Insights into Huawei Intent-Driven CloudCampus V100R018C10

Foreword:

Huawei Intent-Driven CloudCampus V100R018C10 has been generally available for field deployment since January 2019. This latest version provides a broad set of upgrades to Huawei campus network solutions, products, and open ecosystems. This article helps you gain insights into the new upgrades and key values delivered by this newest version.

Huawei Intent-Driven CloudCampus comes with many solution and product upgrades tailored to medium- and large-sized, as well as multi-branch, campus networks. Examples include:

• Releasing the industry’s first commercial Wi-Fi 6 AP — AP7060DN

• Adding the KPI correlation analysis function to the intelligent O&M solution

• Integrating Encrypted Communications Analytics (ECA) and proactive network deception technologies to the campus network security solution

• Introducing topology visibility, stacking of fixed-form factor devices, WLAN AC plus AP networking, and other features, to CloudCampus solution.

These updates are detailed as follows:

Key solution upgrades

• Enhancements to automated deployment of Virtual Networks (VNs):

Centralized gateway networking and gateway-free networking automated deployment are added for multi-service convergence or multi-tenant network scenarios, such as those in universities/colleges, large enterprises, and governments.

The “VLAN + VRF” networking automated deployment is added for medium-sized campus networks (access layer + core layer, where authentication is performed on the core layer) to increase flexibility and compatibility.

• AI-powered intelligent O&M of campus networks; CampusInsight is upgraded with six types of use cases:

1. Visibility into roaming details and applications across the entire user experience journey
2. Protocol Trace of user access
3. KPI Correlation analysis of users encountering poor service quality
4. Analysis of audio and video services
5. Topology-based analysis of faults in a group of users
6. Experience evaluation system for in-depth analysis

• Intelligent security collaboration: ECA and network deception (first-of-a-kind) technologies

Switches with built-in security probes collaborate with the CIS to implement ECA — that is, identifying, analyzing, and handling threats in encrypted traffic, with a success rate of over 99 percent.

The first-of-its-kind network deception technology proactively detects and defends against attack sources through simulation interactions in the honeypot system.

Enhancements to CloudCampus network solution (ideal for multi-branch scenarios):

• Topology visibility for easier management: The network topology and device status are displayed intuitively, increasing the O&M efficiency of network administrators by 30%.

• Intelligent O&M functions: AI-powered intelligent O&M is provided for wired and wireless networks. Featured functions include visibility of user experience across the entire journey, proactive fault identification, and root cause analysis.

• Rights- and domain-based management: MSP/Enterprise administrators can customize rights and specify the management area scope for lower-level (regional) administrators to implement refined network management, while ensuring information security.

• WLAN AC plus AP networking: The roaming domain of Wi-Fi users is no longer limited. In this way, a medium-sized branch Wi-Fi network can be cloud-managed.

Key upgrades for switches and WLAN products

• Industry’s first commercial Wi-Fi 6 AP — AP7060DN: Compared with Wi-Fi 5 APs, a Wi-Fi 6 AP brings higher density (4x concurrent users), faster speeds (4x bandwidth), and lower latency, helping enterprises build next-generation WLAN networks with unmatched high density, ultra-fast speeds, and ultra-low latency.

• Large-capacity AC6805: This newest product is ideal for large-scale campus networks in enterprises, universities/colleges, governments, and others. It supports 6K APs and 64K terminals, provides 40 Gbit/s forwarding, and comes with 2 x 40G (QSFP+) + 12 x 10 GE (SFP+) uplink ports and 12 x GE downlink ports.

• WLAN SmartRadio technology: This technology has the following three key capabilities:

1. Implements load-balancing in roaming scenarios and proactively optimizes coverage for 80 percent of weak-signal users to improve user experience during roaming.
2. Switches the 2.4 GHz band to the 5 GHz band in real time based on the user access density and network load, increasing the network capacity (throughput) by more than 30 percent.
3. Intelligently identifies user service priorities and radio air-interface loads, and dynamically allocates the optimal contention window size for each service. In this way, air-interface scheduling changes from non-sequential contention to orderly scheduling, and, therefore, the MOS of audio and video services grows more than 15 percent.

• The industry’s first intelligent video backhaul switch: This switch integrates multiple modules, including an extended-temperature switching unit, a surge protector, a power supply, a fiber splice tray, and a protection shell. It works normally at -40°C to +55°C and has professional outdoor surge protection, with a rating of IP66. Intelligent O&M technologies, such as camera disconnection diagnosis and enhanced Media Delivery Index (eMDI), enhance video surveillance. All of these highlights help customers build feature-rich video surveillance networks that are highly reliable and easy to deploy, operate, and maintain.

• A main control card, MPUD, is added for S12700: With MPUD, the S12700 provides the multi-core multi-instance feature to improve the WLAN AP management capacity by 67% to 10K and increase the user concurrency capacity from 20K to 50K.

Latest progress on ecological cooperation

Huawei’s solution provides more than 150 open APIs, which are classified into four categories: authentication and authorization APIs, network O&M APIs, network automation APIs, and value-added application APIs. Huawei, together with ecosystem partners in the industry, has jointly added many industry applications, such as Terminal Security, Commercial Wi-Fi, wireless location, DNS Filtering, IoT Application, and WLAN Planning, for sectors such as education, retail, government, and manufacturing. The latest progress on ecological cooperation is as follows:

• Terminal Security: Airwatch and Ivanti

• Commercial Wi-Fi: Cloud4Wi, Purple, Aislelabs, Mobimesh, Linkyfi, and Fontech

• Wireless Location: EtoneSystem and Pointr

• DNS Filtering: SafeDNS

• IoT Application: Hanshow Technology, Century, and Sense Technology

• WLAN Planning: Ekahau and NetScout