Help Center> Direct Connect> Service Overview> What Is Direct Connect?
Updated on 2022-09-26 GMT+08:00
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What Is Direct Connect?

Direct Connect allows you to establish a stable, high-speed, low-latency, secure dedicated network connection that connects your on-premises data center to Huawei Cloud. Direct Connect allows you to maximize legacy IT facilities and leverage cloud services to build a flexible, scalable hybrid cloud computing environment.

Figure 1 shows how Direct Connect connects an on-premises data center to the cloud.

Figure 1 How Direct Connect works

Why Direct Connect?

  • Network quality: Direct Connect allows you to establish a dedicated network for data transmission, which brings high network performance, low latency, and excellent user experience.
  • Security: Direct Connect establishes private connectivity between your on-premises data center and the cloud. Data is transmitted over a secure dedicated connection.
  • Transmission speed: A single connection supports up to 100 Gbit/s of bandwidth.

Components

The key components of Direct Connect are a connection, virtual gateway, and virtual interface.

  • Connection

    The connection is dedicated network connection between your premises and a Direct Connect location over a line you leased from a carrier. You can create a standard connection by yourself or request a hosted connection from a partner. After you are certified as a partner, you can also create an operations connection.

    A standard or operations connection has a dedicated port for your exclusive use and can be associated with multiple virtual interfaces.

    A hosted connection allows you to share a port. Partners with operations connections can provision hosted connections and allocate VLANs and bandwidths for those connections. You can request hosted connections from these partners, and only one virtual interface can be created for a hosted connection.

  • Virtual gateway

    The virtual gateway is a logical gateway for accessing VPCs. Each VPC can have only one virtual gateway associated, but multiple connections can use the same virtual gateway to access one VPC.

  • Virtual interface

    The virtual interface links a connection with one or more virtual gateways, each of which is associated with a VPC, so that your on-premises network can access all these VPCs.

Accessing Direct Connect

The public cloud provides a web-based user interface, the management console, for you to access the Direct Connect service.