Alcatel-Lucent to unify service automation, real-time network control

NEW DELHI: Alcatel-Lucent has come out with its new SDN-based Network Services Platform that allows service providers to define and deliver on-demand network services across multiple network layers.

"The Alcatel-Lucent Network Services Platform is the industry’s first fully-unified software solution to address market demands in the most holistic way. Today’s carrier SDN platforms only address a portion of today’s IP/optical networks, and a fraction of the functionality required. They all lack the necessary integration to unify service automation with network automation," a release said.

According to industry analyst firm ACG, the Alcatel-Lucent Network Services Platform streamlines definition of new services, allowing innovative offerings to be designed more than 58% faster and with at least 56% fewer resources. Once defined, the new services can be provisioned instantaneously across multiple layers, domains, and networking vendor platforms. In addition, Bell Labs research shows that operators are also able to support 24% more revenue-generating traffic by using sophisticated algorithms to intelligently distribute new connections across their network.

Rob Shakir, BT End-to-End Network Architect said: “Tightly coupling service requirements and performance with network control, as in ALU’s NSP, promises to deliver real-world benefits of centralized optimization whilst exploiting the strength of our existing distributed network.”

Paul Parker-Johnson, Practice Lead, Cloud and Virtual System Infrastructures, ACG Research said: "Using a mix of optimization and management technologies hardened over 1000s of operator deployments, as well as important protocol and data modeling standards being widely adopted in large scale cloud and operator infrastructures, the NSP advances the state of the art in wide area service automation with the functionality it supplies in a single unified solution. It will undoubtedly be a key ingredient in turning many operators' WANs into agile service delivery platforms.”

“We have created a simple interface that can deal with the complexity of network control across multiple technologies. We built it from the ground up to enable a true carrier SDN that allows our customers to thrive in today’s cloud-driven world,” said Basil Alwan, president of Alcatel-Lucent’s IP Routing and Transport business.