Network News: HP, Alcatel-Lucent, Ciena, Solera

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the network industry:

HP and Alcatel-Lucent high performance communication networks.  HP (HPQ and Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) announced a jointly developed solution to help organizations move, store and access vast amounts of information by integrating data center infrastructure technology and high-performance communications networks. The integrated architecture known as Data Center Network Connect (DCNC) combines HP technologies and services for data centers and Alcatel-Lucent's optical transport solutions for service providers and its high-performance service routing and switching portfolio. DCNC will leverage the recently announced CloudBand solution from Alcatel-Lucent for businesses to access the cloud with the quality of service their activities require. "Alcatel-Lucent and HP’s solution is based on technology engineered to satisfy telecommunications service providers that expect their networks to perform with exceptional reliability and meet their needs far into the future,” said Philippe Keryer, president, Networks Group, Alcatel-Lucent. “Large enterprises can confidently invest in these solutions knowing that they will receive the full benefit of their investment for years to come.” The joint solutions are currently available in select locations with expected global and consolidated availability by year end.

Ciena selected by BT.  Ciena (CIEN) announced its selection as vendor for BT’s 21st Century Network (21CN), reinforcing Ciena’s position as a strategic supplier for one of the world’s leading communications services companies. The contract for Ciena 100G solutions equipped with intelligent switching technology will underpin BT's next generation broadband and Ethernet efforts, which include plans to enable the company to utilize 40G and 100G technology in the core of its network. "Service providers are increasingly relying on the expertise of select suppliers to solve critical business challenges," said Neil J. McRae, Chief Network Architect at BT.  "The slow, complicated and costly provisioning of basic consumer and enterprise services combined with the well-established rise in capacity requirements and complexity of network management are major threats facing carriers – and are issues where Ciena’s expertise stands out in building intelligent infrastructures." 'Ciena's CTO Steve Alexander recently spoke with Light Reading TV about how the advent of cloud-computing services and platforms are independent on the availability of intelligent network bandwidth.

Solera Networks selected by Government contractor.  Solera Networks announced the deployment of the Solera DS platform across the enterprise network of a large government defense contractor. The Solera Networks appliance was selected for its exclusive ability to sustain full-fidelity packet capture, indexing, classification and analysis at the speeds of today’s fastest enterprise networks. The company needed a security solution to determine what was compromised and quickly identifying the root cause of the breaches required Layer 2–7 data analysis. Today, the company estimates they save approximately $4,000 per individual incident in response team time alone due to the solution’s ability to diagnose problem areas quickly and fine-tune each inquiry early in the investigation.