Alcatel-Lucent has introduced new high-capacity 40 gigabit Ethernet (GigE) switching module for the company’s widely deployed OmniSwitch 6900 enterprise network switch to increase the data capacity, speed and performance of corporate data centre networks.
The new module enables multiple switches to be linked together to create the 40 GigE Pod, which will help enterprises prepare their data centre networks for the emerging ‘carrier cloud’ category of services, offering better control of bandwidth and the ability to provide a guaranteed quality of service.
The 40 GigE Pod establishes the low-latency, high-capacity links between servers needed to introduce carrier cloud services, increases the ability of enterprises to support a wide array of high-bandwidth services such as video, transfers of large files, real-time collaboration and business productivity tools and more within their own network.
In addition, the company has expanded its ‘Data Center Switching Partner’ ecosystem with companies including external link Emulex, external linkNetApp and external link VMware, to make it easier for customers to deploy more affordable, best-of-breed data centre offerings.
Contributions of data centre switching partners include: integration testing is complete between Alcatel-Lucent’s OmniSwitch and Emulex OneConnect 10 GigE Network Interface Cards (NICs), ensuring low risk deployments of the Alcatel-Lucent Pod and Mesh with different servers and the verification testing concerning the use of Alcatel-Lucent’s vNP for automated virtual machine (VM) movement with VMware’s vCenter has been completed
In addition, the contributions include integration between Alcatel-Lucent’s OmniVista 2500 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) and VMware hypervisor architecture has been demonstrated for VMware vMotion, dashboard and provisioning and a test bed is being developed combining the Mesh and NetApp storage arrays with Virtual Desktop Applications.
ZK Research and Yankee Group Affiliate principal analyst Zeus Kerravala said enterprises need to be able to choose which applications they maintain in their own data centre and which they can source from the cloud.
" Alcatel-Lucent is bringing a real-world practicality to data center fabrics, both in terms of affordability and scalability for enterprises both large and small. With this solution, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise provides a safe place to do business … whether it’s in the enterprise data center or the cloud," said Kerravala.
