HP and Alcatel-Lucent Bring Together the Power of Data Center Technology and Communications Networks

WorldWide Tech & Science. Francisco De Jesús.

HP and Alcatel-Lucent Bring Together the Power of Data Center Technology and Communications Networks.

 HP (NYSE: HPQ) and Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext and NYSE: ALU) today announced a jointly developed solution to help organizations move, store and access vast amounts of information by integrating data center infrastructure technology and high-performance communications networks.

The new HP and Alcatel-Lucent Data Center Network Connect (DCNC) is an integrated architecture that brings together the strengths of data center technology with high-performance communications networks to offer enterprises the same levels of reliability, speed and capacity that are available on telecommunication service provider networks – now at substantially lower cost.

This offering builds upon HP and Alcatel-Lucent’s commitment to equip enterprises and service providers with the specific tools they need to deliver converged systems of IT and telecom infrastructures for greater flexibility. DCNC is the latest example of that promise, assisting enterprises in creating efficiencies within their data centers and networks for greater agility. In addition, HP is helping service providers deliver public cloud offerings to customers by also announcing HP CloudSystem integration with Alcatel-Lucent today.

“Clients are creating vast amounts of information that needs to be resourced, distributed and shared without compromising the quality of data or the speed at which it’s delivered,” said Arthur Filip, vice president and general manager, Technology Consulting, HP. “HP and Alcatel-Lucent provide clients a way to securely share extremely high volumes of data between data center sites when and where it’s needed in an instant.”

“Alcatel-Lucent and HP’s solution is based on technology engineered to satisfy telecommunications service providers that expect their networks to perform with exceptional reliability and meet their needs far into the future,” said Philippe Keryer, president, Networks Group, Alcatel-Lucent. “Large enterprises can confidently invest in these solutions knowing that they will receive the full benefit of their investment for years to come.”

Generating enterprise-wide flexibility with data center enhancements

DCNC combines HP’s breadth of technologies and services for data centers with Alcatel-Lucent’s optical transport solutions for service providers and its high-performance service routing and switching portfolio, which are key elements of the Alcatel-Lucent High Leverage Network (HLN)™ architecture.

DCNC will leverage the strength of Alcatel-Lucent’s recently announced CloudBand solution which accesses the power of the distributed network infrastructure to offer large enterprises and governments access to the cloud with the quality of service their activities require.

To address critical functions such as disaster recovery, data backup, virtual machine mobility and the creation of cloud backbones, large enterprises and service providers require an integrated solution that provides ultra-high bandwidth and low latency for connecting data centers. Emerging data center trends such as server virtualization, scale-out applications, network convergence and cloud computing have placed new demands on data center and service provider networks. As such, they require new designs and infrastructure technology that eliminate bandwidth, performance and availability limitations.

The HP and Alcatel-Lucent solution brings together key data center services and networking offerings from the portfolios of both companies. The DCNC supports immediate data center demands such as consolidation, business continuity and security, while laying the foundation for service-oriented, on-demand computing technologies.

DCNC takes advantage of high-performance service routing, switching and optical transport capabilities so clients can address the demanding requirements of the financial services, health care and media sectors, where speed and bandwidth capacity are crucial to delivering services.

HP Enterprise Services, which offers a range of data center services for HP’s outsourcing clients, used Alcatel-Lucent’s 1830 PSS (Photonic Service Switch) to create high-capacity optical links to interconnect HP’s commercial data centers. The first two projects in Germany and Switzerland were successful, and future deployments in other HP commercial data centers are planned.

Client benefits include:

• Increased network performance with faster, more reliable throughput. This results in a highly reliable networking system for e-business applications, business communications and network-based business services.
• Improved time to market through an integrated hardware, software and services solution that combines data center technologies with consulting capabilities to assist clients with implementation and support.
• Enhanced flexibility and agility within the network using an open standards-based design so clients can meet and exceed service-level agreements.
• Reduced total cost of ownership by making the network more efficient by consolidating and connecting multiple protocols and storage area networks and by enabling other resource-sharing capabilities among various locations.
• Superior reliability to support today’s 24/7 business needs.

Availability and pricing

HP and Alcatel-Lucent Data Center Network Connect consists of existing products and product-attached services from HP and Alcatel-Lucent that are available globally now. The services are currently available in select locations with expected global and consolidated availability by year end.

About the HP and Alcatel-Lucent Global Alliance

The HP and Alcatel-Lucent global alliance helps service providers and large enterprises evolve toward converged IT and telecom infrastructures that are more efficient, flexible and adapted to the needs of fast-changing markets. Together, HP and Alcatel-Lucent bring to market the world’s broadest set of capabilities to support customers’ business transformation.

The alliance is currently rolling out comprehensive customer offerings such as the DCNC solution that take full advantage of both companies’ product portfolios for the enterprise and telecom markets.

About Alcatel-Lucent

The long-trusted partner of service providers, enterprises, strategic industries and governments around the world, Alcatel-Lucent is a leader in mobile, fixed, IP and optics technologies, and a pioneer in applications and services. Alcatel-Lucent includes Bell Labs, one of the world’s foremost centers of research and innovation in communications technology.

With operations in more than 130 countries and one of the most experienced global services organizations in the industry, Alcatel-Lucent is a local partner with global reach.

The company achieved revenues of Euro 16 billion in 2010 and is incorporated in France and headquartered in Paris.

For more information, visit Alcatel-Lucent on: http://www.alcatel-lucent.com, read the latest posts on the Alcatel-Lucent blog http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/blog and follow the company on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Alcatel_Lucent.

About HP

HP creates new possibilities for technology to have a meaningful impact on people, businesses, governments and society. The world’s largest technology company, HP brings together a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure to solve customer problems. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com.