China Mobile has picked Nuage Networks’ Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) for the deployment of a new in-house developers' network.

The deployment, built on OpenStack and KVM hypervisors, measures hundreds of servers and thousands of virtual machines, says Nuage CEO Sunil Khandekar. It's starting in one province with the potential to expand to other sites if it works out.

"What really resonated with them was that we provide the ability to do application templates," Khandekar says. Nuage offers plug-ins making it easier to turn load balancers, VPNs, and the like into as-a-service offerings that authorized users can initiate.

The deployment is a sandbox network for China Mobile developers — an in-house alternative to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for creating experiments, in other words. To that end, China Mobile was also enticed by microsegmentation — meaning different IT groups can experiment with applications while being kept within policy boundaries.

"This is where Nuage and policy control become more a platform than a product," says Houman Modarres, Nuage's senior director of marketing.

It's the second announced deal for Nuage in China. In February, China Telecom picked Nuage for a new data center based on CloudStack.

In both cases, Nuage was aided by its status as an Alcatel-Lucent subsidiary. China's service providers tend to favor China-based vendors — Huawei and ZTE topping the list — but they also have ongoing relationships with Alcatel-Lucent.

Illustration by Johan Eklund on Flickr; Creative Commons 2.0 license.