Huawei's Cloud Connect Seeks to Link Multiple Clouds, Integrate Physical and Virtual

Huawei, the Chinese networking equipment giant, announced Agile Data Center Cloud Connect -- a solution designed to simplify building cloud service systems for enterprises, aiming to address challenges associated with mixing physical and virtual devices in cloud infrastructure.

The main components are Huawei’s CloudEngine series of data center switches and Agile Controller cloud applications. It also includes cloud platforms and data center network resources for simple automation.

Huawei launched its data center network architecture, called Cloud Fabric Data Center, in 2012. The company says the solution has attracted about 360 global customers to date.

About 1,800 of its CE12800 switches have been deployed in cloud computing data centers, and the vendor is now looking to integrate and connect all of moving pieces.

"We’ve introduced the Agile Data Center Cloud Connect Solution and we want to work with our partners to build a fully integrated cloud service system," said Liu Shaowei, president of Huawei's enterprise networking product line. "The solution will integrate network, compute and store resources in data centers to unify the virtual and physical network worlds, implementing multi-cloud connectivity and cloud-based network automation to make cloud computing simpler."

Rapid development of cloud computing, Big Data and mobility have brought unprecedented data center infrastructure challenges as well as opportunities.

"Currently, enterprise servers, storage devices and switches in data centers are highly virtualized," said Shaowei. "These devices form a virtual world to support cloud computing. However, there are still a large number of independent physical network devices in data centers, and the distinction between the virtual and physical worlds makes it difficult to implement fast service deployment, unified resource allocation, fault isolation and diagnosis and automated service optimization."

Automatic network configuration

Cloud Connect is about connecting clouds, so it’s not just a clever name. The aim is to allow IT administrators to ensure the provision of network resources and implement cloud-based network migration more effectively. It helps to define and adjust network requirements.

The Agile Controller is capable of interpreting three types of perspectives: the application profile perspective, the logical network perspective and the physical network perspective. It automatically converts application profiles into the required logical networks and delivers the associated configurations to physical network devices, allowing network resources to be dynamically migrated or adjusted on-demand and based on service requirements.

Interlinking an ecosystem

Huawei is building a cloud computing data center ecosystem, which Cloud Connect helps to interconnect. The company wants to link various cloud platforms, unifying ICT resource allocation and allowing seamless integration with popular cloud platforms. It works with:

Cloud Connect displays both physical and virtual network resources in a unified view. It decouples logical networks from physical networks and abstracts the differences and dependencies between them. Decoupling makes it compatible with various physical network models and technologies.