Provisioning and managing a dozen virtual machines? That’s easy. A few hundred or a few thousand? That’s harder.
A million virtual machines? No problem, says Nuage Networks, which has announced that one of its customers, Numergy, is using its SDN technology to potentially manage one million virtual machines.
Nuage Networks, based in Mountain View, Calif., is a venture of Alcatel-Lucent focused on cloud computing and virtualisation.
Unlike its parent, which is known for selling carrier-grade routers and other big-iron hardware, Nuage Networks sells the Virtualised Services Platform (VSP), an SDN-based platform for building and managing a multi-tenant cloud system.
According to Nuage Networks, VSP fully automates multi-tenant datacenter networks, and reduces provisioning time to seconds.
The Nuage Networks VSP consists of a Virtualised Services Controller, which acts as a control plane for datacenter networks; a Virtualised Services Directory, which is the policy, business logic and analytics engine for network services; and Virtual Routing and Switching, which serves as a virtual endpoint for network services.
The company also sells the 7850 Virtualised Services Gateway, which ensures that services defined by the VSP extend across both virtualized and non-virtualised assets in the data center.
At the NetEvents Cloud Innovation Summit Nuage Networks explained that Numergy, a European cloud services and infrastructure provider, will use Nuage Networks’ platform, including both the VSP and the 7850 Virtualised Services Gateway to automate its datacenter networks to be more programmable and efficient.
“We are pleased to implement the Nuage Networks product suite in our cloud infrastructure,” said Numergy CEO, Philippe Tavernier, in a statement.
“The Nuage Networks SDN technology allows us to address key performance and compliance requirements for virtualising our infrastructure and enabling the range of cloud services that are essential for meeting our enterprise customers’ needs.”
According to Nuage Networks, Numergy plans to open two large multitenant datacenters in 2014, with the goal of 10 additional datacenters over the next three years.
Nuage Networks’ SDN solution will provide network virtualisation and automation to deliver cloud infrastructure across millions of virtual machines.
Does a million virtual machines sound large? It shouldn’t – and not only because of growing market for cloud services. Thanks to SDN and Network Function Virtualization (NFV), applications are now able to dynamically scale virtual services.
This means that a Web application server or even a virtual network load balancer might decide to create and provision a virtual machine for a specific workload – automatically – and then shut it down after the need has passed.
Nuage Networks and Numergy are demonstrating that multitenant cloud services can scale tremendously. A million virtual machines is only the start, and the Nuage Networks VSP is well positioned to handle the load.
By Alan Zeichick