News

Nuage Emphasizes SDN Partnerships

• By David Ramel
• 05/19/2015

Software-defined networking (SDN) company Nuage Networks continued to make moves to further its positioning in the open networking arena, forming partnerships and increasing its new-age networking portfolio.

Shortly after addressing the SDN overlay/underlay visibility problem with its Virtualized Services Assurance Platform (VSAP), the company continued to flood the PR airwaves with news of partnerships with Mirantis Inc. and Arista Networks Inc., along with an expansion of its ecosystem program.

Such partnerships are a key part of the Alcatel-Lucent startup's strategy, it indicated in statements coming out of the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, Canada.

"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," the company said in a news release. "This provides the core components required for public and private DevOps clouds at any scale based on existing, proven and operational models."

To that end, it's teaming up with pure-play OpenStack specialist Mirantis to help customers leverage the scalability, performance and policy-based automation of the Nuage SDN solution in Mirantis OpenStack cloud environments.

A key part of that Nuage SDN solution is the Virtualized Services Platform (VSP), which provides overlays on top of existing networking environments.

"The VSP virtualizes and automates data center network infrastructure, transforming it into a reflexive environment that instantaneously establishes the network services required to deliver cloud applications across thousands of tenants in a policy-driven manner," the company said. "Nuage Networks VSP lays the foundation for an open and dynamically controlled datacenter network fabric to accelerate application programmability, facilitate unconstrained mobility and maximize compute efficiency."

Just one day later, Nuage announced the partnership with Arista Networks, a fellow SDN cloud networking company.

"With their respective offerings, Nuage Networks and Arista Networks have enabled customers to build programmable underlays and highly automated SDN overlay infrastructure using industry standard protocols like VxLAN and OVSDB," Nuage said in a news release. "This collaboration enables a common framework for network automation that integrates virtualized and bare-metal assets in the datacenter. The two companies will offer proven integrated solutions, available immediately. Customers using OpenStack or any other cloud management systems can readily leverage the integrated solution over a varied ecosystem of hypervisors."

The partnerships are part of the company's expansion of the Nuage Networks Ecosystem, which generated yet another news release yesterday. Nuage described that concept as "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."

Nuage listed the following components of its ecosystem:

• 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.

Finally, in a blog post yesterday, exec Amir Sharif said Nuage has developed two cloud reference architectures that he said the company will debut at the Vancouver conference.

"These reference architectures are not test tube experiments," Sharif said. "They are based on actual and operational OpenStack environments powering business in the U.S., Europe and Asia today. These cloud DevOps reference architectures are a statement that enterprises and service providers now view OpenStack and SDN as mainstream."