Alcatel-Lucent Builds Openness with its Carrier CloudBand

Alcatel-Lucent is expanding the range of open source cloud platforms and networking equipment vendors supported by its CloudBand "carrier cloud" solution.

CloudBand, which Alcatel-Lucent first unveiled one year ago, is its foundational architecture for a new class of carrier cloud services, such as IMS or video applications, that leverage generic compute resources deployed in regional data centers throughout a carrier's footprint. The goal is to make the carrier infrastructure more agile, elastic, resilient and application-aware.

Alcatel-Lucent said CloudBand gives service providers the flexibility they need to introduce carrier cloud services while benefiting from their existing investments in network infrastructure.

The company has adopted an open approach to integrating best-of-breed open source cloud computing software. This includes support for the OpenStack Foundation, which was co-founded by NASA and RackSpace and is dedicated to open cloud development throughout data centers. Alcatel-Lucent's CloudBand is also supporting Apache CloudStack in the CloudBand Management System, as well as Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Alcatel-Lucent said it is now possible for service providers to remotely set up a networked CloudBand Node in just a few hours by accessing a pre-configured 'cloud in a box' solution. With this approach they can provide all the functionality of the public cloud wherever they choose in their network while offering the benefits of quality and security that come with the carrier cloud.

"Openness has been a key principle that we have embraced to ensure that our customers' cloud environments can be adapted and expanded as the customer demand evolves. We have delivered on this promise of openness with multi-vendor support at every point in the network and the cloud so our customers can enjoy flexibility in their investment decisions, choosing whichever vendor best meets a particular need," stated Dor Skuler, Vice President of Alcatel-Lucent Cloud Solutions.

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