Different Lianyu Yitong, different SD-WAN+

I am a bit scratching my head. Which word should I use to describe Netpas? Low-key, technology-savvy, unique, or self-satisfied? All of these seem to be a little bit similar, but none of them is the most accurate expression.

The more I talked with Xie Yibin, the founder and CEO of Lianyu Yitong, the more contradictions I felt about Lianyu Yitong: Lianyu Yitong is clearly engaged in the most cutting-edge technology - Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN), and has worked hard for more than 10 years, but has never raised any funds; its clients include big names such as China Mobile, Alibaba Cloud, and Kingsoft Games, but Lianyu Yitong gives people the impression that it is kept in a secluded place and unknown to everyone. Even some of Lianyu Yitong's senior employees did not understand what Lianyu Yitong was doing when they first joined the company.

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Is Lianyu Yitong really that mysterious?

Who will ensure the quality of the network?

Kingsoft Games has a popular gunfight game. Kingsoft has found that different players have a higher chance of winning if they have better network conditions in different scenarios. If a person plays a game in a data center with the best network conditions, he is likely to be the winner, which is actually unfair.

The solution Kingsoft Games came up with is to keep the network environment of all players in a balanced state as much as possible, so that players will be more active. Who can help Kingsoft Games put this idea into practice? Lianyu Yitong is the right choice.

Lianyu Yitong has built a new network on top of Kingsoft Games' original network architecture, which has an automatic judgment mechanism. When the game is running on Kingsoft's original network, if the network quality deteriorates, Lianyu Yitong's system can automatically detect and find the problem, and then actively switch the user to Lianyu Yitong's new network, thus ensuring the consistent high quality of the network.

"At present, one of our core tasks is how to judge the network quality faster and more accurately, and anticipate the user's next online behavior, so as to ensure the supply of high-quality network." Lianyu Yitong said, "Although we cannot take over all the traffic on the Internet like operators and Internet service providers, we must know exactly when to switch the network, so that users can benefit and we can benefit as well."

Another example is live streaming. When you watch a celebrity through a live streaming platform, if the video often freezes or the celebrity's face is covered with mosaics, how do you feel? You won't even be in the mood to send gifts. When the network is unstable like this, what Lianyu Yitong can do is to switch these celebrities to its own network to ensure that there will never be freezes during the live broadcast.

After reading these two examples, you can probably understand the business of Lianyu Yitong. Founded in 2003, Lianyu Yitong focuses on the field of Internet communications. It has independently developed and built a global, fast, stable, software-defined and visualized high-quality WAN platform, providing high-quality Internet communication guarantee services.

Lianyu Yitong currently has more than 400 communication nodes around the world, and its business has gradually expanded from China to Southeast Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania and other regions. Lianyu Yitong provides enterprise real-time communication services and other business quality assurance services to many enterprises and operators in cloud computing, live video, cross-border e-commerce, games, communications, medical care, online education and other industries. More than 100 companies around the world, including China Mobile, China Unicom, Momo, Good Future Group, iQiyi, Huawei, IBM Cloud, etc. are its customers.

Xie Yibin told the reporter that when he first started his business, he and the company's CTO wrote code together. Lianyu Yitong grew up slowly under such a poor situation, and all its products are independently developed. "The company is currently profitable, but I have never paid attention to financial figures." Xie Yibin said frankly, "We are doing top-level technical work, so we must lay a more solid foundation. When there are sufficient funds and resources, my main idea is to enhance the company's ability to resist risks on the one hand; on the other hand, let the company's business develop faster, and let our platform be deployed faster for user convenience."

Like Xie Yibin, a technical geek, Lianyu Yitong, which has been established for more than 10 years, has maintained its purity and perseverance, striving for excellence in technology and taking it as its mission to continuously improve network quality. Xie Yibin told reporters that he had talked with many investors, but almost no one could fully understand his ideas and what he wanted to do, so the company has not received any external investment so far. However, Xie Yibin and his team of about 100 people do not seem to feel frustrated and have been moving forward. Because they have a dream in their hearts to make a different SD-WAN, an SD-WAN+ that not everyone can understand, but can indeed bring a different application experience to users.

What’s different about SD-WAN+?

As a joke, wherever there is network injustice, that is Lianyu Yitong’s battlefield.

For example, when users surf the Internet or work, they may occasionally encounter network problems or freezes, which reduces office efficiency and leads to poor personal application experience. As cloud platforms become more and more popular, clouds distributed in different regions and countries may experience inconsistencies or delays in data synchronization, management, and access. Due to some accidents, submarine optical cables may be cut or fail, resulting in poor network communication or reduced access quality.

These are the common problems of network quality degradation in people's lives. Lianyu Yitong focuses on one thing, which is to ensure the quality of network communications.

Nowadays, network communication issues have become one of the bottlenecks restricting the development of corporate business. Now IaaS cloud service providers can provide enterprise users with the most basic services such as computing, storage, network, security, and analysis, but it is like a rough house. The basic functions are available, but they are not perfect. The application experience in some aspects cannot fully satisfy users. For example, IaaS cloud service providers have obvious deficiencies in their ability to control the network. On the one hand, the networks of various operators are freely combined through the BGP protocol, but no one has the ability to independently control the entire network; on the other hand, various types of communication traffic such as games, downloads, videos, and P2P communications converge, slowing down the speed of the overall network. In this case, the shortcomings of IaaS cloud service providers in dealing with complex network problems are undoubtedly revealed.

What to do? Lianyu Yitong has launched a series of products and services based on SD-WAN+ core technology. In the field of network optimization of basic communication operators, it provides Internet service providers with technical services such as network quality monitoring and optimization, key network business acceleration, etc.; in the enterprise market that requires high-quality networks, it provides network communication optimization components, technology and operation and maintenance support for various smart devices, network application development and operators, and provides enterprises with targeted Internet acceleration and enterprise networking services; in the field of cloud computing, it provides cloud service providers with rapid deployment, improved access speed, and guaranteed business data synchronization. Regardless of the industry and field of customers, the benefits they obtain are the same, the network quality has been greatly improved, the average delay and average packet loss rate have been significantly reduced, and users can focus more on their own business development without worrying about network infrastructure.

Since we are talking about SD-WAN, we have to mention SDN (Software Defined Network). The emergence of SDN, a new network architecture concept, has overturned the closed model of traditional telecommunications equipment software and hardware integration, making the control of network traffic more intelligent, visual and optimizable. SD-WAN, which has become popular in the past two years, can be said to be an extension and extension of SDN. It can effectively help enterprises reduce the cost of wide area networks, improve the flexibility of connections, and promote business innovation.

After carefully studying SDN and SD-WAN, Xie Yibin found that the technical architecture and applications they studied were not exactly the same as SDN and SD-WAN, so they used SD-WAN+ to summarize them.

Market analysis company Analysys pointed out the difference of Lianyu Yitong SD-WAN+: Lianyu Yitong's network contains more than 400 nodes, forming an SDN network on top of multiple operator networks; Lianyu Yitong has been focusing on SD-WAN for more than 10 years and has a professional team and rich experience; the main business scope of SD-WAN on the market is still concentrated in inter-enterprise networking, while Lianyu Yitong has expanded SD-WAN business to three areas: networking, routing acceleration, and access acceleration; Lianyu Yitong can provide customers with SLA high-quality guarantee agreements.

"We hope to help the entire industry do better in quality control of the global Internet." Xie Yibin pointed out the goal of SD-WAN+ in one sentence.

Highlighting differentiated competitive advantages

In summary, Lianyu Yitong's network services have four major application scenarios: First, cloud business assurance. Users can deploy virtual machines in the public cloud VPC and connect to Lianyu Yitong's network to achieve interconnection between VPC and traditional data centers, thereby building hybrid cloud businesses. On the basis of ensuring business data synchronization, it can also greatly improve the speed of accessing cloud services; second, synchronization of various data centers around the world. Lianyu Yitong can help enterprises achieve synchronization between self-built data centers and overseas hosted data centers, provide quality assurance close to that of physical optical cables, improve availability, and reduce rental costs; third, provide strong guarantees for live video and online education. Lianyu Yitong's networking architecture is designed for quality control, and can provide dynamic network acceleration services to make up for the shortcomings of CDN; fourth, to ensure the quality of enterprise remote office, Lianyu Yitong can quickly deploy an accelerated network for corporate customers that is not affected by cross-border communications, improve the quality of remote network transmission, and improve office efficiency.

Xie Yibin summarized the advantages of Lianyu Yitong into the following aspects: strict implementation of SLA service level agreement; Lianyu Yitong provides a pure three-layer solution, which is transparent to users and does not require additional cumbersome development and changes; Lianyu Yitong's network basically covers all domestic operators, and can switch between multiple operators while ensuring quality; Lianyu Yitong's network service deployment is very fast, for example, a service covering more than 70 countries around the world was deployed in just one week; the cost of the service is lower.

"We hope that users will not have any doubts about the quality when using Lianyu Yitong's network services." Xie Yibin said, "User needs in different industries vary greatly, and we will provide targeted solutions. This year, we will invest more in education, live broadcasting, and cloud service providers."