HANOVER, GERMANY (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)
Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) today announced that it is working with Citrix to accelerate the arrival of a new class of ‘carrier cloud’ solutions that deliver high-performance cloud services designed to address the most stringent requirements of service providers, enterprises and consumers alike.
Alcatel Lucent is delivering a Citrix Ready™ verified solution,CloudBand™ Management System and CloudBand Node, which combines the computing power and flexibility of the cloud with the high performance, reliability and security of communications networks. The Citrix Ready™ designation identifies products that are proven to interoperate smoothly with Citrix cloud solutions, giving the companies that deploy the confidence that they will perform as promised.
The solution from Alcatel-Lucent utilizes Citrix CloudPlatform, powered by Apache CloudStack, a proven open source cloud platform for building, managing and delivering highly scalable infrastructure-as-a-service clouds. It leverages the unique strengths of the service provider’s distributed infrastructure to deliver cloud services closer to customers with lower latency, better control of bandwidth and guaranteed quality of service. Essentially a ‘cloud in a box’, the joint solution allows service providers to remotely set up a network node location in a few hours to provide all of the functionality of the public cloud.
This unique, open source approach to bringing together the network and computing resources creates greater network control, distribution and optimization to enable service providers to provide a better class of cloud services.
About the CloudBand™ Management System and CloudBand Node
The CloudBand Management System orchestrates and optimizes services between the communications network and the cloud, while the CloudBand Node provides the computing, storage and networking hardware and associated software to host a wide range of cloud services. The CloudBand Management System utilizes the Citrix CloudPlatform to manage the provisioning and coordination of the hardware infrastructure within each CloudBand Node. In turn, the CloudBand Management System manages cloud resources across each of the CloudBand Nodes and the service provider network in accordance to Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and policies.
About Alcatel-Lucent and the cloud
In January 2013, Alcatel-Lucent will make a RESTful CloudStack API available to service providers to support its open, multi-vendor CloudBand platform based on industry standards.
In a separate announcement today, the two companies also announced the Citrix Ready verification of an Alcatel-Lucent Application Fluent Network that automates the performance optimization of enterprise networks to provide a superior customer experience with mobile devices and real-time applications such as virtual desktops. The solution leverages Citrix networking, data center and desktop virtualization products including Citrix Netscaler®, Citrix Branch Repeater®, Citrix XenServer® and Citrix XenDesktop®
The companies will jointly demonstrate the solutions at the Alcatel-Lucent booth #203 during the Citrix Synergy event in Barcelona on October 17-19. In addition, Alcatel-Lucent and Citrix executives will present a ‘Deep dive on cloud vision and strategy’ focused on how service provider and enterprise networks play a critical role in shaping cloud services.
About the Citrix Ready Program
The Citrix Ready program identifies verified solutions that are trusted to enhance virtualization, networking and cloud computing solutions from Citrix, including Citrix® XenDesktop®, XenApp®, XenServer®, NetScaler® and GoToMeeting®. The Citrix Ready designation is awarded to third party products that have successfully met verification criteria set by Citrix, and gives customers an added confidence in the compatibility of the joint solution offering. The Citrix Ready program leverages industry-leading alliances across the Citrix partner ecosystem to meet a wide variety of customer needs from partners who have demonstrated more than 20,000 product verifications showcasing Citrix compatibility. It also includes Citrix Ready Community Verified which allows customers to see thousands of products that have been verified by Citrix users, partners, and customers globally. More information about the Citrix Ready program can be found at http://www.citrix.com/ready/.
