Huawei’s novel switch is exclusively built for the AI Erathat has three characteristics — embedded AI chip, 48-port 400GE line card per slot, and the capability to evolve to the autonomous driving network.
Huawei unveiled the industry’s first data center switch built for the Artificial Intelligence (AI) era – CloudEngine 16800, at its network product launch event for Spring 2019 themed “A CloudEngine Built for the AI Era”. Huawei defines three characteristics of data center switches in the AI era: embedded AI chip, 48-port 400GE line card per slot, and the capability to evolve to the autonomous driving network, and innovatively incorporates AI technologies into data center switches. The pervasive use of AI will help customers accelerate intelligent transformation.
AI’s data center
With the advent of the AI era, the AI computing power is affected by the performance of data center networks, which is becoming a key bottleneck of the AI commercial process. On a traditional Ethernet, the AI computing power of data centers can only reach up to 50 percent due to a packet loss rate of 1/1000. At the same time, the industry expects that the annual volume of data worldwide will increase from 10 zettabytesin 2018 to 180 zettabyte in 2025. Existing 100GE data center networks will be unable to handle the predicted data flood. In addition, traditional manual O&M methods will be unable to meet requirements as the number of data center servers continues to increase and the computing network, storage network, and data network become converged. It is therefore imperative that innovative technologies be developed and introduced to improve the intelligent O&M capability.
Kevin Hu, President of Huawei Network Product Line, said, “A fully connected, intelligent world is fast approaching. Data centers become the core of the new infrastructures such as 5G and AI. Huawei will first introduce AI technology to data center switches, leading data center networks from the cloud era to the AI era. The data center switch built for the AI era has three characteristics, embedded AI chip, 48-port 400GE line card per slot, and the capability to evolve to the autonomous driving network.”
