Nuage Networks Enters China Cloud Market
If the market watchers are correct, there are plenty of opportunities for cloud vendors in Asia generally and the booming Chinese market in particular.
Companies like Cisco Systems have made major inroads in the Chinese market, essentially helping state-owned networking companies build out high-end communications networks along with Beijing's highly restricted Internet services. Business and technology disputes over how foreign companies must operate in China and to what extent foreign companies must share their intellectual property in exchange for access to the world's largest emerging market have soured Cisco, Google and other technology vendors on the Chinese market.
But as sales of key cloud components like servers flatten, companies like Lenovo and its x86 server business acquired last year from IBM are targeting China as a way to expand the server market.
Others are taking a similar tack. The latest example is Nuage Networks, the Alcatel-Lucent startup venture focusing on software-defined networking solutions for the cloud. Nuage Networks announced this week that China Telecom's cloud unit selected the Mountain View, Calif., startup to supply SDN technology used in scaling China's public cloud services market.
China Telecom's Cloud Computing Branch is one of the largest cloud services providers in mainland China. As such, it is investing heavily in scaling technologies like Nuage Networks' virtualized services platform that will have to be fine-tuned to operate China Telecom's widely dispersed network infrastructure.
Guang Xiaoming, CTO of the Cloud Computing Branch of China Telecom, said in a statement that the partnership would help the cloud unit scale its public cloud services as it seeks to deliver secure options and more business applications for enterprise customers.
The partners added that China Telecom would leverage the SDN platform along with Nuage Networks' virtualized gateway platform. The technologies would be used to provision virtual and non-virtual networks in China Telecom's shared datacenter facilities that support its cloud services.
As China Telecom scales its public cloud services across the country, it will also deploy Nuage Networks' virtual routing and switching module to overcome traffic bottlenecks. The module is designed to boost the efficiency of network ports to enable support for more virtual machines per server.
Nuage Networks (the name derives from the French word Nu-âhj, meaning "cloud") said last October that leading European hosting provider OVH selected its SDN platform for its datacenters supporting dedicated cloud services.
Last May, Nuage Networks announced support for the OpenStack Icehouse plug-in that it said would accelerate the use of its virtualized service platform in OpenStack-based clouds running Icehouse.
The company has also been active in the OpenDaylight consortium founded in April 2103 that is attempting to do for software-defined networking what Linux has done for open-source operating systems. The group released its second open-source SDN software stack called Helium in September.
