China Mobile Selects Brocade NFV Software Appliance to Support "Internet+" Mission

Mobile giant will break new ground in China's operator sector through leading SDN/NFV deployment

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Jan. 18, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) today announced that China Mobile (SEHK: 0941, NYSE: CHL), a leading global mobile communications operator, has selected Brocade's advanced Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) solution to support its most strategic corporate development initiatives. The deployment of Brocade® Virtual Traffic Manager (vTM) in its primary data centers will provide China Mobile with highly available, agile cloud services while controlling operating costs.

[[182044]]

As one of the largest operators in the country, China Mobile plays a leading role in the government's "Internet Plus" initiative, which aims to improve competitiveness in traditional industries and support the development of new business models by leveraging information technology, including fixed and mobile Internet connections, cloud computing, big data and the Internet of Things (IoT). In addition to providing IP connectivity services, China Mobile also serves as a large cloud operator to meet the needs of important corporate and government customers.

Brocade vTM will first be deployed with Nokia equipment in the data centers of China Mobile's southern and northern bases. Through its acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia has become a strategic provider of software-defined networking (SDN) and NVF infrastructure for China Mobile. Brocade vTM software will run in the commercial version of the Nuage virtualization service platform based on the standard OpenStack SDN orchestration environment.

"The promise of network function virtualization is the ability to scale services on demand," said Hong Zhu, General Manager of Brocade China. "In the operator space, China Mobile's potential scale is unmatched. We are proud that Brocade's advanced NFV equipment technology has been selected by China Mobile. This is a groundbreaking project in the Chinese operator space, and we are fully committed to ensuring its success."

As a NFV software appliance, Brocade vTM will run on the same industry-standard hardware and virtualization environment used throughout China Mobile's cloud data center. During testing, the project team was able to provide 200Mbps of capacity to each tenant in the form of Brocade vTM virtual machine instances. As mobile cloud orchestration upgrades in the future, Brocade vTM will also be upgraded to elastic capacity of 1~1000Mbps per instance. Testing also showed that to achieve the same load balancing performance on hardware-based application delivery, the controller cost will increase by 50% compared to the Brocade vTM solution.