H3C AD-WAN Solution for Transformation of Hubei Post

China Post, a century-old brand, is considered by most common users as "reliable", "fast" and "affordable". As a postal enterprise with a such long history, China post, driven by the current trend of digital transformation, has ushered in its second spring of service development. The major source of impetus for its transformation comes from the strong empowerment of the postal WAN upgrade.

Transformation, the rocket propellant for the postal enterprise

As a large state-owned enterprise, Hubei Post has information flow, capital flow and physical flow. In recent years, services of Hubei Post have developed rapidly with nine core businesses including agency finance, logistics and mailing, e-commerce, distribution and delivery, machine communication, correspondence and advertisement, newspaper and periodical distribution, philately and value-added business. Hence, the ensuing surge in WAN traffic, operating costs and O&M pressure requires a smarter WAN to improve service and link disposal efficiency and respond to failures in a timely manner to meet the demands for faster and betters services in the digital era.

H3C Group of Unigroup and Hubei Post have kept long-term cooperation in the ICT field. This time, the SDN-based AD-WAN solution provided by H3C realizes automatic adjustment of service bearer links, reasonable allocation of bandwidth resources, and healthy operation of various service systems, significantly improving user experience, which was highly recognized by the IT Department of Post Group and helped Hubei Post become a national information innovation demonstration project.

Ding Guoqing, Director of O&M Department of Hubei Post IT Department, spoke highly of this, "H3C AD-WAN solution has been running stably in Hubei Post WAN for more than two years, helping us achieve reasonable utilization and flexible scheduling of WAN links, provide clear network and service operation, shorten fault detection and processing time, reduce O&M pressure, and accelerate the digital transformation process. "

Smart AD-WAN solution helping stable business development

Previously, Hubei Post WAN architecture was OSPF cost and PBR configuration statically distributed over multiple links, which were complicated and error-prone in configuration and had low resource utilization. When there was sudden traffic of express, financial and video services, carrier links could easily be blocked, and if the link failed and the automatic switching line was not detected in time, the service would be severely affected.

Hubei Post has deployed core routers and aggregation routers in provincial centers and local cities through the AD-WAN vertical network architecture, and has deployed a set of servers + AD-WAN controllers at the core of the network. Managing routers in a software-defined manner provides five major types of services, including upper-layer finance, postal services, voice, and video conferencing, enabling the visibility of network applications, reducing link costs, and simplifying the management and maintenance of the network.

During the implementation and application of the overall solution, H3C smart AD-WAN solution has many advantages:

On the automation deployment layer

Replacing complex commands through the WEB menu, delivering massive configurations with one click, realizing end-to-end business automation, and improving business launch efficiency and service assurance capabilities by 70%;

On the multidimensional visibility layer

Based on the comprehensive visibility of real-time and historical link conditions, link analysis and records are provided to clarify the root cause of faults, and to achieve 100% fault monitoring;

On the smart scheduling layer

Application-level traffic scheduling provides an all-around intelligent guarantee for services, flexible scheduling strategies, and automatic and fast switching in milliseconds when a link is interrupted;

On the smart O&M layer

SNA Center has functions such as high-precision detection, second-level perception, and intelligent troubleshooting, enabling in-depth visualization and unified presentation of network status. Pre-built experience case library with over 6,000 cases, diagnosis and troubleshooting with one click, simple O&M, and the O&M efficiency increased by 75%;

On the reliability design layer

By improving the reliability of the control plane and the forwarding plane, fault detection can be achieved in seconds, ensuring the smooth operation of key services of users.

Based on "AI in ALL" intelligence strategy and "Digital Brain Plan 2020", the H3C smart AD-WAN solution helps Hubei Post build a new generation of intelligent postal WAN through a three-dimensional converged network control hub and intelligent brain that integrates "management", "control" and "analysis" to comprehensively improve network efficiency, enable rapid business development, accelerate its digital transformation process, and set a new benchmark in the industry.