Alcatel-Lucent is introducing an enhancement to its Application Fluent Network solution, providing capabilities to automatically adjust and optimize the entire corporate network to smoothly and effectively support mobile devices and real time applications in the local area network, the data centre and across the wide area network. Automation is essential to businesses of any size to meet the challenges of delivering virtualised, mission-critical applications securely to employees over a high performance network - no matter where workers are accessing these applications.
Alcatel-Lucent’s Application Fluent Network is built on Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise products including OmniSwitch 10k, OmniSwitch 6900 and the OmniSwitch 6850E, which have been verified as Citrix Ready across multiple products from Citrix including Citrix XenApp, Citrix XenDesktop, Citrix NetScaler, and Citrix Branch Repeater. Alcatel-Lucent’s Application Fluent Network detects virtualised applications and applies a profile-driven policy to enable the network to automatically adjust virtualised workload traffic, such as virtual desktops, to meet users’ service quality demands. This solution can combine individual user policies, the type of device and applications being used, with the knowledge of the entire network to dynamically adjust network access priority and bandwidth allocation, ensuring required service levels are met.
Rohit Mehra, IDC noted: "Employees are becoming increasingly mobile and rely more on smart devices, tablets and virtual applications to do their jobs, putting substantial pressures on enterprise networks to quickly react to changes in workload. Alcatel-Lucent, with its vision for an application fluent network, solves this problem by providing increased automation within the network, bringing many benefits to the enterprise including simplified operations and being able to keep pace with the rapid and dynamic performance tuning required by virtualised workloads."
In addition to announcing Citrix Ready verification for key components of the Application Fluent networking solution, Alcatel-Lucent is also introducing the expansion of its data centre switching ‘ecosystem’ program, enhancing the performance and functionality of enterprise networks as businesses transition from traditional data centre designs to cloud-ready networks. The program expansion also includes new verifications with Citrix on OmniVista 2500 Virtual Machine Manager, a new solution with NetApp and a new alliance with QLogic. These joint solutions and new alliances expand Alcatel-Lucent’s solution to help enterprises meet network and data centre requirements for automation, mobility, security, improved user experience and cost reduction.
The Alcatel-Lucent OmniVista 2500 Virtual Machine Manager is Citrix Ready for Citrix XenServer, XenDesktop and XenApp. The OmniVista 2500 Virtual Machine Manager solution provides real-time and historical visibility of both the enterprise data centre network and the location of virtual components, such as virtual machines, within the network. This visibility of both the network and virtual applications provides an essential tool for network administrators to effectively troubleshoot issues with application delivery quality. In addition, the OmniVista 2500 Virtual Machine Manager brings provisioning, management and visibility into Alcatel-Lucent’s Data Center switching solution’s capabilities to automatically perform network adjustments in response to changes in virtualized workloads within and between data centres.
NetApp, a leader in integrated data storage and data management solutions, is working with Alcatel-Lucent to provide a solution blueprint that leverages its enterprise-class Hadoop architecture for improved performance in analysing big data sets. The Alcatel-Lucent high performance data centre network automatically reconfigures the network when changes are detected in virtualised and storage resources, thereby helping reduce query response time and network congestion while eliminating costly manual processes.
QLogic Corporation, a leading provider of high performance data, server, and storage I/O solutions, welcomes Alcatel-Lucent to its NETtrack alliance program. Alcatel-Lucent and QLogic together provide integration across application, network and storage environments to deliver solutions that transform the current infrastructure to a virtualised converged network with industry-leading I/O performance and flexibility.
In a separate announcement today, Alcatel-Lucent also announced its efforts to accelerate the arrival of a new class of “carrier cloud” solution that meets the performance demands of service providers. The company will deliver the Alcatel-Lucent Citrix Ready CloudBand Management System and CloudBand Node, which combines the computing power and flexibility of the cloud with the high performance, reliability and security of communications networks. The solution utilizes Citrix CloudPlatform, powered by Apache CloudStack, a proven open source cloud platform for building, managing and delivering highly scalable infrastructure-as-a-service clouds.