China Unicom Teams with Cisco to Enable Cloud + Network Synergy with Segment Routing

BEIJING, April 17, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Recently, China United Network Communications Group Co., Ltd. (China Unicom) officially announced seven new products: Cloud Network Connection, Cloud Networking, Cloud VPV, Cloud Broadband, Unicom Cloud Shield, Intelligent Boutique Video Network, and Boutique Financial Network. China Unicom has achieved a major milestone in pursuing network transformation based on Industrial Internet and has become one of the leading service providers in building "cloud + network" synergy.

Cisco has been collaborating with China Unicom for the past two years, to transform the existing traditional nationwide MPLS VPN network into Industrial Internet with the "cloud + network" synergy based on Segment Routing. This project marks a series of firsts:

• China's first Segment Routing deployment in a service provider's backbone network;
• the first case of interconnecting equipment from multiple vendors supporting Segment Routing;  
• the first case of achieving high availability (HA) with controllers from multiple vendors       

Industrial Internet is a concept derived from Consumer Internet. It refers to the practice of traditional industries leveraging the advantage of big data, cloud computing, smart devices and networks to increase internal efficiency and the ability to provide service for external customers. It is one of the most important ways for traditional industries to realize transformation and upgrade through "Internet+".

China Unicom sharply discovered the tremendous opportunity of Industrial Internet and worked on it as a corporate strategy to build China's first on-demand network that provides network routes with minimal latency for customers, supporting minute-level service launch. However, China Unicom's nationwide MPLS VPN backbone network covers 300 cities with more than 1200 devices, and once it is connected with the IP RAN/SPDC metro network in the future, there will be tens of thousands of devices involved. In addition, "cloud + network" integration requires the ability to provide traffic engineering service for each tenant and each application. This presents an unprecedented challenge to network scalability. None of these issues can be solved by traditional RSVP-TE.