Nu-âhj: French, meaning ‘cloud’ is a division acquired by the venerable Alcatel Lucent, presented to the delegates around their Network Virtualized Services Platform (VSP). The goal of Nuage is to deliver the instantiation of networks on demand when a workload requires it. The key focus of this presentation was rapid provisioning and providing an alternative for ISP or large enterprise to not rely on the lock in of Amazon Web Services (AWS).
There was a forward by Sunil Khandekar surrounding the vision of Nuage networks which set the theme for the presentation. A highly detailed rocket powered deep dive into the inner workings of Nuage networks SDN solution. Dimitri Stiliadis, Chief Architect of Nuage Networks, delivered the bulk of the presentation and stood his ground against the peppering of questions presented by the delegates.
The ability to reduce the time to market on network services is what provides a point of differentiation. Even though this is not seen by a customer initially, whist your service or cloud attempts to scale, the complexities inherit in older technologies will directly affect your time to market. What should be taking minutes or hours takes weeks. Do you want application developers doing the following: Configure routers, routing protocols (OSPF and BGP), connectivity, ACL and security rules, load balancers and firewalls? Definitely not and even for a well-trained network engineer this can take days if not weeks.
Nuage networks made an announcement during our presentation. They announced the 7850 Top of Rack (ToR) switch. Today’s CIOs and cloud service providers are looking to cloud architectures to deploy applications most rapidly while maintaining security and compliance. Technologies like SDN help them to make their datacenter network instantaneous and boundary-less. The Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) fully automates the datacenter network, creating secure “slices” for each user group or tenant while reducing provisioning time from days to seconds.
Designed to stitch virtual hypervisor based fabrics back to physical appliances this device has Virtual Extensible Local Area Network (VXLAN) enabled hardware delivering VLAN Tunnel End Point (VTEP) services. It runs the proven SR-OS networking software which is built from the stable Linux 3.2 kernel. It has a high density for a 2 rack unit switch with 96x10GbE ports. The density is that high the faceplate forgoes the Nuage logo.
Nuage networks received great feedback from the delegates. I have to admit I didn’t quite intake and digest everything presented to me initially due to the fact it was so spot on. I was witnessing what could be a great SDN solution for ISPs! Whilst there are many large vendors that have solutions this hasn’t stopped Nuage delivering a great solution.
Disclaimer: I attended Networking Field Day 6 as a delegate, but was not compensated to attend. I am free to write (or not write) about any of the presentations as I see fit without fear of censorship by the vendor or Tech Field Day. My general disclaimer is here.
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