Alcatel-Lucent Introduces CloudBand - Making Communications Networks and the Cloud Perfect Together

Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) on November 17 performed a significant seeding of the cloud services market with the introduction of CloudBand — the foundation of what Alcatel-Lucent is calling “carrier cloud” services.

CloudBand comprises two distinct elements:

• CloudBand Management System – delivers orchestration and optimization of services between the communications network and the cloud.
• CloudBand Node – a family of various sized facilities, driven by communication service provider (CSP (News - Alert)) needs, that provides the computing, storage and networking hardware and associated software to host a wide range of cloud services close to where the demand for such capabilities are generated.

The vision for the new offering is simple. CloudBand capabilities are designed tobring together the computing power and flexibility of the cloud with the high performance, reliability and security of communications networks. Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) sees this as the foundation for a new class of “carrier cloud” services, and part of the core for building a “Virtual Telco.” However, fulfilling the vision has been no easy undertaking, particularly since ALU had two significant objectives in mind:

• Enabling CSPs to transform their own infrastructures, operations and business models.
• Providing CSPs with an agile service delivery platform for a new class of cloud services where they are positioned as essential to the offering of a new range of high-performance cloud services to enterprises, consumers and third-parties.

Getting all the moving parts to play together correctly

For service providers and enterprises alike, the integration and seamless interoperation of three key elements — the network, the cloud and data storage — all need to be properly orchestrated and managed to deliver high-performance services and compelling customer experiences.  As Dor Skuler, Vice President of Cloud Solutions at Alcatel-Lucent told TMCnet, “One way to view the cloud is in essence as a huge data center – virtualized, abstracted but abstracted via the public Internet. This means there can be no guarantees about end-to-end performance. CloudBand manages everything including controlling the cloud. It represents true abstraction of hardware and software and will allow CSPs to provide levels of quality and performance that the public cloud is not able to provide.”

Breaking down the barriers to cloud adoption

The backdrop for the need for CloudBand is in the numbers. Estimates are that 80 percent of all new software will be available as cloud services by 2014 putting enormous pressure on CSPs not just to accommodate an explosion in traffic, but also be positioned as critical parts of the value chain. Plus, 90 percent of organizations now have plans to support mobile applications to meet the needs of employees whose communications devices of choice are increasingly smartphones and tablets. In addition, a recent Alcatel-Lucent survey of nearly 3,500 enterprise IT decision makers (making it one of the most comprehensive studies ever done) found that there are still concerns about committing to the cloud. Respondents cited concerns as follows:

• 44 percent viewed performance as an issue
• 40 percent said lack of service level guarantees would inhibit their adoption of cloud services
• 36 percent had issues with security and data ownership
• 27 percent felt today’s cloud does not measure up in protecting privacy
• 25 percent did not see the ROI with questions about whether IT spend would match usage
• 23 percent were worried about deployment times
• 21 percent were not sure cloud would meet their compliance challenges

CloudBand addresses these concerns leveraging the unique strengths of communications service providers to create a new level of “business class” and carrier grade cloud services that can host and/or augment public and private cloud implementations. It makes the extensibility of service with high levels of security and performance a reality with just a few clicks of a mouse by administrators. Carrier class cloud offers CSPs and their enterprise customers: lower latency, better control of bandwidth and the ability to provide a guaranteed quality of service.

CloudBand enables orchestration and optimization of services between the communications network and the cloud. And, in conjunction with the CloudNodes, which put cloud service connectivity where it is most needed, it enables them to be flexible in meeting the demands for cloud services and in testing and launching new capabilities.  

The carrier cloud

As stated in the press release accompanying the announcement, “The biggest challenge in making the carrier cloud a reality is bringing the computing and communications network assets together. CloudBand, which features advanced algorithms developed by Bell Labs (News - Alert), orchestrates the network, computing and data storage elements distributed throughout the network. This approach results in the creation of a single, extremely powerful and flexible service delivery and computing platform that can support a wide range of services, eliminating the need for dedicated hardware platforms for each individual service. As importantly, this orchestration capability can be expanded beyond the service provider’s network to help manage access to a wide array of public and private clouds.”

An ALU graphic depicts this quite nicely:

And another gives a basic view of the ease at which system administrators, from an enterprise perspective as well as from that of the CSP, will be able to get the resources they need, at the service levels and security levels desired, while enforcing crucial business policies and rules.

Adolfo Hernandez (News - Alert), President, of Alcatel-Lucent’s Software, Services & Solutions Group stated that: “From our research we know that performance is the highest concern of IT decision makers. We also know that they believe communications service providers are in the best position to deliver the quality and security they expect, making them the cloud provider of choice for the enterprise world… The network makes the cloud, and communications service providers own the networks. That’s a very powerful combination.”

Going global

It should also be noted that CloudBand is a key element of ALU’s global cloud initiative, which supports the adoption and transformation of Alcatel-Lucent’s own platforms and applications to a cloud-based architecture.  And, in recognition that no one company can make all of this work on its own, ALU says it is working with a number of partners. The most notable is HP, which has a ten year strategic global agreement with ALU to develop a wide array of converged solutions for the information and communication technology (ICT) market and bridge the gap between the data center and the network.

CloudBand will be available for deployment in the first half of 2012, including the members of the CloudNode family. The link here provides more details about CloudBand and the cloud global initiative. It is also worth a few minutes to watch an informative video, “The Network Makes The Cloud” to get a better understanding of why carrier cloud 

A new way to look at CSPs and cloud opportunities

When announcement like this comes along that appears to change the nature of the way in which the industry talks about itself, generally it can take some time for the new nomenclature to take hold. That said, Alcatel-Lucent seems to be onto something important here and it may not take long for it to take hold.

There are some of us who have been around long enough remember the years when industry marketing was dominated by the promise to enterprise customers of delivering “five nines” reliability. This referred to the fact that telecommunications carrier central offices typically were available 99.999 percent of the time, e.g., ad roughly 5.26 minutes of unscheduled downtime per year. This went under the name “Carrier Class” service. It stood in stark contrast to what was then enterprise class service experienced by most large customers on their data networks, which was far from five nines.

The point is that by enabling CSPs to transform their own operations and offer a real and highly valued level of not just performance and flexibility but as ALU calls it service “elasticity,” it has in fact set the stage to seed the market with capabilities that CSPs can leverage on a variety of fronts. Not the least of these is that it will enable them to make sure that clouds do not get in customers’ way, but rather that cloud adoption can be accelerated with CSPs at the center of the action.

To paraphrase an advertising campaign the State of New Jersey ran several years ago, “Networks, Cloud and Storage, Perfect Together!”

Peter Bernstein is a technology industry veteran, having worked in multiple capacities with several of the industry's biggest brands, including Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent, Telcordia, HP, Siemens, Nortel, France Telecom (News - Alert), and others, and having served on the Advisory Boards of 15 technology startups. To read more of Peter's work, please visit his columnist page.