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Networking solutions provider Brocade has announced that China Mobile, a leading mobile communications service provider, has selected Brocade’s advanced network functions virtualization (NFV) solution to support a major strategic development initiative.
By deploying Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager (vTM) in key China Mobile data centers, the operator will be able to deliver highly available, agile cloud services while keeping operational costs under control.
China Mobile is taking a central role in the Chinese government’s Internet Plus initiative, a program designed to boost competitiveness and foster new business models across traditional industries through technologies such as fixed and mobile Internet connectivity, cloud computing, big data, and the Internet of Things. Beyond providing IP connectivity services, China Mobile is expanding to deliver large-scale cloud solutions tailored to the needs of enterprise and government customers.
Initially, China Mobile will deploy Brocade vTM at its Southern Base and Northern Base data centers in collaboration with Nokia. The Brocade vTM software will run on the Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform, a commercially supported implementation of a standard-based OpenStack software-defined networking (SDN) orchestration environment. During testing, the project team was able to provision a Brocade vTM instance capable of handling 200 Mbps on a single virtual machine host.
Brocade reports that, with an orchestration upgrade for China Mobile’s cloud data center, vTM can scale elastically from 1 Mbps up to 1,000 Mbps on a single virtual machine host. Testing also showed that matching the same load-balancing performance using a hardware-based application delivery controller would be about 50% more expensive than the Brocade vTM software-based solution.
This deployment highlights how software-defined, virtualized network functions can offer both cost efficiency and operational flexibility for large-scale cloud service providers, enabling rapid scaling and better resource utilization while lowering capital and operating expenditures associated with traditional hardware appliances.