Huawei has debuted a “three-layered” open software-defined wide area network solution, the vendor’s latest product to help operators embrace open architectures.
The layers relate to physical architecture, control and the cloud. The universal customer premises equipment runs on x86 or ARM64 architecture that supports the virtual machine and container mechanisms.
This physical layer supports more than 10 virtual network functions, including those from F5 and Riverbed Technology in addition to Huawei’s own.
The Chinese vendor said control layer openness ensures interoperability with BSS and OSS through APIs, allowing operators to offer a wide range of applications and automatically orchestrate services.
The cloud layer allows the solution to be deployed on a range of clouds including Huawei’s own, telco carrier clouds and Microsoft Azure. These clouds can be interconnected through the solution.
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In a statement, Huawei said: “As SD-WAN becomes more mature, the evolution of SDN towards enterprise interconnection has become one of the most talked-about topics. [Operators] expect to leverage SD-WAN to reduce interconnection costs and improve service experience.”
Huawei also announced today that it has signed a new joint innovation agreement with China Unicom on network slicing.
The telcos said they wanted to the technology’s potential in virtual and augmented reality, industrial contexts, connected vehicles and the Internet of Things.
Earlier this month, Huawei opened its tenth OpenLab in Moscow with virtualisation one of the areas it will research, as well as mobile data and the Internet of Things.