Data Center Network Connect joins HP and Alcatel Lucent in the Cloud
While HP is pushing their vision of a single vendor for their converged infrastructure solutions, they chosen to work with long-time partner Alcatel-Lucent in delivering a solution designed to lower the costs and increase the reliability of supplying data from the datacenter to the cloud. They are doing this by leveraging the expertise, technology, and long term experience of Alcatel-Lucent in delivering communications networks and integrating that high-performance communications technology with their own optimized datacenter information delivery systems.
The Data Center Network Connect (DCNC) is a product solution that ties together HP in the datacenter and Alcatel-Lucent's carrier grade networking environment to deliver an end-to-end solution to customers looking to upgrade and expand the technologies currently used to interconnect datacenters. The technologies involved are all current products; HP uses Alcatel's Photonic Service Switches, a key component of Alcatel's High Leverage Network architecture, to tie together some of their existing European commercial datacenters and plan to expand those interconnects to other HP commercial datacenters worldwide.
The solution integrates both hardware and software with HP proving the datacenter hardware pieces and Alcatel-Lucent providing the datacenter and cloud interconnection components. A single management view is provided by the integration of the Alcatel Cloudband management software with HPs existing Cloudsystem design and management tools. HP believes that they can deliver a single view of both their datacenter and datacenter interconnect networks in this fashion, reducing the overall cost of management of the corporate networking infrastructure.
The capabilities that the DCNC is designed to deliver are not limited to just interconnecting your datacenters. The infrastructure is also designed to optimize the support and delivery of cloud services to external customers. When providing cloud services externally to a customer base, reliability, flexibility and agility ion delivering those services when and where needed are paramount, and HP's decision to partner with Alcatel-Lucent, who has a long history of delivering carrier-grade communications networking, gives them a leg up in meeting customer demand.