Paris, December 14, 2011 – Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) is taking a key step forward in its strategy to support the delivery of secure, reliable and high-performance cloud services by introducing a major new capability to its portfolio of enterprise solutions.

Businesses are increasingly looking to the cloud to give them more flexibility and greater control over costs, but until now many have been reluctant to fully embrace cloud services due to concerns about the availability, security and performance of their mission-critical applications and data.

Alcatel-Lucent is helping enterprises prepare for the cloud evolution with the introduction of a new high-capacity 40 gigabit Ethernet (GigE) switching module for the company’s widely deployed OmniSwitch™ 6900 enterprise network switch, dramatically increasing the data capacity, speed and performance of corporate data center networks. This will lay the groundwork for enterprises to enjoy the same quality of experience with cloud services as with applications deployed in their own data centers.

This new module enables multiple switches to be linked together to create the 40 GigE Pod, which will help enterprises prepare their data center networks for the emerging ‘carrier cloud’ category of services, offering better control of bandwidth and the ability to provide a guaranteed quality of service.In addition to establishing the extremely low-latency, high-capacity links between servers needed to introduce carrier cloud services, the 40 GigE Pod also dramatically increases the ability of enterprises to support a wide array of high-bandwidth services such as video, transfers of large files, real-time collaboration and business productivity tools and more within their own network.

The 40 GigE Pod represents a significant evolution of the Alcatel-Lucent Mesh, an award-winning solution that brings together the best of the cloud with enterprise data center networks.

Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research and Yankee Group Affiliate said: “Enterprises need to be able to choose which applications they maintain in their own data center and which they can source from the cloud. As importantly, their data center fabric needs to be flexible enough to take advantage of all the capabilities of the cloud, while supporting seamless interactions between the cloud and applications hosted on their own network. Alcatel-Lucent is bringing a real-world practicality to data center fabrics, both in terms of affordability and scalability for enterprises both large and small. With this solution, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise provides a safe place to do business … whether it’s in the enterprise data center or the cloud.”

Building the enterprise cloud ecosystem

Coupled with the launch of the 40 GigE module, the company has expanded its ‘Data Center Switching Partner’ ecosystem with companies including Emulex, NetApp and VMware, to make it easier for customers to deploy more affordable, best-of-breed data center solutions. This highlights the company’s commitment to open standards, by ensuring that Alcatel-Lucent’s equipment works smoothly and seamlessly with that of other industry leaders.

Shaun Walsh, vice president of marketing, Emulex said: “We are committed to helping our customers prepare their infrastructures for the future. This focus marries well with Alcatel-Lucent’s approach to its new Enterprise Data Center Switching Partner ecosystem. We are proud to be a charter member of the ecosystem program, which will give customers the confidence to deploy fully interoperable joint solutions.”

Contributions of data center switching partners

• Integration testing is complete between Alcatel-Lucent’s OmniSwitch and Emulex OneConnect™ 10 GigE Network Interface Cards (NICs), ensuring low risk deployments of the Alcatel-Lucent Pod and Mesh with different servers.
• Verification testing concerning the use of Alcatel-Lucent’s vNP for automated virtual machine (VM) movement with VMware’s vCenter has been completed and integration between Alcatel-Lucent’s OmniVista 2500 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) and VMware hypervisor architecture has been demonstrated for VMware vMotion®, dashboard and provisioning.
• A test bed is being developed combining the Mesh and NetApp storage arrays with Virtual Desktop Applications.
• Alcatel-Lucent recently participated in an IEEE sponsored multi-vendor interoperability test of Shortest Path Bridging (SPB).

About the 40GigE Module and the 40GigE Pod

With this new 40GigE module for the OmniSwitch 6900, Alcatel-Lucent continues to deliver on its ‘Application Fluent’ approach which enables a high-quality experience for employees with real-time applications and reduced complexity for IT and network managers. This is achieved through simplified, resilient and low-latency network architecture with built-in security. The 40GigE Pod is a highly dense, any-to-any interconnection of OmniSwitch Top-of-Rack switches that delivers high performance, with best-in-class capacity and low latency server-to-server bandwidth (under 2 microseconds with no oversubscription).  The new OmniSwitch 6900 40GigE module scored high in the Lippis Open Industry Network Performance & Power evaluation of data center switches for use in public and private data center cloud computing applications.

About Alcatel-Lucent in the Cloud

The launch of the 40 GigE Module is the latest development in the advancement of Alcatel-Lucent’s cloud strategy. On November 17 the company launched a new solution, called CloudBand, which brings together the computing power and flexibility of the cloud with the high performance, reliability and security of communications networks. On December 1 the company introduced the new HP and Alcatel-Lucent Data Center Network Connect (DCNC) integrated architecture that brings together the strengths of data center technology with high-performance communications networks to offer enterprises the same levels of reliability, speed and capacity that are available on telecommunication service provider networks.