Open Networking Solution for Private Cloud：Low latency and easy to scale

What Challenges Are We Facing in Private Cloud Networking？

As digital transformation continues to advance, the demand for private cloud services continues to grow in industries such as finance, government, energy, telecommunications, and research. Because of the need to carry today’s growing scale and changing business models of cloud computing services, legacy data center networks will inevitably face the following challenges:

• Network forwarding performance: Legacy data center networks can not provide high-performance network services such as flat convergence and lossless forwarding for distributed architectures, HPC or storage services.
• Network functionality expansion: When facing new development needs, equipment functionality expansion is often limited by the closed architecture of network equipment products, making it difficult to develop.
• Ineffective network operation and maintenance: long deployment cycle of network opening, rough daily monitoring means, it is difficult to carry out real-time, comprehensive and detailed operation and maintenance of the network.

How Open Networking Products Can Be Applied to Private Clouds？

Asterfusion is a next-generation open network solution provider focusing on ISPs, finance, energy, Internet, public cloud and other industries, aiming to help users build an open, secure and cost-effective infrastructure network.

Image via：https://sonicfoundation.dev/

In Asterfusion’s open network solution, we use low-latency CX-N series switches to build a private cloud network based on the Spine/Leaf architecture, which makes the network scalable, both in network scale expansion and in the rapid addition of new features.

Based on CX-N’s low-latency features and traffic control functions (e.g., PFC, ECN, ETS, etc.), a single network can be used to simultaneously apply different services such as distributed storage and HPC.

• The Leaf layer uses MC-LAG, ARP-to-host routing, and other techniques to realize a de-stacked host dual uplink access.
• Network devices are interconnected at the Underlay level using EBGP with ECMP (Equal-cost multi-path) enabled.
• Create MP-BGP peers between Spine-Leaf layers to pass EVPN routing information, and use VXLAN/EVPN to realize network overlay.
• VXLAN tunnels are automatically established through EVPN routing and associated with the same VNI, VLANs within the VPC are mapped to the VNI of this VPC on the Leaf device, and the MAC and host routing information of the virtual machines are automatically synchronized throughout the Pod through EVPN.
• A single Pod can support up to 10W+ VMs.

Other Highlights in Asterfusion Open Networking Solution

In-band Network Telemetry

CX-N series switches support In-band Network Telemetry, which provides real-time, fine-grained, accurate and comprehensive network telemetry data (e.g., interface information, timestamps, delays, queue lengths, etc.) for network analytics platforms, and these functions are based on ASICs without consuming CPU performance.

Enterprise Distribution SONIC: AsterNOS

AsterNOS is designed and developed by Asterfusoin for cloud computing. AsterNOS is based on a standard Linux kernel, containerized architecture, and provides end-users with a system integration environment and development kit.

The RESTful API provided by CX-N series switches can be interfaced with users’ third-party controllers to realize software-defined, elastic scheduling, on-demand scaling, and network automation on the cloud management platform, which helps users to reduce the complexity of configurations and improve the efficiency of their business.

Zero Touch Provisioning of Underlay Networks

CX-N series switches can obtain configuration file path information through the DHCP optional field, obtain configuration files from file servers and load them automatically, which can reduce the configuration workload and improve efficiency.