Telecom Lead Europe: Alcatel-Lucent’s CloudBand ‘carrier cloud’ management solution supports an additional number of open source cloud computing software as well as networking equipment from technology vendors.
“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,” said Dor Skuler, vice president of Alcatel-Lucent Cloud Solutions.
Alcatel-Lucent introduced the CloudBand service in November 2011. The CloudBand Management System optimizes services between the communications network and the cloud, while the CloudBand Node provides the computing, storage and networking hardware and associated software to host a wide range of cloud services.
The CloudBand Management System utilizes OpenStack to manage the provisioning and coordination of the hardware infrastructure within each CloudBand Node, and leverages Apache CloudStack to manage cloud and network resources in accordance with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and policies.
As it is compatible with network equipment from other vendors, CloudBand eliminates issues involving interoperability of cloud solutions with service providers’ multi-vendor network environments.
Moreover, CloudBand gives service providers the flexibility they need to introduce carrier cloud services while benefiting from their existing investments in network infrastructure.
Alcatel-Lucent claims that it has also adopted an open approach to integrating best-of-breed open source cloud computing software.
Alcatel-Lucent supports the OpenStack Foundation which was co-founded by NASA and RackSpace and is dedicated to open cloud development throughout data centers, which are central to the delivery of all cloud services.
This move complements Alcatel-Lucent’s utilization of Apache CloudStack in the CloudBand Management System, and support of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). CloudBand’s unique, open approach gives service providers greater flexibility when selecting cloud platforms.