By Sam Bucci, VP Terrestrial Optics, Alcatel-Lucent

IT transformation and the introduction of Cloud Services are changing the Data Center and networking landscapes, as well as posing new challenges. Crucial among these challenges is building a converged, virtualized Data Center network that enables scalable, dynamic, automated operations. Equally important are low-latency and high performance, cost and power efficiency, the rapid deployment of new resources, unified management, and secure operations. Such transformation fundamentally enhances the way applications consume compute, storage and networking resources both within and between Data Centers, as well as the way new services are introduced and provisioned.

Alcatel-Lucent has a long history of active participation with standards organizations, as a key contributor driving crucial networking standards to address key industry challenges. We believe that the development and implementation of open and interoperable standards are fundamental tools for addressing the challenges facing evolving Data Center networks.

A reference architecture that strives to achieve open Data Center solutions based on interoperable standards was recently put forward by IBM with the ODIN (Open Datacenter Interoperable Network) technical briefs. We believe that this architecture addresses the key challenges being faced by Enterprises and Cloud Providers both within and between Data Centers, and we endorse this approach.  Alcatel-Lucent is committed to working with IBM on further refining the details of the ODIN architecture.

Click here for more information on the IBM ODIN solution.