Nuage Signs China Mobile for Developer SDN

Nuage Networks is to provide a China Mobile subsidiary with SDN technology that will be used for applications development and testing on an internal private cloud architecture.

The SDN infrastructure is designed to allow the China Mobile Software Technology Company's internal developers and subsidiaries to quickly develop, test and deploy applications using DevOps methodologies, Nuage Networks CEO Sunil Khandekar told Light Reading.

The technology from Nuage -- a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) focused on SDN -- will initially be deployed in the Suzhou province, but Nuage hopes the deal will spread from there. "The idea is to take a sensible approach, use SDN technology to create a consumable internal cloud and get experience with it and then roll it out on the public side," Khandekar says.

The Nuage agreement follows a sweeping deal between Alcatel-Lucent and both China Mobile and China Unicom for fixed, mobile, IP, optical and carrier/cloud virtualization technologies valued up to 8.12 Chinese yuan renminbi (US$1.3 billion). The China Mobile end of that deal is worth up to RMB4.53 billion ($730 million) (See AlcaLu Lands $1B+ Deals in China).

Earlier this year, Nuage signed China Telecom to use Nuage technology for public clouds. (See China Telecom Taps Nuage SDN for Public Clouds.)

China Mobile, which has 800 million subscribers, is rolling out an OpenStack and KVM-based private cloud. It will use Nuage technology to design applications that connect to the network automatically and consume firewall, load balancer and VPN, all available as services on the network rather than hardware appliances, Khandekar says.

China Mobile will take advantage of Nuage's microsegmentation capabilities to isolate applications from each other while still giving each application access to the complete set of network services. Microsegmentation also helps control the network if a server goes runaway, consuming excess network resources, or becomes infected by malware.

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Microsegmentation provides a sandbox for application testing and development. "They can test all kinds of failure scenarios within the sandbox, but never violate anything outside that sandbox," Khandekar says.

Each China Mobile subsidiary will have its own virtual private cloud with resources located in one or more data centers, connected together and accessible from anywhere in the cloud, Nuage says.

China Mobile will use Nuage's Networks Virtualized Services Platform, which is a data center VPN. The communications provider will also use Nuage Virtualized Services Assurance Platform for visibility between the virtual and physical environments for each VPC and the federated cloud. (See Alcatel-Lucent Spins Up Its SDN.)

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— Mitch Wagner, , West Coast Bureau Chief, Light Reading. Got a tip about SDN or NFV? Send it to [email protected].