In March, cloud services provider Numergy, which is backed by mobile business SFR, Bull and French-owned public investment agency Caisse des Dépôts, announced its intention to deploy technologies for software-defined networking (SDN) in two new data centers being built in Europe. The company heavily promotes agility in its rhetoric referring to “agile DevOps” with “infrastructure as code”. It also promotes the OpenStack-related Solum StackForge project which is working to allow applications running on Solum to be exported to clouds operated by vendors using a compatible language pack.

Numergy also makes it clear in its blogs and marketing that it wants to compete with Amazon Web Services (AWS), offering cut-price services supporting Ubuntu, CentOS, Red Hat, Windows and MySQL. To make its cloud more programmable and operationally efficient, Numergy aims to use SDN in a big way. Just last month it said it will adopt technologies offered by Silicon Valley startup Nuage Networks, which is backed by the IP division of another French company, telco equipment company Alcatel-Lucent.

It is Nuage’s first customer win outside the Americas. Telus uses its SDN technology in Canada for provisioning of cloud services. UPMC, a healthcare company based in Pittsburgh, and a number of financial service customers in the US have also deployed Nuage’s SDN solutions.

Networking change

Sunil Khandekar founded Nuage Networks with Dimitri Stiliadis and Florin Balus (all previously worked for Alcatel-Lucent) in 2011. Before then Khandekar worked at IP router company TiMetra which Alcatel Lucent bought for US$150m in 2003. It was in his days at TiMetra that Khandekar says he realized the network needed to change. “There were many disparate networks and they all needed to be converged into a single IP substrate with devices that offered services, as in VPN services, on a common MPLS VPN. This was when we designed service routers to differentiate against the Cisco routers built largely for enterprise networks and the routers built only for the Internet. We wanted to offer VPN connectivity on common IPM MPLS networks allowing secure, scalable SLAs. This then became the ‘gold’ standard in the industry. This was at the time we sold TiMetra to Alcatel-Lucent,” Khandekar says.

In house at Alcatel, Khandekar’s work focused on routers for the service provider and telco market. He is  now is branching out into the enterprise space again with solutions from Nuage that “bridge the gap between apps and the network”, and treat infrastructure as little more than a vehicle SDN can sit on top of. “We are making sure the network in the data center is not in the way of the applications. Allowing the network to be automated in a way that can ultimately deliver the promise of cloud computing,” Khandekar explains.

Khandekar says it is Nuage’s ability to add provisioning on any network featuring any vendor’s wares that makes it different from other companies “I saw that Cisco, Juniper and others were busy working on the network infrastructure but they were not tackling the way the network and applications were being connected to the network,” Khandekar says.

One year after officially launching Nuage with Alcatel’s backing, the company has become a player in the SDN market. But unlike some players, Khandekar says Nuage has the agility of a startup and the financial backing of a much larger player, as well as access to Alcatel-Lucent’s channel to go to market. This is allowing Nuage to pick up some key customer wins in a short time frame.

Numergy’s game plan is based on offering a flexible environment for the provisioning of cloud services. As part of its move towards an agile environment Numergy plans to use Nuage’s virtualized services platform (VSP) and 7850 virtualized services gateway (VSG) with Alcatel-Lucent 7750 service routers.

The VSP allows for automation and orchestration across any network, Layer 2 to 4. It contains a virtualized service controller – a control plane offering per-tenant view – the virtualized service directory – using restful APIs for admins to define and refine services, and policies and virtual routing and switching – a module which acts as a virtual end point for network services. The VSG offers 10GbE and 40GbE switches that can be used to integrate public, private and hybrid cloud applications into managed VPNs. Fitting in with Numergy’s “open and agile” approach, the VSP offers hypervisor integration through OpenFlow and compute management with plugins for OpenStack, Cloudstack and vCloud.

Fluid connections

Nuage also lists AWS in rhetoric. It wants to make customers as automated, responsive and programmable as the AWS cloud and labels its offerings as SDN 2.0 to reflect its webscale capabilities. “What differentes us from earlier SDN solutions is the notion of connecting workloads as fluid and boundaryless as mobile networks,” Khandekar says. “We do that in a similar manner to how mobile connections work between London and New York. When you turn on your phone you get instant connectivity because you have a unique ID that is captured at the nearest cell tower. This talks to a policy server which matches it to your own SLA. The network then configures itself automatically for capacity. We leverage the principals of SDN. It doesn’t matter where a request comes from, we can recognize it, send it to the Nuage policy server, authenticate it, authorize it and instantly send it to the network which will then configure itself.” 

Numergy COO Erik Beauvalot says such automated levels of provisioning will be key to delivering performance-optimized services over its open environment. “This will allow us to virtualize our infrastructure and offer our customers cloud services in a dynamic way.”

This article first appeared in FOCUS issue 35. To read the full digital edition, click here. Or download a copy for the iPad.