The cloud has changed the way that consumers and businesses relate to each other, but this has put massive pressure on the data center. From real-time applications and virtualization to desktop presence information and video on demand, the limits of the network are pushed on an almost daily basis.
Meeting the challenge of the data center is Alcatel-Lucent, according to a report last year by Current Analysis (News - Alert) on data center switching infrastructure, which listed Alcatel-Lucent (News 
- Alert) as “Very Threatening”—which in this case means they are poised to be market leaders i.e., threats to other vendors.
Part of that is because of Alcatel-Lucent’s Application Fluent Network (AFN), which understands devices as well as associated applications to prioritize and route traffic intelligently, boosting performance while reducing operating expense.
“Alcatel-Lucent is very threatening in the data center with both scale and market presence to weather any storm. ALU brings years of carrier class experience and design concepts to the enterprise data center solution with resilience and simplicity that have long been heralded as critical attributes of the most demanding networks on the planet, telephony,” according to Mike Spanbauer, Current Analysis service director of business technology and software.
Spanbauer noted that increasingly the market is moving toward an application-aware network environment, which gives Alcatel-Lucent and its AFN a head start.
Alcatel-Lucent’s AFN helps the company deliver a mesh architecture multi-site data center solution with next generation management capabilities. The resulting software defined network (SDN) provides connectivity across a range of data center deployment models scaling from providing cost effective solutions for server farms of smaller enterprises to multi-site virtualized data centers and "private" clouds for large enterprise. The resulting architecture provides resilient, low-latency any-to-any connectivity.
With the Alcatel-Lucent AFN, enterprises also can support multi-site data centers. Spreading the data center switching fabric across multiple sites creating a path to private cloud computing.
AFN also helps data centers manage their virtualized environments.
“Virtual Network Profiles, or vNPs, for example, automatically optimize application performance, while Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregators eliminate the need for virtual switches,” notes Alcatel-Lucent. They add that, “Shortest Path Bridging determines the most effective routing of application data traffic. All of these combine to increase an enterprise's Network IQ and help it meet the demands of an increasingly mobile, real-time and virtualized enterprise.”
So while data center demands have increased, so have the solutions to meet those demands. Applications fluency and SDNs are very likely in your future.
Edited by
Peter Bernstein
