The network digital map of Huawei iMaster NCE was unveiled at Huawei Network Summit 2023 (Asia Pacific). It features multi-dimensional network-wide visibility, rapid fault demarcation and locating in minutes, and real-time assurance of optimal network connection experience, facilitating digital transformation of enterprises and making network management easier than ever before.
Before the advent of the digital era, we had to rely on our own experience and memory to select a route to a destination. This approach consumed a lot of time and labor resources because we did not know the real-time situation of each road and had to adjust the route temporarily in the event of road closure or heavy traffic. The navigation map makes this a thing of the past. It turns the traditional static geographic map into a dynamic and real-time digital map. With it, we can get the latest traffic data in real time, such as traffic congestion and road closure information, improving our traveling experience.
Enterprises are accelerating their pace towards becoming networked, digital, and intelligent. As the foundation of digital infrastructure, network connectivity plays an increasingly important role in promoting digital transformation across industries. The total number of global connections is likely to reach 200 billion by 2030, as networks will evolve from connecting tens of billions of people to connecting hundreds of billions of things. New services such as next-generation human-machine interaction, housing and transportation integration, industrial interconnection, and AI computing are raising new requirements for network connections. To keep up, the network needs to develop towards an automatic and intelligent one that features native intelligence, holographic visibility, deterministic experience, high security and reliability, and integrated sensing.
As digital transformation gathers pace, enterprise services are developing rapidly and networks are drastically growing in both scale and complexity. However, there is no corresponding increase in the number of network operations and maintenance (O&M) personnel of enterprises, meaning that the O&M personnel have to do more.personnel of enterprises, meaning that the O&M personnel have to do personnel of enterprises, meaning that the O&M personnel have to do
more.Making matters worse, there is no unified view that can centrally display the enterprise network health, leading to a poor network experience, numerous complaints about network faults, and a low efficiency of fault rectification, thereby hindering the digital transformation pace of enterprises.
This is where Huawei's network digital map comes in. Different from the conventional static network topology, this is a real-time, dynamic, and high-definition (HD) network map. On the basis of Huawei's autonomous driving network management and control system — iMaster NCE — the network digital map uses a host of key technologies such as big data computing engine, AI, search algorithms, route simulation, and verification algorithms to achieve multi-dimensional network visibility, path navigation, search and positioning, and deterministic application experience assurance. It also provides abundant capabilities such as real-time visibility into network quality, rapid fault demarcation and locating, and self-healing, helping customers switch the network O&M mode from the static topology-based O&M to the dynamic and HD digital map-based O&M. In this new mode, the network digital map intuitively displays the network status in real time, maximizing the network O&M efficiency.
The network digital map of Huawei iMaster NCE stands out with one-map network visibility, one-second fault demarcation, and one-click network optimization in campus network, data center, and wide area network (WAN) domains.
In the campus network domain, by leveraging a four-dimensional network digital map, Huawei iMaster NCE provides a network management platform that integrates management, control, and analysis functions for all scenarios, including the enterprise headquarters campus, production campus, and branch office space.
- One-map network visibility: Large chain supermarkets, for example, have multiple separate networks, such as wired, wireless, and branch networks. Managing these networks is too complex and it takes too long to roll out a new site. Huawei iMaster NCE can centrally manage 200,000 network elements (NEs) on the entire campus network, spanning wired, wireless, and branch networks, and can complete branch network pre-configuration within just 5 minutes. Moreover, the digital map can intuitively display the network experience at four dimensions (NE, user, terminal, and application), facilitating one-click root cause locating.
- One-second fault demarcation: As IT and OT converge, the boundaries of large manufacturing enterprises' campus networks are blurred. 85% of security risks are caused by terminals, especially unauthorized terminal access, threatening enterprise network security. The digital map of Huawei iMaster NCE uniquely implements intelligent identification of massive numbers of Internet of Things (IoT) terminals, and can automatically match access control policies, rapidly and accurately detect unauthorized access locations, and isolate abnormal terminals.
- One-click network optimization: Globally, the audio and video services of enterprises increase by 30% every year, but the video conferencing experience is poor and the VIP complaint rate is high. The digital map and in-band flow measurement functions uniquely achieve experience measurement of key applications from end to end, spanning the wireless air interface and wired network. They can also rapidly demarcate and locate faults based on the time and space dimensions and perform intelligent optimization in real time, ensuring ultimate experience of videos and VIP users from end to end.
In the data center domain, the network digital map eliminates the inability of conventional O&M to detect service changes. It implements service-oriented navigation and positioning in the network world, speeding up the digital transformation of data center networks.
- One-map network visibility: Typically, more than 20 O&M systems coexist on a multi-cloud and multi-vendor data center network, leading to fragmented management of different network partitions and separated O&M of networks and applications. Huawei's network digital map uses ecosystem integration plug-ins to standardize data structures and perform digital modeling based on multi-dimensional data such as network traffic, topologies, and configurations, improving the topology accuracy from lower than 60% to higher than 99%. In addition, the map can dynamically and intuitively display the multi-dimensional mappings and forwarding paths between applications, networks, and services.
- One-second fault demarcation: In the conventional O&M mode, services and networks are troubleshooted separately, lacking a unified view. In addition, it is costly to deploy the conventional network performance monitoring (NPM) and device-layer indicators are invisible, leading to difficult and slow troubleshooting. This cannot meet financial supervision requirements. Leveraging the xFlow (intelligent full-flow analysis) capability, the network digital map adopts a host of flow analysis technologies such as ERSPAN, port mirroring, and IFIT to enable unified management of more than 140 application and network performance indicators (twice the industry average), hop-by-hop fault diagnosis cross clouds and vendors, and raw packet backtracking and proofing, thereby building a unified O&M platform for devices, networks, and applications. This achieves a future-oriented shift from the network device-centric O&M to the application experience-centric intelligent O&M.
- One-click network optimization: As data centers evolve from single computing power to diversified computing powers, AI training tasks increase dramatically in number. AI training flows feature small flow quantity but large data volume per flow. The conventional hash algorithm is extremely prone to load imbalance. As a result, the effective network throughput is just 50%. Oriented to scenarios where masses of tenants share clusters and each cluster has 1000/10,000 GPUs/NPUs, the network digital map uses the network scale load balancing 2.0 (NSLB 2.0) algorithm to optimize the network load, increasing the network-wide throughput to 98% and improving the AI training efficiency by 20%.
In the WAN domain, the network digital map offers real-time visibility into network status and performance, and can make reliable judgments and decisions based on the dynamically changing network data, implementing automatic load balancing of network traffic and differentiated service assurance. All of this helps customers build a digital foundation for autonomous networks, thereby stimulating the growth potential of private line services and accelerating the monetization of premium private line package upgrade.
- One-map network visibility: The network digital map collects a massive amount of key network data in real time. The data includes network traffic and bandwidth utilization, link delay and packet loss rate, and static attribute configurations and protocol status of Layer 3 links. A digital twin engine with outstanding data processing, storage, and query capabilities is adopted to provide real-time and reliable network data via unified data modeling and diversified application data governance. This enables the digital map to be refreshed in real time when network data changes so that users can detect network changes in seconds.
- One-second fault demarcation: The network digital map provides fine-tuned IFIT in-band flow measurement technology that can manage network-wide link status in real time. When a link is congested, congestion data such as packet loss, delay, and jitter information can be reported to the digital map in seconds through telemetry. The map then analyzes the data, quickly detects network performance changes, and displays the changes on its graphical user interface (GUI) to guide resource scheduling for rapid fault rectification. This can slash the fault locating time from several hours to minutes.
- One-click network optimization: The network digital map supports automatic network optimization. It provides intelligent path computation for large-scale networks. That is, when link congestion occurs or services are of poor quality, the map can centrally compute paths based on the latency, bandwidth, packet loss rate, and other differentiated service level agreement (SLA) requirements of different services. In this manner, the map can obtain the paths best suited to the services' SLA requirements in real time and rapidly adjust the traffic over the congested link to a new link. This eliminates manual intervention and improves network utilization by 30%.
The network digital map of Huawei iMaster NCE for the data communication field stands out with multi-dimensional network visibility, rapid fault demarcation and locating in minutes, and real-time assurance of optimal network connection experience, making network management easier than ever before and facilitating digital transformation of enterprises.
