AD-WAN Solution for Intelligent WAN of Haier Ririshun

RRS Supply Chain (listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange with the stock code of 1169.HK) is a leading bulky logistics brand in China, and has been selected as one of the "National Intelligent Warehousing and Logistics Demonstration Bases" jointly organized by the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Commerce. It has been selected as one of the top ten "China's Supply Chain Management Model Enterprises" by the American Supply Chain Management Professional Association. With 15 major shipping bases, 136 intelligent warehouses, more than 6,000 micro warehouses, a total storage area of more than 6 million square meters, more than 100,000 vehicles for small deliveries, 200,000 service staff, service coverage of 2,915 districts and counties across the country, it is the first in the industry to provide delivery by appointment, and synchronized delivery and installation. It has a services network covering the entire network, and ensuring deliveries to villages.

According to the comments from the Notices on "Internet +" Efficient Logistics Implementation from State Council and the Guidance on Promoting the Quality of Logistics Services to Improve the Work jointly issued by the Ministry of Transport and other 11 departments: "the logistics service model should be innovated", enterprises shall be encouraged to actively use the Internet and other modern information technologies to transform business processes, strengthen the use of big data mining, and improve service efficiency and customer experiences. RRS Supply Chain urgently needs to build an integrated logistics service platform with "the bulk logistics as the core", and gradually turn to specialization, standardization, intelligence, transforming from the traditional economy to the Internet economy. Through cloud warehousing and distributing, national inventory sharing is achieved to enable online shopping for users and local product delivery, which ultimately creates a seamless online and offline user experience for users and promotes service upgrading in the industry. To improve the agility of the ICT infrastructure, the existing WAN needs to be overhauled and upgraded. Currently, the WAN faces the following issues:

Wide distribution and a large number of branch offices, and a long IT business deployment period

RRS Supply Chain has more than 170 branches nationwide, and the front-end offices of the branches lack professional IT O&M personnel. Traditional network devices are configured using the command line, causing many problems such as long IT service deployment periods, poor network maintenance capabilities, complex service changes, and high IT change risks.

Traditional network technologies are simple and rigid, making it difficult to meet business agility requirements

Traditional networks can only provide simple reachability and network connectivity, instead of service-driven path selection and forwarding assurance, focusing on reachable routing, but not dynamic and intelligent traffic scheduling among transmission lines with many asymmetrical qualities (bandwidth, latency, packet loss, etc.) to protect user service experience. During large promotional events, such as JD 618 and Double Eleven, user orders and other key services cannot be reliably processed, and manual business adjustments are made to temporarily solve problems, causing rigid business security and low efficiency of enterprise IT O&M.

WAN bandwidth and performance demands soar, and WAN line costs remain high

As enterprise businesses continue to grow, the WAN branch access dedicated line bandwidth increases year by year, and the limited bandwidth expansion cannot satisfy the enterprise's bandwidth needs, leading to higher dedicated line expenses. Bandwidth source expansion (e.g. Internet, LTE) and transmission performance optimization (bandwidth optimization, latency optimization) have become the primary choices for RRS Supply Chain. However, Internet, LTE and other new Internet lines have unreliable network transmission quality problems, leaving the enterprise IT upgrade to a dilemma.

There is no effective real-time monitoring of network traffic and performance, but there are difficulties in the enterprise IT O&M

In traditional WAN scenarios, deploying a large number of WAN probes or extensively enabling flow collection technologies to achieve visual management of network traffic and performance requires significant investment, poor experience, and it also increases the workload of network devices. Enterprise WAN management level and O&M efficiency need to be improved.

II. Solution

2.1 Solution overview

For the current situation of RRS Supply Chain WAN, H3C provides a full set of AD-WAN solutions, which takes into account various key factors such as routing, traffic flow and service quality from a multi-dimensional perspective with SDN thinking, and builds a multi-dimensional intelligent scheduling system to unify data collection, analysis, policy management and distribution, realizing intensive "multi-level network collaboration", IP network resource balancing and one-click traffic scheduling. And it integrates multi-dimensional information such as topology, QoS, routing and traffic, builds a global dynamic online network service model, and realizes end-to-end delay path dynamic automation calculation. It is designed to meet the enterprise's large-scale IP Internet and business intelligence operations, enabling users to achieve enterprise IT digital transformation.

Figure 1: WAN SDN smart scheduling system

Rapid network deployment and dynamic definition of network resources for rapid branch service coming online

AD-WAN achieves zero configuration of RRS Supply Chain branch devices to come online, effectively reducing the IT dependence of enterprise IT on branch users. Even if there is no professional network O&M personnel in the branch, it is easy to complete the rapid provisioning of the branch network. It flexibly categorizes applications by business needs, defines application requirements for the network, reserves bandwidth and link resources, performs active awareness applications, and conducts rapid automated deployment of services.

Intelligent traffic scheduling to secure joint businesses

AD-WAN effectively improves RRS Supply Chain WAN link utilization, guarantees service quality and business continuity, strengthens the control and global load balancing of various services, and reduces WAN dedicated link expenses. Traditionally, network pinnacle and business pinnacle periods (e.g. Double 11, 618, enterprise network learning), peak business traffic will increase by 200% compared with daily traffic, and the intelligent traffic scheduling of AD-WAN solution fulfills full load utilization of links. Network resources can be selected based on the quality and bandwidth required by different applications. The traffic scheduling provides automated traffic scheduling and generates alarms according to network changes. The scheduling function is enabled after manual intervention, so the network health status can be clearly viewed, which effectively reduces operation costs.

Figure 2: AD-WAN solution deployment layout

Network and business visibility, for real-time display of application network health status

AD-WAN provides managers with the means to master the implementation of business quality, and can monitor the traffic bandwidth behavior of enterprise IT applications, providing accurate data basis for subsequent WAN link capacity expansion, WAN priority service bandwidth allocation, etc. It completes the automation and intelligence of the whole process from network planning, deployment and implementation to post-tuning for users, allowing RRS Supply Chain to focus more on core businesses.

Figure 3: AD-WAN solution deployment layout

Simple O&M, minute-level fault response, fast identification and troubleshooting

Due to the vast layout of RRS WAN branch sites, network-wide service configuration is often required for full network deployment of new services. In the event of network security problems, it performs rapid port control or the control of specific services to configure the distribution and retrieval of resources, and traditional means are often labor-intensive and prone to configuration errors. After the AD-WAN solution is adopted, it provides accurate feedback to internal business departments and employees, and easy communication with external operators and calculation of SLA. Link problems can be quickly pinpointed upon the occurrence of a link failure, reducing the average 4-hour troubleshooting time to 10 minutes.

Figure 4: AD-WAN solution deployment layout (network topology)

III. Commercial values

By deploying the H3C intelligent WAN branch solution, RRS Supply Chain has completed the rapid integration of national WAN network resources, effectively networking 136 smart warehouses, 6,000 service outlets and 100,000 vehicles deployed across the country, and forming a distributed three-tier cloud warehouse network radiating in the country. It controls the warehouse information of more than 6,000,000 square meters at 15 major shipping bases, and reasonably plans more than 3,300 shuttle bus circulation lines. Initially, it built an intelligent network that can be programmed, delivered quickly and put away flexibly during the transition period, responding quickly to flexible changes in market business and forming a reliable nerve center for intelligent logistics.

RRS Supply Chain, as a leading brand in bulk logistics, joins hands with H3C to successfully build a solid WAN technology platform for enterprise logistics business development with the AD-WAN solution. The project's launch also provides a stronger impetus for RRS Supply Chain's future digital transformation. In the future, RRS Supply Chain will work together with H3C to promote the in-depth integration of logistics business and Internet+, and accelerate the high-quality and sustainable development of the logistics industry.