Nuage Networks has notched a notable customer win with a large bank’s IT company to provision services from a hybrid cloud across five locations and 10 regions.

Based in Spain, Grupo Santander is a global banking business that uses its own IT company, which is called Produban, to provide services to more than 120 companies — with over 5,500 professionals — across nine countries. Like many other financial institutes and large enterprises, Grupo Santander wanted to transform its IT operations in its existing public cloud to a more agile, automated hybrid cloud environment.

Nuage CEO Sunil Khandekar says his company first came in contact with Produban about 18 months ago, and after proving itself in a proof-of-concept (PoC) trial with “real use cases,” it was selected for deployment.

Produban’s footprint includes 10 data centers across five locations — Brazil, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and two in Spain — that support Grupo Santander’s banking business. Khandekar says Produban wanted a platform for the data centers that featured an internal, self-service cloud for deploying workloads with the same policies in both the private and the chosen public cloud.

Khandekar says Produban’s need for alignment of Santander’s business needs with its IT platform required it to consider a platform that allowed it to work seamlessly across geographic locations, and with various different open source technologies in its IaaS stack as well as one that allowed for a mix of public and private cloud.

One of the bank’s requirements included network automation for the current workloads, which are virtual machines and bare-metal servers, and the ability to migrate to containers down the road. The new platform also needed to work with the existing environment and hypervisor technology (VMware’s ESXi) while building a new OpenStack Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) environment. With Nuage, Santander is able to apply the same policies across its public and private clouds.

Produban “wanted to do multi-data-center, and make it appear seamless and as one” and “wanted to make sure they could make changes anywhere in the network very quickly,” Khandekar says.

Produban also cited the need to use Red Hat Ceph storage for dynamic overlay of storage functions, and border gateway protocol (BGP)-based network federation between the data centers. As a financial institution, security, auditing devices, and compliance were also key factors for Santander’s network.

“What really shined in the selection of Nuage was, first and foremost, the open platform that allowed them to integrate the rest of the stack,” Khandekar says. “That allows them to automate all of their workloads. That we have the ability to provide container support, that we are multi-data-center, and we have a federation were also important aspects that played into their selection of Nuage.”

For its hybrid cloud, Produban is using Nuage’s SDN-based Virtualized Services Platform to provide the software overlay. The hybrid cloud was built with several Red Hat products, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and Red Hat CloudForms.

The new hybrid cloud is up and running across four data centers with the fifth coming online soon, Khandekar says. Produban is targeting 1,000 servers by the end of the year.

Nuage also announced on Monday that it has expanded its Nuage Networks Partner Program with the launch of a self-service certification initiative. With a focus on Layer 4 and Layer 7 application delivery and security, the initiative is designed to assure enterprise customers that the microsegmentation security policies, components, and services they choose will operate automatically in Nuage's SDN environment.

The first security technologies to be certified are from CounterTack, Fortinet, GuardiCore, Palo Alto Networks, and vArmour.

The first application delivery partners with technologies certified are Citrix and F5.

The Nuage Networks partners will demonstrate their technologies in a cloud environment during the OpenStack Summit in Toyko, which starts tomorrow and runs through Friday.

As an independent division of Alcatel-Lucent, Nuage Networks is included in Nokia’s pending $16.6 billion deal to buy Alcatel-Lucent.