China Mobile selects Brocade NFV Software Appliance

NEW DELHI: Brocade has announced that China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile communications service provider, has selected an advanced network functions virtualization (NFV) solution from Brocade to support its most strategic corporate development initiative.

"Deployment of the Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager (vTM) within key China Mobile data centers will help the company deliver highly available and agile cloud services, while keeping operating costs under control," the company said.

As one of the country’s major service providers, China Mobile is playing a leading role in the Chinese Government’s Internet Plus initiative to increase competitiveness and support the development of new business models within conventional industries through information technologies, such as fixed and mobile Internet connectivity, cloud computing, Big Data, and the Internet of Things. In addition to providing IP connectivity services, China Mobile has also taken on the role of a large-scale cloud service provider capable of meeting the needs of major enterprise and government customers.

Brocade vTM will initially be deployed at China Mobile’s Southern Base and Northern Base data centers in conjunction with Nokia which, through its acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent, became China Mobile’s strategic supplier of software-defined networking (SDN) and NFV infrastructure. Brocade vTM software will run within the Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform, a commercially supported version of the standard-based OpenStack SDN orchestration environment.

“The promise of network functions virtualization is the ability to scale services on demand. When it comes to service providers, they don’t come much bigger than China Mobile in terms of potential scale,” said Henry Zhu, country manager of Brocade China.

“We’re naturally delighted that Brocade’s advanced NFV appliance technology has been selected by China Mobile. This is a groundbreaking project within China’s service provider landscape and we are fully committed to ensuring it results in complete success," added Zhu.

As an NFV software appliance, Brocade vTM runs on the same industry-standard hardware and virtualization environment employed throughout China Mobile’s cloud data centers. During testing, the project team was able to spin up a Brocade vTM instance of 200 Mbps on a single virtual machine host. With the orchestration upgrade for China Mobile’s Cloud data center, Brocade vTM can achieve elastic capacity from 1 to 1000 Mbps on a single virtual machine host. The testing also revealed that getting the equivalent load balancing performance on a hardware-based application delivery controller would be 50 percent more expensive than the Brocade vTM solution.