China Mobile, Alcatel Lucent and their respective subsidiaries are working together on SDN in many contexts

China Mobile’s IT subsidiary Suzhou Software Technology Company has baked Nuage Networks’ software-defined networking technology into its private cloud architecture to enable federation across multiple China Mobile subsidiaries. The move comes the same week both parent companies – China Mobile and Alcatel Lucent – demoed a virtualised radio access network (RAN), a core network component.

The company deployed Nuage’s Virtualised Services Platform (VSP) and Virtual Services Assurance Platform (VSAP) for its internal private cloud platform in a bid to improve the scalability and flexibility of its infrastructure, and enable infrastructure federation between the company’s various subsidiaries.

Each subsidiary is allocated its own virtual private cloud with its own segmented chunk of the network, but enabling infrastructure federation between them means underutilised assets can be deployed in other parts of the company as needed.

“China Mobile is taking a visionary approach in designing and building its new DevOps private cloud architecture,” said Nuage networks chief executive officer Sunil Khandekar.

“By combining open source software with Nuage Networks VSP, China Mobile is replacing and surpassing its previous legacy architecture in terms of power, sophistication and choice. It will change the way China Mobile operates internally and, ultimately, the cloud services they can provide to customers,” Khandekar said.

The move comes the same week China Mobile and Alcatel Lucent trialled what the companies claimed to be the industry’s first virtualised RAN, which for an operator with over 800 million subscribers has the potential to deliver significant new efficiencies across its datacentres if deployed at scale.