Telecom equipment vendor Alcatel-Lucent on Tuesday announced its software defined networking (SDN) technologies for the OmniSwitch Ethernet LAN portfolio of its Enterprise division.
In order to address challenges of enterprises IT departments, Alcatel-Lucent’s SDN capabilities now feature automation and provisioning, support practical use cases which solve real world issues in the enterprise, making SDN the foundation for a new and improved user experience.
Alcatel-Lucent, which expanded its Application Fluent Network vision to help enterprises build SDN-based solutions in an affordable manner, said OpenFlow support and OpenStack integration are available now on the Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch product via a free software upgrade or at no additional charge when a new system is purchased.
“These capabilities ensure that OmniSwitch solutions are open and will work seamlessly with the company’s partner ecosystem and industry SDN leaders’ solutions,” said Stephane Robineau, general manager and vice president, Enterprise Networks business, Alcatel-Lucent.
Key benefits
OpenFlow-enabled Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitches interoperating with Aruba wireless controller can dynamically route traffic for optimal performance improving the user experience with bandwidth intensive, real-time applications on a wireless network.
When an unwanted application or traffic pattern is detected, an automatic security policy is immediately created and enforced at the OmniSwitch level to stop malicious network traffic. This capability leverages RESTful interfaces and Application Fingerprinting that are enabled by Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitches and Radware DefensePro.
As storage and data networks converge, the programmable interface of SDN provides a consistent policy across these networks to improve the delivery of applications. IP and fiber channel based storage can be managed on the converged data center network through the programmable interfaces available on Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch enabling a true software defined data center.
OpenFlow 1.3 support complements previously released RESTful API support on OmniSwitch products, providing an additional northbound SDN interface for interoperability in an open and multi-vendor SDN-controlled environment.
OpenStack integration provides additional southbound SDN interfaces that enable open and multi-vendor virtualized SDN ecosystems.
A new module available for the OmniSwitch 6900 with a Native Fibre Channel interface and built-in Fibre Channel-to-Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) Gateway enables convergence of storage and data networking in the data center. This capability has been validated with QLogic Storage Area Network (SAN) fabric and NetApp storage arrays.
