Huawei and InfoVista Partner to Improve SD-WAN User Experience

Huawei and InfoVista said they would openly collaborate on SD-WAN. InfoVista will bring application delivery, monitoring, analytics, network traffic optimization algorithms, and visibility to Huawei’s layered SD-WAN. Last month, Huawei introduced the concept of “openness” at three layers of its SD-WAN. Those three layers are at the universal CPE (uCPE) equipment, at the orchestration layer, and at the interfaces that connect multiple clouds. At that time it also named Riverbed Technology, F5, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) as partners that helped create the architecture. HPE later denied the claim that it was working with the Chinese vendor. Huawei relies on open uCPEs and cloud-based visualized operations and maintenance to enable customers to make flexible service changes and on-demand provisioning of Huawei and third-party services. The latest collaboration will see InfoVista’s Ipanema virtual network function (VNF) added to Huawei’s SD-WAN service to bolster end-user performance. The VNF helps provide application visibility, WAN optimization, and dynamic WAN selection. InfoVista also delivers control algorithms through the WAN to the flow level to ensure that the entire network is compliant with service level agreements (SLAs). This isn’t InfoVista’s first partnership with an SD-WAN vendor. InfoVista also deploys its Ipanema VNF on Nuage’s Virtualized Services platform and with ZTE’s uCPE router for SD-WAN. Interestingly, in IHS Markit’s first quarter 2018 Data Center Network Equipment market tracker, both Huawei and InfoVista’s SD-WAN revenues took a dive. Huawei SD-WAN revenues dipped by 45 percent and InfoVista’s by 22 percent. Cliff Grossner, senior research director and advisor for cloud and data center at IHS Markit, told SDxCentral that this was likely a reflection of quarterly variations that occur based on contracts.