China Mobile, the world's largest mobile communications service provider, has selected an advanced network functions virtualization (NFV) solution from Brocade as part of its broader virtualization rollout.
According to Brocade, the deployment of the Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager (vTM) within key China Mobile data centers will help the company deliver highly available and agile cloud services, while keeping operating costs under control.
Brocade vTM will initially be deployed at China Mobile's Southern Base and Northern Base data centers in conjunction with Nokia which, through its acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent, became China Mobile's strategic supplier of software-defined networking (SDN) and NFV infrastructure. Brocade vTM software will run within the Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform, a commercially supported version of the standard-based OpenStack SDN orchestration environment.
As an NFV software appliance, Brocade vTM runs on the same industry-standard hardware and virtualization environment employed throughout China Mobile's cloud data centers.
Brocade claims that during testing, the project team was able to spin up a Brocade vTM instance of 200 Mbps on a single virtual machine host. With the orchestration upgrade for China Mobile's Cloud data center, Brocade vTM can achieve elastic capacity from 1 to 1000 Mbps on a single virtual machine host. The testing also revealed that getting the equivalent load balancing performance on a hardware-based application delivery controller would be 50 percent more expensive than the Brocade vTM solution.
Henry Zhu, Country Manager of Brocade China
We're naturally delighted that Brocade's advanced NFV appliance technology has been selected by China Mobile. This is a groundbreaking project within China's service provider landscape and we are fully committed to ensuring it results in complete success.
