Nuage Networks introduces 2nd generation SDN solution for datacenter networks, accelerating the move to business cloud services

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., April 2, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Nuage Networks™, an Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris andNYSE: ALU) venture focused on software defined networking (SDN) solutions, has today announced an open software-based solution to address the key 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.

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Trials of the Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform begin in April in Europe and North America. Trial customers include UK cloud service provider Exponential-e, French telecoms service provider SFR and leading US healthcare provider, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). Worldwide commercial availability is planned for mid-2013.

Michel Combes, new CEO of Alcatel-Lucent said: "It's exciting to start my first day as CEO of Alcatel-Lucent with an announcement that expands our addressable market. Alcatel-Lucent's SDN strategy and the Nuage Networks branded portfolio announced today 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.

But 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 2016¹.

SDN companies approach the market in different ways.  While most first generation SDN solves 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.

To contrast:

Nuage Networks' VSP:

• Provides an open, software-only solution that works with OpenStack, CloudStack and VMware cloud environments and any datacenter network switches.
• Delivers seamless network connectivity inside the datacenter, between datacenters as well as datacenter to Enterprise VPN connectivity.
• Improves network utilization and efficiency by up to 40 percent according to Bell Labs studies. In addition, by removing networking constraints we enable unrestricted placement and mobility of compute workloads, driving up to 40 percent increase in server utilization.
• Makes the network available instantaneously no matter where the application is running – even if the application moves to a virtual machine in another rack of servers or to another datacenter.
• Delivers full programmability using a set of standardized APIs in clear IT-friendly language.
• Based on software from Alcatel-Lucent's Service Router Operating System (SR OS) and its 10 years of reliable, large scale, business-critical network performance worldwide, including 40 of the top 40 telecom service providers.

Quotes

Sunil Khandekar, CEO of Nuage Networks: "SDN is one of the most exciting and promising new technologies in datacenter networking. At Nuage Networks, we're focused on getting the network out of the way so that it no longer constrains the server and storage resources or the performance of cloud services. We do that by offering a platform that is technology and layer agnostic. As more companies move to a cloud service environment, we can help them automate their networks to deliver instant connectivity to their customers."

Mukesh Bavisi, Managing Director of Exponential-e: "At Exponential-e we are operating in a very competitive market and pride ourselves on delivering the most innovative and differentiated services. As such, we are pleased to trial the Nuage Networks SDN solution to meet the dynamic needs of our customers."

Ibrahim Gedeon, Chief Technology Officer at TELUS said: "TELUS is investing in multi-tenant datacenter infrastructures to deliver the most innovative cloud services to our customers. The value we expect to see from SDN technologies is exactly along the lines of the Nuage Networks proposition of a virtualized and automated datacenter network infrastructure that gives us the agility to turn up cloud services very quickly while connecting seamlessly to the VPN services our business customers consume today. We commend Nuage Networks on their approach."

William Hanna, vice president of IT infrastructure at UPMC, said: "UPMC has been a leader in virtualizing our data centers to provide fast, reliable and flexible services to our clinicians and other customers in a rapidly changing healthcare landscape. With the Nuage Networks SDN solution, we hope to further our strategy of using smart technology to support patient-centered, accountable care."

About the Nuage Networks SDN Solution and Ecosystem

Nuage Networks offers a holistic cloud networking solution. Nuage Networks is integrating the security and virtualization capabilities of Citrix, F5, HP and Palo Alto Networks with its highly scalable Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) – a complete network services solution for the multi-tenanted cloud datacenter. The solution separates and abstracts the definition and creation of datacenter network services using three key elements: the Virtualized Services Controller (VSC), the Virtualized Services Directory (VSD) and the Virtual Routing and Switching Engine (VRS). All three elements will be available for trials in April 2013. 

Quotes

Sameer Dholakia, Group VP and GM, Cloud Platforms Group, Citrix said:
"An integration of the Nuage Networks SDN solution with Citrix XenServer and Citrix CloudPlatform powered by Apache CloudStack will enable enterprise and service provider customers to instantaneously and dynamically create network services in their datacenter and deliver applications more quickly. Nuage's efforts with partners like Citrix demonstrate how the spirit of openness can help spur innovation in cloud services."

Jim Ritchings, Senior Vice President, Business Development at F5 Networks said: "F5 is already working with Nuage Networks to incorporate the SDN Layer 4-7 services capabilities of F5's platform into its new solution. Nuage Networks has taken a powerful and novel approach to delivering network services instantaneously and flexibly in a virtualized environment. As traffic management is central to performance, availability and dynamic services creation for cloud-based applications, our work with Nuage Networks can help accelerate the deployment of differentiated cloud services for our customers."

Mark Potter, Senior Vice President and General Manager for HPs Industry Standard Servers said: "The service provider community is looking to engage in the cloud market with new and dynamic services enabled by SDN. HP and Nuage Networks are aligned in supporting the transition to an industry standard approach to SDN and we are pleased to offer our market leading servers and storage as part of the Nuage solution."

Chad Kinzelberg, senior vice president of Business and Corporate Development of Palo Alto Networks said:
"Palo Alto Networks has collaborated with Nuage Networks to bring our customers robust, dynamic and scalable control over our next-generation firewall products, whether they are appliances or virtual firewalls.  We commend Nuage's leading approach to empowering the cloud through network control that includes the critical service layer, a key capability to catalyze SDN adoption."

Nuage Networks is hosting a live webcast press conference on April 2, 9:15am PDT (12:15pm EDT/6pm CEST). Visit: http://www.media-server.com/m/p/2jtxear6 to join the event.

About Us

Nu-ahj: From French, meaning cloud.  Nuage Networks brings a unique combination of groundbreaking technologies and unmatched networking expertise to the enterprise and telecommunications industries. The Silicon Valley-based startup is able to apply radically new thinking to the problem of delivering massively-scalable and high programmable SDN solutions with carrier-class reliability. Nuage Networks, backed by Alcatel-Lucent's (Euronext Paris andNYSE: ALU) fast growing IP division, has the pedigree to serve the needs of the world's biggest clouds.  The cloud has made promises – the mission of Nuage Networks is to help you realize them. 

Learn more about Nuage Networks:

Visit: http://www.nuagenetworks.net
Visit: http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/solutions/cloud/prepare-your-network
Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/nuagenetworks 
See the Nuage Networks new video:
Download the Nuage Networks launch webcast slides 
Download the Nuage Networks' logo, images and executive photos 
Read Nuage Networks' CEO, Sunil Khandekar's, blog

¹ IDC Evolution or Disruption: Where are we headed with Software Defined Networking (SDN), doc #DR2013_T4_RM,  March 2013

SOURCE Alcatel-Lucent

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