Nuage Expands Ecosystem Program to Stimulate OpenStack Adoption

Nuage Networks, the Alcatel-Lucent start-up venture focused on SDN (software-defined networking) is extending its expanding the Nuage Networks Ecosystem, a complete ecosystem of open source community projects, ecosystem partners, systems integration partners, developers, and customers for Development and Operations (DevOps) clouds based on OpenStack.

Unlike legacy networking vendors with a “one-size-fits-all” approach, Nuage Networks is working with a broad range of partners and communities at every level in the IT stack – such as core networking, server platforms, virtualization, security, and system integrators. This provides the core components required for public and private DevOps clouds at any scale based on existing, proven, and operational models.

By leveraging experience from deployments at leading enterprise and cloud service provider customers, Nuage Networks has built several reference architectures for DevOps cloud infrastructures that are united by a common orchestration framework – OpenStack – and by a common networking platform –Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform (VSP). With this rich ecosystem, enterprises and cloud service providers can build a DevOps private or public cloud infrastructure that not only replaces but also surpasses legacy architectures in terms of power, sophistication, and choice.

Both pure play OpenStack distributions announced today, and Linux / OpenStack distributions from a leading vendor such as Red Hat are supported. “Partnerships like this are critical to helping our customers migrate to the cloud. We share a common vision with Nuage Networks in taking an open approach that is still enterprise-proven and cloud service provider-ready,” said John Bleuer, Red Hat’s Vice President of Global Partners and Alliances. “Together, we are working to provide the capabilities for our customers to create OpenStack-based Clouds that can outpace legacy architectures.”

The Nuage Networks ecosystem unifies and leverages these best-of-breed components:
•Unified Network Control for Cloud Consumption: Nuage Networks VSP overlays virtualized and bare metal resources without imposing hardware swap outs and enables unified network controls and management of multiple standalone DevOps clouds. These clouds can be unified or “federated” into a single, coherent cloud.
•Rich Partnership Ecosystem: Using the service insertion model, Nuage Networks ecosystem program enables introduction of various services based on best-of-breed solutions and customer choice.
•Open Source Integration: Newly added support for Linux Containers and Docker alongside with existing and operational support for OpenStack, KVM, and Xen virtualization hypervisors maximizes choice for DevOps based on proven and leading-edge open source community projects.
•System Integration Reach: By offering a set of rich reference architectures and partnering with leading system integrators such as Accenture, Nuage Networks makes the adoption of proven and operational cloud architectures easily within reach of enterprises and service providers.

“Enterprises adopting OpenStack are looking for a cloud-native, open approach to datacenter networking that accords primacy to application workloads and DevOps processes. To provide what customers need, vendors must work together to form complete ecosystems, extending all the way from the OpenStack distribution through to network infrastructure, network and security services, and even professional services. With its partner program, Nuage Networks is building an extensive ecosystem that holistically addresses the needs of organizations that want to move ahead with real-world OpenStack deployments,” said Brad Casemore, Research Director for Datacenter Networking, IDC.

Nuage Networks ecosystem leverages Nuage Networks VSP, overlaying a virtualized network on an existing networking environment. By managing both virtualized and bare metal resources side-by-side, each data center network can be managed by a single approach. By uniting the networks across data centers (also called federation), all data centers, all discrete clouds (e.g. Development clouds) and the entire DevOps environment are managed as a whole. Further, by leveraging the proven operating system used in Alcatel-Lucent’s edge and core routing products and Nuage Networks extensions to OpenStack, SDN can be implemented easily for DevOps environments at even the largest enterprises and service providers.

The partner technologies supporting the ecosystem include F5 Big IP Local Traffic Manager for application delivery, Infoblox DDI for DNS, DHCP and IP address management, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series for next-generation firewall protection, and Red Hat OSP 6 as the OpenStack distribution.

Sunil Khandekar, CEO of Nuage Networks said, “We are honored to work with market and thought leading customers in the enterprise and cloud service provider markets. We’re sharing the lessons learned from actual OpenStack deployments to build not only a comprehensive reference architecture but also a complete ecosystem of network vendors. Through our ecosystem, we are enabling OpenStack clouds to exceed the capabilities of legacy architectures – and that provides our customers with a competitive advantage.”