Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise: Enabling Enterprises to Leverage the Data Center

Fabrice Lieuvin, Senior Director, Network Solutions

When it comes to infrastructure management of IT, data centers have always been a top priority. However, today, as the data centers are oppressed with increasing complexities and rising costs, the optimal utilization of servers, is gaining momentum. Therefore, most of the CIOs continually opt for solutions that will help them in cost optimization and aptly meet the increasing needs of data expansion in the workflow. For balancing cost with performance and scalability, ALE, operating under the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise brand, renders data center switching solutions to make the data center network application fluent and automated.

Why ALE?

“Our data center switching solutions are designed to simplify the complexities of operations in the data center networking infrastructure,” says Fabrice Lieuvin, Senior Director of ALE, heading the Network Solution Architecture team. These solutions assist its clientele in meeting the demands of bandwidth-hungry applications of the network infrastructure. The clients can also adjust application traffic flow dynamically and follow virtual machine movement within or between data center sites.

In rendering fluent datacenter networks, clients can make the optimal use of virtualized applications and attain superior performance by reducing the latency in data transfer. Leveraging best-in-market virtualization techniques coupled with a proven approach to data center switching Fabric, ALE delivers an end-to-end virtual infrastructure with high scalability, availability, and a performance guarantee for mission-critical workflows. “We render a single pane of glass view to manage and filter the complexities of data center networking infrastructure.” This assists its clientele, particularly small and mid-size enterprises (SMEs), to streamline various IT operations through automation and integration with standard hypervisors for retrieving and manipulating data.

Importance of Connectivity

Lieuvin explains that, although companies today do know how to virtualize their network based on their existing IT services, providing network connectivity remains a major challenge for them.

Our solutions are designed to simplify the complexities of operations in data center networking infrastructure

“We focus on addressing this complexity by creating a link between the network tools and virtual infrastructure provisioning,” adds Lieuvin. Adding to this, the firm also secures the connection of virtual machine by eliminating the manual configuration on the data center fabric.

An Integrated Solution

Today, it is common for enterprises to have multiple data centers for specific areas of its businesses. “Therefore many customers come to us, as we render an integrated solution in place of the various solutions portfolio they have.” ALE provides an integrated, single operating system that enables its clients to address the complexities of managing campus and data center networks with a unified approach. The firm also adopts an object oriented approach to software configuration that is pushed to every network connection point as well as the data center fabric. “Through this, our clientele can configure and manage their entire network virtualization in a single pane of glass view,” adds Lieuvin.

Furthermore, the company develops wireless LAN access points in its offerings to extend the virtualization with traffic containment and security policies of the data center to the mobile user. “We also have Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) capabilities on access switches or access points and in the data center,” implies Lieuvin. It enables its clients to predict the adverse effects of an application on their infrastructure with its analytics module.

The Success Stories

With footprints in over 50 countries, the firm’s services have catered to the needs of its clients in several industries such as healthcare, hospitality, government, education, and transportation. One of the instances that highlight the success story of the firm is a large University in Sweden. The challenge here was to help the university to deploy an end to end network virtualization from the class room to its data centers. The university was facing complexities to manage multiple sites and IT services consisting of research, education, and numerous other services. “The solution we offered was an Ethernet Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) based design that enhanced the management processes of the campus and of the data center networks while deploying many new IT services of several other projects,” explains Lieuvin. Referring to one other successful project, Lieuvin cites the case of a national healthcare institution that was in need of a solution to streamline the provisioning and management of its data center networks. ALE provided a virtualization technique for the datacenter that helped in achieving higher resiliency of the architecture along with a significant reduction of the power consumption and operation complexity.

The Road Map Ahead

Going forward, the firm intends to diversify its global presence and upscale its technical capabilities. “Through continuous innovation, we aim to improve our acumen in data center virtualization and IoT Networking. We are also investing heavily in technology to craft best-in-market solutions to deliver more value to our customers,” concludes Lieuvin.