Huawei deploys China's largest SDN

21Vianet Group, the largest carrier-neutral internet data centre services provider in China this week tapped up Huawei to deliver the country’s largest commercial Software Defined Network (SDN).

The companies worked on joint innovation initiatives in SDN that will cater to enterprise and business users of 21Vianet’s cloud services. To cope with its rapidly growing business with more customers and higher levels of data volume, 21Vianet has been exploring ways to improve the efficiency of network to provide reliable, consistent and high quality services. Fast service provisioning is crucial for the company as most of its customers are ISPs that require high speed provisioning.

The overall efficiency of 21Vianet’s cloud computing datacentres will be enhanced significantly as a result and a one-click service deployment function increases the speed of 21Vianet’s cloud service provision tenfold, while Huawei’s Open Programmability System shortens 21Vianet’s new service innovation period from six months to only one month. In addition, automatic path adjustment and optimisation functions increased the efficiency of link bandwidth utilisation from 50 per cent to 80 per cent.

The companies deployed what they have dubbed the Agile Traffic Engineering solution, based on Huawei’s Cloud Fabric Data Centre Network across eight large-scale data centres in China located in major cities including Beijing, Guangzhou, Nanjing and Wuhan.

In the next phase, 21Vianet will expand the deployment of the SDN to more than 80 large-scale data centres in over 40 cities.

“21Vianet’s goal is to become one of the most respected Chinese companies in the internet infrastructure sector and provide high-quality services via open and innovative next-generation network infrastructure. 21Vianet’s SDN-enabled network is an example of the successful commercial application of an SDN network in China,” said Mike Ma, Vice President, 21Vianet.

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