Telefónica is extending its Nokia Nuage SD-WAN infrastructure to include software-defined data center (SDDC) technology.
Currently, the Spanish service provider is using Nuage’s Virtualized Network Services (VNS) to connect users to other users and to applications, at any location, including connecting branches to the data center.
According to Hussein Khazaal, Nuage VP of marketing and partnerships, “All of the SD-WAN solutions out there solve the automation to the edge of the data center. Then, some manual connectivity has to take place to stitch the WAN side with the data center side.” The problem with this, he said, is that connecting two different systems (the data center solution and the SD-WAN solution) negates efficiency and agility.
Nuage’s SDDC technology fixes this by leveraging a single API-based platform that connects users to their applications, both in the cloud and in the data center, with a single policy to establish connectivity. It also ensures end-to-end security on the network.
“Our platform extends the WAN to be able to establish that connectivity to more than just branch-to-branch.” said Khazaal. It extends connectivity from the branch, to the edge, to the data center.
The platform is Nuage’s Virtualized Services Platform (VSP). It includes both Nuage’s Virtualized Cloud Services (VCS), which is the service that acts as a data center overlay for Telefónica, and Nuage’s VNS, which Telefónica is using for its SD-WAN. Because the service provider was already leveraging the VNS, it is using the same centralized policy controller but can now use the platform to improve its data center efficiency, agility, and scale.
VCS is certified by Red Hat’s Linux OpenStack.
The new VCS service enables Telefónica to automatically establish networking configurations, with both quality of service and security policies, and to leverage zero-touch, policy-based network automation for applications on any infrastructure. This includes virtual machines (VMs), containers, or bare-metal servers.
VCS provides per-tenant micro-segmentation and access controls to the individual applications and workloads. Additionally, Khazaal said, “You can visualize these flows with that single pane of glass, and you can detect threats and automate a response.”
With this service and platform, Telefónica can also create seamless interconnection between private data centers, its own SDDCs, and public clouds so that its customers can meet the needs of their cloud-based applications, including latency and routing services.
