Huawei unveiled some universal customer premises equipment (uCPE) for its software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN). And the company wants to make it clear that its SD-WAN is not dependent on command line interfaces (CLI).

The company’s AR650 series and AR1600 series, which are currently available for order, and its AR3600 series, which will be generally available soon, are different size uCPEs built on x86 blades that can run virtual workloads.

The uCPEs support on-demand deployment of Huawei and third-party virtual network functions (VNFs).

“It evolves our solution quite a bit; we can roll out VNFs on the fly, within minutes,” said Ian Foo, ‎director of network switching, gateway, and security products at Huawei USA. “You can roll those out based on policy to the branches very easily.”

VNFs include virtual firewalls and WAN optimization controllers as well as future value-added services.

Foo said the uCPE is essentially an x86 based WAN router platform but with the benefit of WAN interface capabilities. These interfaces allow the uCPE to plug into a variety of connection types that might be found at branch offices located all over the world. “It’s basically a branch platform that allows us to have WAN interfaces that allow us to have virtual network functions on it,” he said. “It’s not a proprietary platform. It’s a server platform but with WAN interfaces on it to support multiple connectivity options.”

Huawei also stressed that it’s SD-WAN solution is much more than just some simple software running on existing routers in branch offices. Huawei’s SD-WAN is managed by its Agile SDN controller.

“While our devices do have CLI, it is not required at all to use Huawei’s SD-WAN solution,” said Foo. “Some customers prefer to use CLI; most others do not. Our SD-WAN solution doesn’t require any knowledge of CLI by the customer to deploy or operate. There is a zero-touch deployment plug-and-play capability for simplified deployment and operation in the field at the branch location. And the Agile controller-based management is GUI based.”

Huawei’s SD-WAN is an open SDN architecture with Netconf and YANG mode for South-bound interfaces and RESTful for North-bound interfaces on the Agile controller.

“We are on par with all the vendors out there,” said Foo.

Earlier this month, Huawei announced that Japan’s SoftBank is using its SD-WAN offering.