CloudEngine 16800

On the 9th of January, Huawei presented the new switch for data centers, the CloudEngine 16800. As it has been stated on the post Artificial Intelligence & Data Centers, the AI has a growing tendency; we are towards the AI era. In this evolution towards the integration of AI, there are some challenges we must overcome like removing bottlenecks on data access and processing. 

Huawei has been lately working on innovation, creating new products capable of working with agility in new IT environments dedicated exclusively to artificial intelligence. Kevin Hu, president of Huawei Network Product Line, mentioned that:

The AI computing power of data centers can only reach up to 50 percent due to a packet loss rate of 1‰.

The industry expects that the annual volume of data worldwide will increase from 10 zettabytes in 2018 to 180 zettabytes (180 billion terabytes) in 2025, a data flood that existing 100GE data center networks will be unable to handle. In this context, Huawei has created the CloudEngine 16800 switch which has three main characteristics:

• Embedded AI chip
• 48-port 400GE line card per slot
• Capability to evolve to the autonomous driving network

The CloudEngine 16800 leverages the power of an embedded high-performance AI chip and uses the innovative iLossless algorithm to implement auto-sensing and auto-optimization of the traffic model, thereby realizing lower latency and higher throughput based on zero packet loss. Furthermore, this chip greatly enhances the intelligence level of devices deployed at the network edge and enables the switch to implement local inference and rapid decision-making in real time. With the centralized network analyzer FabricInsight, the distributed AI O&M (operations & management) architecture identifies faults in seconds and automatically locates the faults in minutes, helping to accelerate the advent of autonomous driving networks.

On the following figure from IDC, we can observe that Cisco is the switches' market leader. Future will tell where does Huawei place itself with this new technology it has just released.

When analyzing the figure above, we must consider that it is talking about switches in general, and not about data center switches. The latter is becoming a new class of switch since data center networking infrastructures are becoming more disaggregated. Unlike the network switch for traditional three-tier hierarchical networks, data center switches are designed to support data and storage for mission-critical applications; they are switches for large companies and cloud providers and they must provide proven high performance and density, low latency, and exceptional power efficiency. The characteristics of the new data center switch from Huawei place the company in a differentiated position on the market.