NTT and Cisco Collaborate to Implement Software-Defined WAN Solutions for Customers

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As Cisco's global strategic partner, NTT has been committed to the ICT industry to help customers with their digital transformation for many years. With the rapid development of public cloud technology in recent years, more and more customers are facing the need to deploy enterprise applications on public and private cloud infrastructures. This has also raised new issues for traditional enterprise network architectures - how to achieve secure transmission and flexible deployment of enterprise IT services in a new hybrid cloud environment, while providing high-quality user experience and further optimizing costs.

Recently, NTT and Cisco have implemented a software-defined wide area network (SDWAN) project in mainland China for an internationally renowned manufacturing customer. The implementation of this project has enabled the company to upgrade the interconnection between factories, offices and data centers across the country. At the same time, the customer will use the SDWAN solution in the future to achieve lower-cost internal enterprise interconnection and more accurate application traffic diversion, thereby applying higher-quality WAN resources to the operation guarantee of key businesses and reflowing more non-critical businesses and traffic to lower-cost Internet lines.

The customer has more than 20 business sites and production bases in mainland China. In the past, the WAN was built based on expensive MPLS dedicated lines and has been running for more than ten years. During this period, as the business developed, the customer found that the annual consumption of its MPLS dedicated lines had reached millions. After investigation and combining the development of the customer's own business, the customer invited NTT to participate in its new generation WAN transformation plan based on the SDWAN architecture. After half a year of solution design and discussion, after comprehensive evaluation, the customer decided to adopt the SDWAN solution based on Cisco architecture provided by NTT and combine it with NTT's overall service capabilities. The advantages of this solution are:

1. Compliance <br /> Follow the customer's global infrastructure construction specifications and comply with the relevant regulations in mainland China;

2. Stability <br /> Follow Cisco's best practice design guidelines to achieve redundant and reliable design at the control and transmission levels;

3. Security <br /> Encrypted transmission is used at both the control layer and the transmission layer to ensure the security of internal enterprise information, and the network partitioning and access mechanism is implemented to meet the security requirements of the infrastructure;

4. Agility <br /> Automatic discovery and convergence of network topology, and automatic establishment of link channels to meet the diverse adaptation of services and new site network connections;

5. Deliverability
NTT provides customers with complete project management services, ensuring that the customer's organization cycle from the beginning of the project to the end of the project and subsequent maintenance services is controllable, the quality is controllable, and the knowledge base is established and enriched, fully ensuring that the project can achieve project expectations on time, according to quality and quantity.

In this project, NTT's team provided customers with a complete end-to-end overall solution service, involving pre-sales solution consultation, after-sales deployment design and implementation, overall project management, and after-sales maintenance and operation services.

Keywords-Cisco SDWAN

Cisco SDWAN is a new generation of WAN architecture that uses a software-defined approach to architect the WAN. The advantages provided by this new approach are reduced transportation costs, simplified deployment operations, and improved application flexibility and performance. SDWAN technology achieves long-term controllable cost optimization by adjusting data transmission paths, such as transmitting business data through more cost-effective Internet lines instead of high-cost links such as MPLS. Although traditional architectures can utilize these links, traditional WAN technology cannot provide effective quality monitoring, latency control, and overall optimization for critical businesses for Internet lines. Now, the use of low-cost links can be achieved using software-defined methods such as SDWAN.

Since SDWAN technology uses abstract modeling to achieve multiple levels of management, including control-level management of virtual links and control optimization at the transmission level, and through best practice templates and automated deployment, it makes it possible to reduce costs and increase efficiency in WAN transmission. Once SDWAN technology is planned and deployed, it will become a process-based, easily replicable modular management method that can achieve more agile business readiness, rapid network initialization deployment, and capacity expansion deployment, achieving on-demand adjustment of network infrastructure operation and maintenance requirements while minimizing the impact on network applications and infrastructure.

The application-aware routing technology based on SDWAN can realize network self-healing, which is a function that traditional network routing protocols cannot achieve. This function can not only improve the user experience of network terminal users, but also provide customers with unprecedented ability to manage the WAN in a refined manner.

The SDWAN solution can also provide security protection and user experience optimization for cloud application access, and can provide refined network isolation, thereby changing the traditional network structure where cloud application external access traffic still needs to flow back to the total non-aggregation node, resulting in additional bandwidth consumption and delay, resulting in additional costs and experience degradation. At the same time, it also provides better protection for the security of traffic access, providing indispensable security protection while upgrading the experience.

Keyword-NTT technical services

As a world-renowned ICT service provider, NTT has developed a proven service system and business process based on years of industry customer service, its own technology accumulation and business innovation. In this case, NTT fully utilized its own sound service system and sufficient solution implementation resources to provide customers with a comprehensive service solution from early solution design, project life cycle management services, after-sales implementation services and after-sales maintenance services.

In the early stage of the project, special resources are allocated to form a project team, and full-time project managers, project architects, and project after-sales engineers are assigned to participate in the project. The project manager and the customer will conduct unified docking, and the resources and deliverables of the relevant links will be implemented one by one according to the customer's project progress. At the same time, a project knowledge base, related project testing plans, various project progress and resource coordination meetings will be established and continuously enriched, and periodic project progress reports and other information will be provided to facilitate the control of the overall project delivery cycle and project quality.

NTT organized high-quality engineering technical resources and collaborated with the manufacturer's support team to ultimately meet the project's design expectations and complete project delivery two weeks ahead of schedule, gaining high recognition from the customer's relevant technical team and operation and maintenance team.

About NTT

NTT is a leading global technology services company. We work with organizations around the world to achieve business outcomes through smart technology solutions. To us, smart means data-driven, connected, digital and secure. As a global ICT provider, we have more than 40,000 employees and a relaxed and inclusive work environment. With offices in 57 countries, business in 73 countries, and services in more than 200 countries and regions, we are creating a connected future together.
For more information about NTT, please visit hello.global.ntt

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