At the Huawei network product launch event for Spring 2019 titled “A CloudEngine Built for the AI Era,” Huawei revealed the industry’s first data center switch built for Artificial Intelligence (AI) era –– CloudEngine 16800.
Huawei identifies three features of data center switches in the AI era: embedded AI chip, 48-port400GE line card per slot, and the potential to grow to a self-driving network, and merges AI technologies into data centre switches in a novel way.
Customers will benefit from the widespread usage of AI, which will help them speed intelligent transformation. AI use would rise from 16% in 2015 to 86% by 2025, according to Huawei’s Global IndustryVision (GIV) 2025.
The potential to use artificial intelligence to restructure business models, make choices, and improve customer experiences will become a major driver.
“A fully connected, intelligent world is rapidly approaching,” states Kevin Hu, President of Huawei Network Product Line.
Data centres are at the heart ofemerging infrastructures like 5G and AI
Huawei will be the first to introduce AI technology to data centre switches, ushering data centre networks into the AI era. With the emergence of the AI age, the performance of data centre networks has become a critical bottleneck in the AI commercial process, affecting AI computing power. Due to a packet loss rate of 1%, the AI computing capability of data centers on standard Ethernet can only reach up to 50%.
At the same time, the industry anticipates a global data volume increase from 10 zettabytes (180 billion terabytes) in 2018 to 180 zettabytes (180 billion terabytes) by 2025. The expected data flow will overwhelm existing 100GE data center networks.
Furthermore, as the number of data centre servers grows and the computing, storage, and data networks become more converged, old manual (O&M) approaches will be impossible to meet requirements. As a result, developing and implementing innovative solutions to improve intelligent O&M capability is critical.
Kevin Hu explained, “The data center switch created for the AI era has three characteristics: embedded AIchip, 48-port 400GE line card per slot, and the potential to adapt to the autonomous driving network.”
Industry’s first data centre switch with an embedded AI chip, reaching an AI computing power of 100%
The CloudEngine 16800, the industry’s first data centre switch with an embedded high-performance AI chip, employs the iLossless algorithm to implement auto-sensing and auto-optimization of the traffic model, resulting in lower latency and higher bandwidth based on zero packet loss.
The CloudEngine 16800 overcomes the computing power restrictions imposed by typical Ethernet packet loss, increasing processing power from 50% to 100% and enhancing data storage Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) by 30%.
Industry’s highest density 48-port 400GE line card per slot, meeting the requirements for 5-fold traffic growth in the AI era. The CloudEngine 16800 has an updated hardware switching platform and overcomes many technical obstacles such as high-speed signal transmission, heat dissipation, and power supply with its orthogonal architecture.
It has the industry’s greatest density 48-port 400GE line card per slot and the industry’s largest 768-port 400GE switching capacity (five times the industry average), allowing it to fulfil the AI era’s traffic multiplication needs. Furthermore, the power consumption per bit is lowered by 50%, resulting in a more environmentally friendly operation.
Enabling the autonomous driving network, identifying faults in seconds, and automatically locating faults in minutes. The AI chip incorporated in the CloudEngine 16800 dramatically improves the intelligence of devices deployed at the network edge, allowing the switch to do local inference and speedy decision-making in real-time.
The distributed AI O&M architecture detects errors in seconds and instantly locates them in minutes, thanks to CloudEngine 16800’s local intelligence and FabricInsight’s centralized network analyzer. Additionally, the flexibility and deployability of O&M systems are substantially improved by this architecture.
“Huawei CloudEngine series data centre switches have been successfully launched into commercial usage for more than 6000 clients, assisting the digital transformation of industrial customers such as finance, Internet, and carrier customers,” said Leon Wang, General Manager of Huawei Data Centre Network Domain.
Huawei introduced the CloudEngine 16800 to assist customers in accelerating intelligent transformation, achieving widespread AI use, and collaboratively building a fully connected and intelligent world.
By Staff Writer.
