Huawei and Canonical announced the integration of Huawei’s CloudFabric data center network system with Canonical’s Ubuntu OpenStack. They’ll combine Huawei’s Agile Controller for software-defined networking (SDN) with Canonical’s OpenStack distribution, Ubuntu OpenStack, along with Canonical’s application modeling service Juju.

“We’ve been doing a number of things with Huawei, but this expansion across telco and enterprise is important to us: their SDN, our OpenStack, and Juju,” said John Zannos, VP of cloud alliances and business development at Canonical.

Asked to explain exactly what Huawei’s CloudFabric for the data center does, a Huawei spokesperson replied in an email to SDxCentral that “it uses Huawei’s SDN Agile Controller to integrate with multiple mainstream cloud platforms that manage both physical and virtual network devices.”

Huawei views the network as important in weaving things together across the data center, said Zannos. “The SDN controller is a piece of that,” he added.

In addition to the strategic technology alliance, Huawei and Canonical will help each other expand their market reach. Huawei’s ecosystem now gets to include Canonical Ubuntu OpenStack market share. “From our perspective, we’ll continue to supply the marketplace with choices of SDN — in this case the Huawei SDN,” said Zannos.

There are also geographical benefits. Huawei commands a huge presence in China, and Canonical boasts a strong footprint in North America, as well as EMEA and parts of Asia. The two companies do share at least one common customer: Deutsche Telecom.

“At the broad level we both get an expansion of our ecosystem in quick order,” said Zannos.

Open Source

He also said, “They’re committed to embracing an open strategy.” In fact, Huawei’s Agile Controller 3.0 is based on the ONOS open source controller and is also compatible with the OpenDaylight Project controller via APIs.

In addition, the board of directors of the OpenStack Foundation this month elected Huawei as a Platinum Member.

“Huawei Agile controller has passed interoperability certification with multiple providers of commercial OpenStack versions,” said Huang He, general manager of the Huawei SDN controller domain, in a statement.