Nokia likes to talk about scalability a lot. So, it's no surprise that scalability is at the heart of the company's new data center strategy.

The telecommunications vendor today unveiled its new switching portfolio, which includes a new network operating system, intent-based networking tool kit, and switch hardware. With these components, Nokia aims to help cloud providers and data center builders keep with up with the exponential growth in traffic spurred by emerging technologies like 5G, edge compute, and IoT.

"We see a big opportunity," said Steve Vogelsang, CTO of Nokia's IP and optical networks group. "We've got an opportunity to improve data center networking for all cloud builders. This is not only targeting the webscalers, but the tier-two public clouds, software service providers, enterprises, and of course the telcos as they build out the telco cloud."

The idea, he explains, is to give this wide demographic of customers the tools they need to ensure a high degree of automation as they scale out to mitigate changes in traffic across their infrastructure.

This approach has already won Nokia clout among early adopters like Apple, which is using Nokia's new switching infrastructure and network operating system to build out its data centers.

The first prong of Nokia's data center strategy is founded on a new network operating system called Service Router Linux, or SR Linux for short.

"It's built on a completely open Linux OS. So completely open to the customer. They can utilize their toolset to manage and operate the Linux operating system," he said. "In addition, we support a broad set of the foundational IP networking technology in our SRS platform."

With this, Nokia aims to appease hyperscalers and cloud providers that want complete control over the data center.

"One of the things we heard from the webscalers was ... they really didn't want code running unless they needed it," said Vogelsang. "The way it's structured in SR Linux, it's all declarative. If your configuration of the system indicates some functionality via the configuration tree that requires a different application ... the system will activate that component."

The idea is to provide something that just works out of the box, but can also be tuned to a data center or cloud provider's specific needs. This is achieved using Nokia's Network Operations Development Kit. The development kit serves as a network application platform allowing customers to build their own apps that run natively on the switch.

"Nothing like that has ever been done before," claimed Vogelsang.

Alongside SR Linux, Nokia is also launching a new intent-based networking toolkit called the Fabric Services Platform (FSP).

The idea behind the platform is to automate the design, implementation, and operation of data center fabrics. "FSP is really there for any cloud builder that doesn't necessarily have a complete intent-based operational toolset for the network today," Vogelsang said.

And to make it easier to test and prototype network fabrics before deploying them to a data center, Nokia has implemented a digital sandbox.

"It creates a digital twin of the network, which is a fully emulated copy of network," said Vogelsang. "That's got a number of really compelling use cases. When you're designing the network, you can verify that you've got a good design before you deploy it. Then, on an operational basis, you can, as you're doing your continuous integration, make sure before you roll out a new version of software; roll out a config change, that that's going to work in a sandbox, in a digital twin rather than pushing that immediately to the network."

The final prong of Nokia's data center strategy includes a new line of data center switching hardware.

Nokia's new 7250 and 7220 IXR platforms include a wide array of switching hardware designed to data centers of sizes and topologies.

The portfolios span top-of-rack switches, spine switches, super-spine switches, and modular chassis spine switches with support for 400 Gb/s, 100 Gb/s, 50 Gb/s, 40 Gb/s, 25 Gb/s, 10 Gb/s and 1 Gb/s interfaces.

According to Vogelsang, these advancements are necessary because network demands are changing, and the pandemic has only shown just how quickly.

"The real change we are preparing for is industry 4.0," he said. "With industry 4.0, we're looking at automating a wide variety of different industries and delivering pretty significant productivity gains. That is very much driven by [artificial intelligence] machine learning-type workloads."

And as 5G networks see wider adoption, Vogelsang said edge computing will push computing further out of the data center, allowing for lower latency communications and services.

"The end result of all this is we're going to see a massive surge in the amount of data that needs to come into these clouds, get processed, run it through AI, machine learning type systems, and driving decisions that impact the productivity of businesses," he said. "So, the turn around has to be very quick, and ultimately what that means is the structure of the cloud needs to change."

It's at this juncture that Nokia sees its competitive advantage in the already crowded and highly competitive data center space. But while vendors like Cisco have long dominated the data center market, Nokia claims no other vendors have delivered a platform that is designed to meet these changing demands.

"We see this as a once in a decade generational shift in how DCs are built and are delivering the right solution at the right time," said Vogelsang.

Apple is among the first to deploy Nokia's new switching platform.

"We regularly upgrade our data center equipment with technology to increase efficiency and reduce energy consumption," said Adam Bechtel, VP and networking lead at Apple, in a statement. "Using Nokia's new system, we enable better networking and routing capabilities in our Viborg, Denmark facility."

However, Apple isn't the only customer interested in Nokia's new data center portfolio. BT Group, Equinix, Team.blue, and Turkcell have all expressed interest or are actively trialing Nokia's switching infrastructure.