Alcatel-Lucent Targets Enterprise-scale SDN

Alcatel-Lucent is pursuing an enterprise-scale Software Defined Network (SDN) strategy that goes beyond offering basic awareness of the applications running on it to a network that can make automatic real-time adjustments. The strategy involves building greater programmability, application awareness and end-to-end visibility into its Application Fluent Network.

Alcatel-Lucent's Application Fluent Network, which is built on its OmniSwitch platform, detects virtualized applications and applies a profile-driven policy to enable a network to automatically adjust to virtualized traffic, such as virtual desktops, in order to meet service quality demands. The solution can combine individual user policies, the type of device and applications being used, with the knowledge of the entire network to dynamically adjust network access priority and bandwidth allocation, ensuring required service levels are met.

CandIT Media, a digital media solutions vendor based in Belgium, is using Alcatel-Lucent’s OmniSwitch 6900 to create a “content aware” digital network that dynamically supports the large traffic peaks specific to media flows. In addition to providing a higher quality user experience, CandIT Media can deliver solutions to its customers at lower costs since the network is more efficient in transporting large files.

"The high volumes of media traffic we deal with have a bursty nature that makes Ethernet switches suboptimal for their transport. By using off the shelf hardware and Alcatel-Lucent’s OminSwitch 6900, we were able to achieve and significantly improve Quality of Service by optimally tuning the transfer of media content which also resulted in a much higher utilization of physical components," stated Luc Andries, CTO, CandIT Media.

In addition, Alcatel-Lucent announced that its OmniVista 2500 Virtual Machine Manager is now classified as VMware Ready.  The OmniVista 2500 Virtual Machine Manager provides real-time and historical visibility of the enterprise data center network and the location of virtual components, such as virtual machines, within the network. This visibility of both the network and virtual applications coupled with the ability to provision and manage resources, enables the network to automatically make adjustments in response to changes in virtualized workloads within and between data centers.

Alcatel-Lucent  said it will further enhance the Application Fluent Network during the first half of 2013 via:

• Increased programmability through a set of RESTful interfaces that enable applications, external controllers and orchestration platforms such as OpenStack and CloudStack to talk with  Alcatel-Lucent’s OmniSwitch for greater orchestration and optimization of  application delivery.
• Greater network recognition of applications through application profiling, and new application performance analysis of virtual machine connectivity to understand and react to network conditions on applications in real-time.
• Enhanced global control view through the addition of Plug-N-Play capabilities that allow each device in the network to be identified and brought into service automatically for improved decision making at the network node level.

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