Huawei iMaster NCE-Fabric Brochure
Product Description
With the advent of the 5G and cloud era, innovative services such as VR/AR, live broadcast, and unmanned driving are emerging. The ever-expanding amounts of data and increasingly complex cybersecurity threats are changing the technology landscape at breakneck speed. The development of science and technology is narrowing down the gap between users and service providers, and widely distributed applications and data lead to the rise of distributed computing models. In this case, it is important to adopt a radically new approach to networking. The current rigid and largely manual lifecycle management approach is no longer sustainable for deploying, maintaining, and updating networks, and it cannot scale to meet the growing complexity. For an organization to flourish in the digital economy, the data center network needs to adapt quickly to changing business requirements or intent.
Huawei iMaster NCE-Fabric, an important part of Huawei CloudFabric Solution, is a network automation and intelligence platform that integrates management, control, analysis, and AI functions. It efficiently translates business intent into physical networks, provides capabilities such as full-lifecycle simplified deployment and intelligent fault remediation, and redefines service provisioning and O&M of data center networks.
Architecture and Key Components
The platform integrates various components for comprehensive network management:
Thrid-party IT/OSS/Apps
- Basic Service: System Monitoring, Geographic Redundancy, Installation and Deployment, Security, Log, License
- Management & Control: Service provisioning, NE configuration, NE maintenance, NE upgrade, Performance management, Service template, Service maintenance, Intent-driven, Tenant management, SFC, ZTP, Path detection, Resource prediction, Fault simulation, Impact analysis, Resource visualization, Inventory resource, Topology, Resource pool, Alarm, Alarm RCA, SLA analysis, Health Prediction, Knowledge graph, Predictive maintenance, Analysis
- SBI: NETCONF, RESTFUL, RESTCONF, MTOSI, XML, Syslog, SNMP
- Network Infrastructure: Switch, Router, OPENFLOW, FW, SNMP
Key Features
Zero-Waiting Service Deployment Through Intent Network
Reduces the workload of O&M personnel, improves the work efficiency of O&M personnel, and shortens the service deployment and rollout time.
Zero-Error Configuration Change Through Simulation Verification
Establishes a technical mechanism to prevent problems caused by manual misoperations, improving work efficiency and security productivity.
Zero-Interruption Intelligent O&M Through Proactive Prediction ("1-3-5 Troubleshooting")
Prevents network quality deterioration and detects faults before they occur, minimizing faults. In case of a fault, it can be quickly located and resolved, implementing easy O&M.
Automated E2E Network Deployment
iMaster NCE-Fabric provides highly autonomous experience in the entire lifecycle of data center network planning, construction, maintenance, and optimization. It uses 21 types of network intents as inputs to achieve intent-centric end-to-end highly automated capabilities.
During the planning phase, iMaster NCE-Fabric performs intelligent data center network design based on user intentions, recommends network design solutions, and integrates design and network deployment, including automatic deployment and verification, to ensure that no errors occur, greatly reducing network construction time and costs.
For network construction, it provides ZTP one-click simplified deployment and flexible deployment planning for basic underlay networks. It offers a simplified drag-and-drop network design and automatic provisioning process for logical overlay networks, with provisioning efficiency three times the industry average, facilitating service provisioning in minutes.
Intent-based Network Deployment
Traditionally, service provisioning involves transferring services from the service department to the network department via work orders. The network department designs the network plan and deploys services, a process that is time-consuming and prone to missing requirements due to extensive communication. iMaster NCE-Fabric introduces AI to implement intent-based networking in three steps:
- Understands and translates the service intent entered by administrators into network intent.
- Provides multiple preferred network models and deployment solutions based on AI model calculation and configuration plane simulation verification.
- Converts a network deployment solution into NE configurations and automatically delivers them to network devices.
Change Risk Assessment
Nearly 40% of network faults are caused by human errors, such as logical vulnerabilities in network design, deviation from administrator intent, and misoperations. Risk evaluation of network changes and policy adjustment consumes significant human resources.
iMaster NCE-Fabric provides a simulation verification module. Using network modeling and formal verification algorithms, it checks network resource sufficiency, displays detailed connectivity relationships, and analyzes the impact of configuration changes on services. This allows network engineers to pre-evaluate change risks, resolve human-caused problems like design logic vulnerabilities, and ensure zero network configuration errors.
On-demand Deployment of the Container Network
With the rapid development of container technology, containers are favored for their lightweight, easy-to-deploy, and easy-to-port features. Container services are increasingly deployed in data centers. However, the network where containers run needs pre-deployment and is separate from traditional VM or BM networks, lowering deployment and O&M efficiency.
iMaster NCE-Fabric flexibly interconnects with container orchestration systems via plug-ins to implement on-demand deployment and unified management of container networks, improving O&M efficiency by more than 30%.
The system integrates with Kubernetes and Huawei FusionStage via a Server Watcher Plugin, enabling unified management of container networks.
Unified management of multiple DCs
iMaster NCE provides multi-data center controllers (MDCs) for different multi-cloud and multi-DC scenarios. The MDCs can orchestrate cross-DC and multi-cloud services, display services in a unified topology, and apply to distributed multi-cloud deployment scenarios for internal and external customers of enterprises. Provides flexible multi-cloud networking solutions to meet automatic network construction requirements in multi-cloud and multi-DC scenarios.
Scenarios include:
- Edge DC solution
- Multi-PoD solution
- Multi-site solution
- Multi-cloud hybrid solution
"1-3-5" Troubleshooting
Data centers are critical for business support and value creation. For 98% of enterprises, a one-hour service interruption can result in losses exceeding US$100,000. Customers have zero tolerance for network interruptions.
Currently, network O&M is largely manual. Locating faults is difficult and time-consuming, impacting service continuity. iMaster NCE-Fabric utilizes Telemetry technology to collect real-time data from management, forwarding, and data planes. It detects faults within minutes from a service experience perspective.
Huawei has accumulated over 30 years of O&M experience and is familiar with over 7,800 data center customer fault scenarios. Based on this, iMaster NCE-Fabric has summarized 75 typical faults across 7 types and uses AI algorithms to build a network knowledge graph. Through continuous fault drills, most faults can be located within 3 minutes. iMaster NCE-Fabric supports intent-based fault remediation and intelligently analyzes fault impacts, recommending emergency plans and rectifying typical faults within 5 minutes.
Network Health Assessment
iMaster NCE-Fabric comprehensively assesses network health based on the physical environment, resources, protocols, overlay network, and service models, providing assessment analysis from the service experience perspective. O&M personnel can export assessment reports in one-click mode for easy network health management.
iMaster NCE-Fabric supports predictive maintenance by detecting network exceptions based on dynamic baselines. It intelligently predicts optical module fault rates and port traffic, generating advance warnings. Compared to traditional passive O&M, it proactively identifies network exceptions before they occur.
Specifications List
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| NE management and control | NE fault, configuration, accounting, performance, security (FCAPS) and basic network configuration |
| Network service provisioning | iMaster NCE-Fabric interconnects with mainstream cloud platforms (OpenStack, container orchestration platforms) or third-party applications. Cloud platforms or third-party applications invoke standard APIs to provision network services. iMaster NCE-Fabric independently provisions IPv4 or IPv6 network services to implement automatic network deployment. |
| Zero Touch Provisioning | Supports device go-online through ZTP and automatic faulty device replacement. Automatically identifies and manages network devices. |
| Cybersecurity | Supports traffic diversion to third-party firewalls and load balancers. Supports microsegmentation. Supports role-based access control. Supports local or remote authentication (RADIUS, AD, and LDAP authentication). |
| SFC | Supports IETF-based SFC model. |
| O&M | Supports logical resource monitoring. Supports visibility of application, logical, and physical network topologies. Mappings from application to logical topology, and from logical topology. Provides an overlay network detection tool for path detection, intelligent loop detection, and connectivity detection. Provides an overlay O&M tool for southbound and northbound data consistency verification, intent-based verification, and device replacement or fault impact analysis, and provides emergency plans. |
| Reliability | Supports distributed clusters. Supports active/standby geographic redundancy deployment. |
| Openness | Supports southbound protocols such as SNMP, NETCONF, OpenFlow (1.3/1.4), OVSDB, JSON-RPC, and sFlow. Supports northbound interfaces such as RESTful, RESTCONF, WebService, and Syslog. |
| Managing Capacity and Performance | Typical configuration (three-node cluster): Number of managed physical network devices: 1,800. Number of managed physical servers: 9,000. Number of managed VMs: 180,000. VM online rate: 200/s. |
| Telemetry network monitoring | Collects and displays performance indicators of devices, boards, chips, interfaces, queues, and optical links through Telemetry, and detects exceptions based on dynamic baselines. Supports millisecond-level queue congestion and packet loss detection. |
| Application and network visibility | Supports physical network topology visibility and displays abnormal links and congested ports in the current or historical time period in the topology. Displays application health status, interaction relationships between applications and hosts, and details about TCP flows with abnormal host interaction. |
| Predictive maintenance | Predicts optical link health status. Predicts traffic on a port. |
| Network health assessment | Constructs a network health assessment system based on device, network, protocol, overlay network, and application flow, providing reports. |
| Issue analysis | Identifies 75 typical faults of 7 types (configuration, non-fabric, hardware, resource specifications, entire network, entry, and cybersecurity) within minutes. |
Glossary
- ADN: Autonomous Driving Network
- AR: Augmented Reality
- BM: Bare Metal
- DVR: Distributed Virtual Router
- NCE: Network Cloud Engine
- SDN: Software Defined Networking
- VR: Virtual Reality
- ZTP: Zero Touch Provisioning
Contact Information
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.
Huawei Industrial Base, Bantian Longgang district
Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, P.R. China
Postcode: 518129
Tel: +86 755 28780808
www.huawei.com
HUAWEI, HUAWEI, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. Other Trademarks, product, service and company names mentioned are the property of their respective owners.
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