A key part of the overall solution is Alcatel-Lucent’s Cloudband technology, the company’s NFV platform that provides the server, storage and networking infrastructure with the Cloudband Node. Cloudband also includes management and orchestration functionality to deploy and manage network functions deployed on the infrastructure.
Gulyani said that Alcatel-Lucent is using Red Hat’s OpenStack Platform to provide compute resource management on the Cloudband nodes, essentially to create and manage virtual machines on the servers.
“The management and orchestration software essentially runs on virtual machines in servers – so it is a cloud application that can be run on the Cloudband node itself, or on any virtualized data center infrastructure,” Gulyani said.
Moving forward, Gulyani said that overall, the virtualization of mobile network functions is a big step in getting mobile networks to adopt cloud. This will be a journey the industry takes on as a whole over the next few years.
Read the full story at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet:
Alcatel-Lucent Embraces OpenStack as SDN and NFV Efforts Expand
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.