In New Delhi: Alcatel-Lucent is joining rivals Cisco Systems, Avaya and Juniper Networks on the list of network fabric vendors. Network fabricsor mesh, as Alcatel-Lucent officials refer to themare becoming a key trend in the data center, offering resources a more flattened and virtualized networking infrastructure to connect everything from servers to storage devices. Such fabrics are fueling the drive toward more converged data centers.
Juniper has its QFabric, which started life as Project Stratus a couple of years ago, while Cisco has Fabric Path, (Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture). Recently, Cisco bulked up its networking fabric offerings as part of a larger rollout of data center offerings in late March.
Now Alcatel-Lucent is entering that fray with not only the mesh architecture, but also with a pod that offers a direct server-to-server traffic path without having to rely on a core switch.
The new data center switching solution is built upon new and existing switches from the company, with the goal of creating an environment with lower latency and power costs, higher scalability and the ability to easily move applications across multiple sites.
Central to Alcatel-Lucents switching strategy is what company officials are calling a pod, which enables top-of-rack switches to be directly connected and eliminates the need for the core switch, which drives latency down below two microseconds, according to Cliff Grossner, director product marketing for networking with Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise.
The pod capabilities also allow for hybrid cloud environments that span multiple sites, he said. The company has also announced vNP (Virtual Network Profile), which enables the network to manage applications like services, where the network understands each application and adapts to optimize the performance of the application.
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