Telecom Lead Europe: Alcatel-Lucent announced it is introducing new technologies to meet demand for so-called ‘software-defined networks’, the growing enterprise market trend being fueled by an increasingly mobile workforce and network management challenges brought on by the ‘growing virtualization within data centers.
Software-defined networking enables enterprises to program networks and control the traffic flow, inspection and modification of applications on them. By building greater programmability, application awareness and end-to-end visibility into its Application Fluent Network, Alcatel-Lucent is delivering an enterprise-scale Software Defined Network (SDN) that moves beyond offering basic awareness of the applications running on it, to a network that can make automatic real-time adjustments.
Alcatel-Lucent’s application fluent approach to SDN extends to the entire enterprise network, going beyond basic network configuration to create a better user experience. This approach gives mid-sized and large enterprises highly automated and simple to use solutions that are scalable and compatible with existing networks.
CandIT Media, a digital media solutions company based in Belgium, is the first vendor to validate Alcatel-Lucent’s application fluent approach to enterprise scale SDN. By using Alcatel-Lucent’s OmniSwitch 6900, it has created 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.
Alcatel-Lucent’s OmniVista 2500 Virtual Machine Manager is now classified as VMware Ready, which is an important element in providing increased programmability for delivering on SDN. Alcatel-Lucent’s 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.
Alcatel-Lucent’s Application Fluent Network technology automatically adjusts and optimizes an entire corporate IT infrastructure to ensure it can seamlessly support real-time applications running on a local area network, data centers and across the wide area network. This automation helps businesses meet challenges of delivering virtualized, mission-critical applications securely to employees over a high performance network – no matter where workers are accessing these applications.
Alcatel-Lucent will enhance further 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; and 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, the company said.
Top IPTV vendors include Huawei, Harmonic, Alcatel-Lucent, Motorola and Verimatrix
According to Multimedia Research Group’s annual study IPTV Market Leader Report — Fall 2012, Alcatel-Lucent leads in the Access category in four regions.
