SDN/NFV Solutions Enable Digital Transformation

ZTE Corporation unveils its latest immersion cooling server, IceTank, at MWC Shanghai 2024. Specifically designed for AI and high-performance computing data center scenarios requiring efficient heat dissipation, it will fully demonstrate ZTE’s latest achievements in green energy-saving technology innovation and sustainable development. The immersion cooling server IceTank stands out for its superior heat dissipation capabilities. Each node is capable of processing over 2000W of power, ensuring temperature uniformity and preventing the generation of hot spots, thus extending the hardware’s service life. Additionally, its ultra-high heat dissipation capacity reduces reliance on traditional cooling methods such as fans and air conditioning, not only lowering operational costs but also effectively reducing the carbon footprint. This perfectly embodies the design concept of energy conservation and environmental protection. In terms of the selection of working fluids, this server can adopt advanced oil-based fluids or fluorinated liquids. Oil-based fluids offer excellent electrical insulation properties, while fluorinated liquids are characterized by their low viscosity and high heat capacity. The efficient recycling of these fluids enhances cost-effectiveness and environmental benefits, significantly strengthening the overall sustainability of the system.  To simplify O&M, ZTE’s immersion cooling server IceTank can work with the multi-functional O&M vehicles, enhancing the convenience and efficiency of maintenance tasks. Additionally, the fan-less design not only reduces noise pollution but also maintains a sealed environment that prevents dust from compromising sensitive components, ensuring a clean and quiet data center environment. These designs not only avoid the interference of dust and vibration but also significantly reduce the failure rate, thereby greatly improving the reliability of critical applications and maximizing equipment uptime.   ZTE’s  immersion cooling server IceTank fully demonstrates its firm commitment to sustainable development. By reducing the reliance on traditional cooling systems, it enhances data centers’ efficiency with lower Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), thereby contributing to global carbon emission reduction targets. As various industries advance towards more environmentally friendly and efficient computing solutions, ZTE’s immersion cooling server is leading the trend and showcasing the future of green computing.

ZTE recently organized the "Telco Cloud Native & AI" workshop at the ETSI NFV #46 meeting in Xi'an, which was hold again in China to promote the development of standards and industry. At the workshop, many leaders and experts from different technologies and industries were invited to discuss hot topics and technological prospects of telco cloud native and AI, so as to promote the development of standards and industry. Xi’an, China, June, 2024, ZTE Corporation (0763.HK / 000063.SZ), a global leading provider of integrated information and communication technology solutions recently organized the "Telco Cloud Native & AI" workshop at the ETSI NFV #46 meeting in 2024 was held in Xi'an.  European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) Industry Specification Group (ISG) Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is an authoritative standard-setting organization in the international cloud native field. ETSI NFV has provided more than 100 specifications and more than 10,000 proposals to help 90% of global operators successfully migrate their services to a modern and virtualized cloud environment. Five years later, ETSI NFV#46 meeting was held again in China. At the workshop, many leaders and experts from domestic and overseas standard technology experts, major Chinese operators, suppliers, and scientific research institutions were invited to discuss hot topics and technological prospects of telco cloud native & AI, so as to promote the development of standards and industry. Since the establishment of ETSI NFV, ZTE has been actively participating in the standard formulation. Currently, ZTE serves as the Vice Chairman of the Technical Steering Committee, and has a leading influence on standards in NFVs. Wang Weibin, Chief Scientist of ZTE Product Planning, said in his speech: "The NFV technology has been born for more than 10 years. With the modernization of networks and the large-scale commercial use of 5G networks, NFV has achieved large-scale deployment in the first ten years. Technologies such as virtualization, container, cloud native, SDN/NFV convergence, edge computing, and hardware acceleration are emerging, which have become the new subordination model of telecom networks. At present, the emergence of GenAI and LLM has given new impetus to the development of NFV, and the network is facing the challenges of increasingly complicated structures, diversified scenarios, and higher requirements for reliability and automation. Through this NFV workshop, we hope to bring together the strength of the industry to jointly promote and accelerate the development of NFV technology in cloud native and intelligent standards, laying a foundation for the development of network technologies and the communications industry in the next ten years.” Lin Yang, Chief Planning Engineer of ZTE Computing and CN Products, delivered a speech entitled "Cloud Native and Intelligent Evolution Enables the Digital Transformation of Operators", describing ZTE's thinking in the direction of cloud native and AI standardization of telecom networks. He pointed out that due to the lack of standardization, different operators and equipment vendors in the industry showed their own trends in deploying cloud native networks. To speed up the standardization and commercial implementation of cloud native and AI in NFVs, Lin Yang offered four suggestions and said that ZTE is willing to work with global partners to help operators transform and build digital infrastructure networks that meet the needs of the intelligent society in the future.   Zhang Hao, Director of the Institute of Network and IT Technology Institute of China Mobile Research Institute, said: "With the development of 5G and Generated Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in recent years, operators' services are rapidly changing from traditional voice and data connection services to diversified and multi-industry application services. Services are emerging at a faster frequency, and have higher requirements for diversified computing power, network bandwidth, latency, and self-intelligence. At the same time, the NFV network featuring simple virtualization cannot support the emerging new services. It needs to be further improved in terms of agility, elasticity, and self-intelligence, and evolves to the directions of overdistributed architecture, continuous deepening of cloud native, in-depth convergence of computing networks, and intelligence to meet the strict requirements of services for networks.“ Wang Xuliang, Deputy Director of the Cloud and Network Operation Technology Research of China Telecom Research Institute, introduced how China Telecom achieves in-depth integration of telecom service platforms and network functions through the cloud and network integration strategy. This strategy not only promotes service cloudification, but also provides customers with one-stop integrated services that integrate cloud and network concepts through cloud infrastructure. Since 2011, China Telecom has been exploring service cloudification and evolving its service model. By 2020, China Telecom had clearly proposed the cloud-network integration strategy to accelerate the cloud-based transformation of network services. In the speech, he emphasized the importance of technological innovation, proposed the goal of enhancing infrastructure security and disaster recovery capabilities, and looked forward to the future vision of building a unified service and technology architecture, covering the development of intelligent computing, enhanced PaaS, high-reliability architecture, software and hardware integrated computing, and distributed hybrid multi-cloud architecture. Doctor Chang Cao, Director of the Research Department of Next Generation Internet of China Unicom Research Institute, pointed out: "With the development of network service requirements and network architecture, communications will present the characteristics of underlying infrastructure biochemistry and intelligence from the perspective of technical evolution. From the perspective of three major phases, phase 1 is "Software/Hardware AIO Server/NFV + AI for Net ", phase 2 is "NFV/Cloud Native + Net for AI ", and phase 3 is "Cloud Native +AI Native". Overall presentation functions are enhanced, and the architecture is simple." Haining Wang, Vice Chair of CCSA SP1 from Intel, said, "CCSA SP1 (NFV) is the first ad hoc cross-TC standards project team established by CCSA. Since its establishment, CCSA SP1 has formulated more than 20 industry standards related to the management and orchestration of NFVs. Based on the ETSI NFV specifications, CCSA SP1 has added specific requirements for NFVs deployment of Chinese operators, providing good support for the development and deployment of China's NFVs industry, and meeting the urgent needs of the industry in recent years. At the beginning of the second decade of NFV development, CCSA SP1 plans to continuously promote the evolution of the open NFV architecture towards agility, reliability, and intelligence in accordance with the future telecom cloud requirements, enhance cooperation and coordination with ETSI ISG NFV, and jointly promote the development of the global NFV industry." Zhiruo Liu, a senior engineer of China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, said: "With the cloud-based transformation of network NFV, network flexibility and openness are improved through software and hardware decoupling, and large-scale and multi-vendor product integration and interoperability are difficult, which has become a huge challenge that operators must break through to promote network cloudification. This report will sort out the development trend of intelligent network in terms of standard, industry, and deployment, analyze the key to empowering intelligent network O&M, and share the considerations on model evaluation and standardization." At the same time, two roundtables were held around "Telco Cloud Native" and "AI". In Telco Cloud Native Roundtable, guests discussed in detail how to reconstruct the telco cloud system architecture to evolve to a cloud-native architecture, how to provide a foundation for telco cloud infrastructure to provide cloud-native network functions, and finally discussed in-depth the technical challenges in telecom cloud evolution to cloud-native coordination with orchestration systems. In the AI roundtable, guests discussed the future trends, opportunities, and challenges of introducing AI into the telecom field, typical application scenarios, and key elements of AI in NFV and cloud-native networks. They fully confirmed the necessity of introducing AI into telecom networks, especially in large models, which will bring convenience in customer service, network maintenance and optimization, marketing recommendation, risk management, and new service innovation, greatly improving the network quality, operation efficiency, and service satisfaction of the telecom industry. In the future, ZTE will continue to work with the ETSI to build more consensus on development in the telecommunications field, promote global cooperation, and promote industry prosperity.