Sichuan University of Science and Engineering

The first path: the pain of traditional Ethereum

For the former Sichuan Light Chemical Industry, campus network has always been a headache for the information center. Huidong Campus, which uses traditional Ethernet solutions to build the network, has exposed many problems in actual use of the network, which has always troubled the school information center.

Traditional Ethernet services have weak scalability and high costs. With the development of smart campuses, there are more and more business terminals in classrooms and offices, and a new information point means the need to add a copper cable, which puts enormous pressure on weak current rooms and building bridges, and also increases the difficulty of operation and maintenance. In addition, the school is located in Zigong, Sichuan, a salt-producing holy land. The local climate is relatively humid, and the concentration of moisture and chlorine in the air is high. The crystal head of the network cable is easy to rust, which can easily lead to unstable use of equipment or links, requiring manual regular inspection and replacement. The workload, equipment costs and labor costs brought by a large number of lines and losses are constantly increasing.

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Picture: Densely packed copper network cables

Second path: Is POL the answer?

The school saw the obvious advantages of optical fiber over copper cable in actual use, which is why the school took the lead in adopting an all-optical network. "As early as six years ago, the Light Industry and Chemical Industry had planned to build an all-optical campus network." With the trend of "optical fiber replacing copper", optical networks have moved from home use to the enterprise market. At that time, the all-optical network solution, that is, the POL solution, was relatively simple and primitive. It was derived from a home solution and could not guarantee that it would not be "unsuitable" for enterprise-level campus networks.

From the perspective of the medium, the performance of optical fiber can be said to be a "dimensionality reduction attack" on copper cable. Ethernet, which uses copper cable as a carrier, has been "defeated" by the advantages of optical fiber, such as high bandwidth, low latency, high speed, and low cost. However, the defects of the POL solution are as obvious as its advantages:

• Poor performance over shared bandwidth

The POL solution uses splitting technology deployment. Taking 1:8 as an example, the main line is 2.4Gbps, which is divided into 300Mbps in each branch, that is, each classroom has a maximum transmission rate of 35MB/s. For universities with highly comprehensive disciplines such as light chemical engineering, there are many kinds of teaching services, including many services that require real-time high bandwidth, such as high-definition video, VR, cloud desktop, etc., and the requirements for network support for teaching services are more stringent. Insufficient network bandwidth will limit the teaching effect and the teaching experience of teachers and students;

• Horizontal traffic bottleneck

When teachers and students need to share teaching resources on the school intranet, since the POL solution uses a split-optical structure, all data must be forwarded back to the OLT of the main line before it can be transmitted, which can easily cause congestion in the main line.

• Management and operation are more complicated

Other campus businesses still use Ethernet architecture, and operation and maintenance personnel cannot manage them uniformly through a set of software or SDN technology. Managing two networks at the same time has a higher technical threshold and a greater workload.

"Optical fiber is a huge performance leap over copper cable, and the campus network of the future must be in the field of 'optical'." Zhang Chaogui, deputy director of the Network Information Management Center of Sichuan Light Chemical Industry, recalled that when he was building an all-optical campus network for the school's Yibin campus six years ago, he said that the advantages of optical networks are unquestionable, but a good optical network solution has yet to appear. "Our school was one of the first to try out all-optical networks, and it can be said that we have stepped on all the 'pitfalls' of early optical networks, so when building a new campus, we paid special attention to screening solutions." At the beginning of the construction of the Li Baihe Campus, the leaders of the school and the Information Center were still determined to consider all-optical networks, but were there any other all-optical network solutions different from POL that could circumvent the problems of POL?

The third way: Time and practice will prove that Ethernet all-optical network is a more suitable solution

This is what Sichuan Light Chemical Industry has been doing. "We hope to provide students in the new campus with a stable, high-performance campus network, and teachers with a smart, efficient teaching network. At the same time, we can also build a basic network for operation and maintenance personnel that is simple to operate and maintain and meets long-term needs." This is also the direction that Ruijie Networks has been pursuing, producing a truly easy-to-use and simple optical network solution for customers that is truly suitable for enterprise-level users. The minimalist Ethernet all-optical solution came into being.

1. Easy to use: strong stability, high performance, high efficiency

At the Li Baihe Campus of the Light Industry and Chemical Industry Institute, Ruijie's simplified Ethernet all-optical solution was used to deploy the basic network of the entire campus. The entire network uses all-optical fiber links. At the access layer, Ruijie innovatively proposed the RG-SF series, an indoor optical switch, which upgraded the access switch originally located in the weak-current room on the floor into a silent, compact, and easy-to-install indoor model, allowing optical and Ethernet to be cleverly integrated.

Picture: RG-SF series indoor optical switch

The revolution of architecture and products has brought many changes. Take the school's multimedia teaching building as an example. There are 130 classrooms in the building, and each classroom has at least 5 information points, including multimedia computer classrooms that have high requirements for network performance. Compared with the previous Huidong campus, the number of information points has increased by about 3 times, and the number of optical fibers used is only half of the previous one, saving more than 50% of the space. If the school adds other smart teaching services in the future, it will no longer need to be deployed through the weak current room, and the expansion can be completed by directly connecting to the indoor optical switch indoors.

In addition to being an indoor optical switch, the minimalist optical solution also specifically solves many difficulties in the actual use of traditional optical network solutions:

1) Breaking horizontal bottlenecks - better support for internal forwarding:

Internal data sharing in teaching scenarios can easily lead to a large amount of lateral traffic, reaching the bandwidth limit and affecting the teaching experience. The minimalist optical solution uses the Ethernet three-layer architecture, and adjacent lateral traffic can be directly transmitted at the aggregation layer, which better supports internal forwarding of data, avoids congestion on the main line, and brings teachers and students a fast internal resource sharing experience.

2) Breaking bandwidth limitations - 1:1 10G access to homes:

A multimedia classroom with 50 terminals requires about 1G-1.2G bandwidth for normal teaching. However, after the 1:8 splitting of the POL solution, a single room only has 300Mbps, which is difficult to support 50 terminals to achieve high-speed and smooth use at the same time. So, is the optical network not enough or not good enough?

The simplified optical solution follows the Ethernet architecture, with a 10G bandwidth for the main line and a 10G bandwidth for the classroom. Education services with high-performance requirements such as real-time HD video conferencing, VR/AR online teaching, and multimedia computer rooms can run smoothly, and the optical fiber "information highway" extends all the way to the classroom.

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2. Simple: "Zero" configuration to start, "Zero" threshold operation and maintenance

For the network deployment of colleges and universities, it is often divided into multiple steps. The core computer room is the last step, and the construction of the basic network, the deployment of applications and IoT devices are difficult for many operation and maintenance personnel. A large number of devices need to be deployed and connected to the network. If the traditional method of manually entering devices one by one is adopted, the workload is huge and complicated. You know. The minimalist optical solution can be connected to the SDN controller. From the initial deployment of the equipment to the operation and maintenance replacement, it can achieve zero configuration plug-and-play. The new device can be connected to the network SDN controller to automatically complete the original configuration distribution, which greatly reduces the work of the deployment personnel.

After using indoor optical switches, the number of switches has also increased. Will operation and maintenance become more complicated? Here we have to mention the SDN technology used in this solution again. This is also the reason why the solution can "liberate" operation and maintenance personnel in daily operation and maintenance. Once a device fails, the link can be checked, the faulty device can be found, and the product can be replaced with zero configuration. The operation and maintenance personnel do not even need to remember the location of the network cable port, and blind plugging the port can quickly restore work.

"For Sichuan University of Science and Chemical Technology, the practice of the minimalist Ethernet all-optical solution has achieved ideal results and strengthened our confidence in exploring the all-optical campus network and smart campus," said Zhang Chaogui, deputy director of the Network Information Management Center of Sichuan University of Science and Chemical Technology.