China Mobile to deploy Brocade NFV software in key data centers

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Brocade announced that China Mobile will deploy its advanced NFV solution within key data centers to help the company deliver highly available and agile cloud services, while keeping operating costs under control.

Brocade’s Virtual Traffic Manager (vTM) will initially be deployed at China Mobile’s Southern Base and Northern Base data centers in conjunction with Nokia which, through its acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent, became China Mobile’s strategic supplier of SDN and NFV infrastructure. Brocade vTM software will run within the Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform, a commercially supported version of the standard-based OpenStack SDN orchestration environment.

As an NFV software appliance, Brocade vTM runs on the same industry-standard hardware and virtualization environment employed throughout China Mobile’s cloud data centers.

During testing, the project team was able to spin up a Brocade vTM instance of 200 Mbps on a single virtual machine host. With the orchestration upgrade for China Mobile’s Cloud data center, Brocade says its vTM can achieve elastic capacity from 1 Mbps to 1000 Mbps on a single virtual machine host.

The testing also revealed that getting the equivalent load balancing performance on a hardware-based application delivery controller would be 50% more expensive than the vTM solution.

“The promise of network functions virtualization is the ability to scale services on demand. When it comes to service providers, they don’t come much bigger than China Mobile in terms of potential scale,” said Henry Zhu, country manager of Brocade China. “This is a groundbreaking project within China’s service provider landscape and we are fully committed to ensuring it results in complete success.”

China Mobile has taken on the role of a cloud service provider capable of meeting the needs of major enterprise and government customers as part of the Chinese Government’s Internet Plus initiative to “increase competitiveness and support the development of new business models within conventional industries through information technologies, such as fixed and mobile Internet connectivity, cloud computing, Big Data, and the Internet of Things.”

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