China Mobile is continuing its partnership with Nokia’s Nuage Networks by choosing the vendor’s software-defined networking (SDN) platform to expand its public and private enterprise cloud offering. The expansion will allow China Mobile to offer new public, private, and hybrid cloud services such as hosting workloads on either Kubernetes containers or bare metal servers.

During the past two years, Nokia Shanghai Bell, the company’s joint venture in China, has deployed Nuage’s SDN platform in 10 data centers. The largest deployment contains more than 1,000 servers.

According to Charles Ferland, Nuage’s VP of business development, Nuage is seeing customers increasingly want to offer hosting on either containers or bare metal servers. “That’s definitely a trend I see — customers want more bare metal services.”

However, he also noted that containers are increasingly being consumed by end users for different reasons. That’s why Nuage is offering a plug-in to Kubernetes. “Old applications, instead of reprogramming them, they [the end user] puts them into a container wrapper and can scale them on demand,” he said. “It’s a way of taking an old legacy application and migrating it to a more agile cloud environment.”

Nuage’s SDN technology is called the Virtualized Services Platform (VSP). It automates the configuration, management, and optimization of virtual networks.

Nuage’s VSP also uses a virtual services directory that creates a template so a web server can talk to database servers. When a web server is detected, VSP pulls down a template and dynamically builds the service.

Ferland says that China continues to be a growing market for Nuage. Besides its deal with China Mobile, the company also continues to work with China Telecom Global, which is also using Nuage’s VSP platform.

In addition, Nuage also worked with China Pacific Insurance Company to deploy VSP in two data centers so the insurance company could use SDN to integrate its IT systems into a unified private cloud and build a test cloud for internal research and development.