Technicians, information technology (IT) management personnel are working under great pressure. They have to work in big shopping malls, telecoms rooms chock-full of devices, expending considerable effort to construct and maintain IT infrastructure platforms. LUCAS AJANAKU reports on innovative solutions that could reduce these burdens.
Shopping malls have become part of the reality of fast developing cities across the country. Similarly, offices have emerged from small to large depending on the scale of services being provided. These have placed burden on IT manager. They have little time to pay attention to new technologies and trends in the industry. As a result, they cannot provide suggestions for service innovations for technological decision-makers.
The best way to simplify network Operation and Maintenance (O&M) management is to reduce the numbers of network types and network devices. In this way, device configuration, fault troubleshooting, and network maintenance can be substantially lessened. Then how can we unify network O&M management methods and reduce the number of network devices without changing the scale of existing campus networks? What are the critical technical difficulties?
According to experts, there are multiple mature technologies for simplifying network O&M management in both wired and wireless networks. For example, stacking technology can be used in wired networks to virtualise multiple switches into one logical switch; in wireless networks, devices can work in master/backup mode, and a wireless AC can manage a large number of wireless APs in a centralised manner. If wired and wireless networks can be deeply converged, network O&M management will be significantly simplified.
However, wired and wireless traffic is forwarded in a completely decentralised manner. As a result, the two networks adopt two independent mechanisms for device and service configurations, network management, fault troubleshooting, user authentication, and policy management. Although we can use stacking technology and AC cards to make network devices look like only one device and use the same authentication system to permit users to access wired and wireless networks through the same account, the problem of decentralised forwarding of wired and wireless traffic cannot be fundamentally solved.
But experts say centralised forwarding of wired and wireless traffic simplifies network management
If wired networks are capable of wireless network control, no independent wireless AC device or AC card will be needed, because identification, forwarding, and control of wired and wireless packets can be integrated on one network device. Such convergence at the Network Element (NE) level eliminates separate control and forwarding of wired and wireless traffic, unifies management of devices, services, and configurations, and shields management differences for IT personnel. In this manner, we can integrate the advantages of both wired and wireless networks.
Wired and wireless networks take advantage of each other’s management capabilities, reducing the number of management devices
Wired networks can take advantage of the plug-and-play and zero-configuration capabilities of wireless networks to reduce the workload of configuring large numbers of access switches. At the same time, wireless networks can take advantage of the stacking and virtualisation capabilities of wired networks. In this way, all wired and wireless access and core devices can be virtualised into one device for management. By introducing Software-Defined Networking (SDN) ideas, we can enable network devices to automatically coordinate command translation, message synchronisation, and policy delivery. IT management personnel only need to manage one device, simplifying device, service, and user management.
Chief Executive Officer, SO4 Engineering Limited, Soji Oluwasuyi said unified wired and wireless user authentication and policy management simplifies user management.
According to him, IT management personnel can unify wired and wireless user authentication regardless of the role of the user desiring access. They can uniformly set all service management and security control policies such as service priority, bandwidth, and access rights. Network devices can judge these policies automatically and intelligently. Devices closest to the user side can automatically execute rights-related policies to enhance access security. Service experience-related policies such as bandwidth and priorities take effect on the link through which traffic is transmitted. As a result, all wired and wireless services can be configured with one mouse-click, and IT management personnel can be further relieved of heavy manual work.
According to him, the Huawei Agile Campus Network Solution (ACNS) featuring wired and wireless convergence greatly reduces the burden of IT management personnel.
As long as user traffic on wired and wireless networks can be forwarded in a centralised manner, multiple wired and wireless convergence solutions at device, service, and user levels can be used to simplify network O&M management. To address this problem, Huawei introduced its ACNS, which puts the SDN-based idea of “wired and wireless convergence” into effect, and translates traffic forwarding into a software process. This idea implements converged forwarding of wired and wireless traffic and consistent user and management experiences on both wired and wireless networks.
Huawei remains committed to freeing IT management personnel from complex technical terms and tedious manual configurations of massive numbers of network devices. With Huawei’s help, IT management personnel can use their knowledge and experience to the fullest and focus on suggesting IT planning and construction ideas for valuable enterprise service development and innovation.
