Alcatel-Lucent's CloudBand Hopes To Advance NFV Community

Alcatel-Lucent transforms itself with a focus on enabling Network Functions Virtualization community, Emulex launches a purpose-built NetFlow appliance, and EdgeCast offers a globally-distributed DNS service.

Alcatel-Lucent advances NFV with CloudBand Ecosystem

Speaking at the opening of its cloud research center in Tel Aviv, Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) CEO Michel Combes outlined The Shift Plan – the company’s industrial transformation from telecoms generalist to specialist in IP Networking and Ultra-Broadband Access – which will harness new technologies to accelerate the move to the cloud by service providers. The company hopes to leverage  Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) technology, which enables network services to be deployed on a shared cloud infrastructure instead of dedicated, purpose-built hardware. To advance the cause, the company launched its CloudBand Ecosystem Program, a community of service providers, developers and vendors adopting NFV. Developers and vendors can access tools and test applications to ensure they scale and interact within a simulated cloud environment before they reach a service provider’s network. Alcatel-Lucent already uses the platform at its CloudBand Innovation Center (CIC) to successfully ‘onboard’ its own virtualized applications for the carrier cloud.

"Alcatel-Lucent is dedicated to helping service providers advance quickly in the area of NFV," said Roy Amir, Vice President, Strategy & Ecosystem, CloudBand at Alcatel-Lucent. "The CloudBand Ecosystem Program aims to do just that, providing a workspace where companies can access CloudBand and collaborate and learn from each other. This will help service providers adopt a completely new NFV operational model using services and solutions that have been developed with them and their customers’ needs in mind.”

Emulex launches NetFlow appliance

At Interop New York Emulex announced the new EndaceFlow 3040 NetFlow generator appliance. The new appliance is purpose-built for use with high-density 10Gb Ethernet networks, generates 100 percent accurate NetFlows on up to four Ethernet links at speeds up to 10Gb per second line rate. By providing 100 percent NetFlow generation, new threats to network security and performance can more easily be detected, identified and resolved - resulting in the detection of a wider range of network anomalies and intrusions in the security operations space and the identification of network choke points that impact application performance - and can be further treated with packet-based network recording and analysis tools.

"As enterprises move more deeply into the latest data center technologies, such as 10GbE, server virtualization and software-defined networking, they are finding that visualizing what is happening in their networks has become more challenging," said Lee Doyle, principal analyst, Doyle Research. "This is compounded by the fact that many tools that worked well at 1Gbps speeds simply have not scaled up to 10Gbps. This has critical implications for the ways that enterprises approach security monitoring, forensics and network performance management, which can only be addressed by tools that are designed to enable network visualization at 10Gbps speeds and above."

EdgeCast launches DNS service

EdgeCast Networks announced a new globally distributed DNS (Domain Name System) service. The new service will offer enterprise-grade DNS features and functionality with a simple and cost-effective pricing structure. Customers switching from competitors are likely to realize significant savings while benefiting from vastly superior performance and functionality. “In third-party testing, EdgeCast Route was the fastest overall performer among all the major DNS providers – in many cases by a substantial margin,” said Ted Middleton, VP of product management at EdgeCast Networks. “Coupling that performance with sophisticated features like near instant health-checks, automatic failover, load balancing and advanced policy (geography or network-based) routing, EdgeCast Route is clearly differentiated against any other managed DNS service. This combination of performance and features – offered at prices that are among the most aggressive in the industry – brings a very powerful new alternative to the market.”