Nuage Networks, an Alcatel-Lucent venture focused on software defined networking (SDN) solutions, has announced an open software-based solution to address datacenter network constraints that limit cloud services adoption. The Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) will allow healthcare, banking, utilities and other enterprise market segments, as well as webscale companies – large Internet-based companies – and telecom service providers, to scale their cloud offers and provide instant, secure connectivity to multiple customers.
While the worldwide commercial availability of the solution is planned for mid-2013, trials of the Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform begin in April in Europe and North America.
Michel Combes, CEO, Alcatel-Lucent said, “Alcatel-Lucent’s SDN strategy and the recently announce Nuage Networks branded portfolio builds on the cloud orchestration we already provide with our CloudBand Management System. We are very well positioned to help telecom and cloud service providers build large scale cloud infrastructure and services, opening up new revenue opportunities for our customers and ourselves.”
Consumers and business users are driving demand for cloud computing and storage. Current datacenters are well equipped from an IT perspective. Datacenter operators can add or change virtual servers and storage almost instantly to meet customer demands. However, the network isn’t keeping up – it has high capacity, but it’s not flexible enough to make use of that capacity. Network provisioning still requires detailed technical planning, manual configuration and complex systems and processes to connect customers to compute and storage resources. SDN helps solve this problem and IDC forecasts the worldwide SDN market will grow from $360m in 2013 to $3.7Bn by 2016.
Combes said, SDN companies approach the market in different ways. While most first generation SDN solutions solve part of the problem, Nuage Networks’ Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) is a comprehensive solution. VSP automates the entire datacenter network, creating secure “slices” for each customer, changing provisioning time from days to minutes. VSP also scales to support very large datacenters with thousands of customers, each with thousands of users. This makes it suitable for public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud services delivered by large enterprises, webscale companies or telecom service providers.