New Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise technology has been introduced that the company claims simplifies network operations with game changing automation set to improve the agility of the entire IT operations.

Despite advances in computing and storage to help achieve more business agility, today’s network complexities have limited IT departments’ ability to quickly respond to business needs. Todays’ introduction of the Intelligent Fabric technology provides for simpler network designs, easier interoperability, plug-n-play deployment and automatic reconfiguration with server/device/ application moves/adds/changes.

Key elements of the Intelligent Fabric technology include:

• Automation:

• Self-configuration – The Intelligent Fabric enables Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise switches to be simply unwrapped and cabled. The system does the network configuration automatically, creating a network that is ready in minutes versus hours.
• Self-attachment – Network connection and interoperability of access switches, servers, applications and third party switches/devices are automatically configured.
• Self-healing – The Intelligent Fabric technology includes comprehensive redundancy and resiliency with automated reconfiguration in response to failures to provide 7x24 uptime.
• Easy moves/adds/changes – The system detects new, changed or relocated switches, applications, devices and servers and automatically updates the configuration accordingly.

• VXLAN Hardware Gateway – Customers using VXLAN technology to manage their application infrastructure have to look into both the physical and virtual worlds. The recently introduced Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch® 6900-Q32 provides an integrated wire-rate VXLAN hardware gateway that bridges these two worlds.

• VXLAN Overlay Visibility and Quality of Service - VXLAN creates a virtual world on top of the physical infrastructure in order to provide business agility for applications running on virtual machines (VMs). The Intelligent Fabric technology automatically identifies VMs in the VXLAN environment. IT now has a visibility of applications across both physical and VXLAN networks and the tools to provide quality of service, security and prioritization.

• Virtual Network Profile – The Intelligent Fabric technology extends to VMs in a VXLAN environment the unique Virtual Network Profile (VNP) feature introduced in 2011. The VNP contains information - quality of service, prioritisation and security - on how the network should treat traffic coming from a virtual machine. As new applications are introduced or moved, the Intelligent Fabric dynamically detects the applications, in either the VXLAN or physical network, and creates the Virtual Network Profile and services across the network. The VNP feature is also extended to support Secure Virtual Machines.  
• SDN ready – To simplify the migration to an SDN environment, the Intelligent Fabric technology provides support for standards-based Openflow 1.3, OpenStack plug-in, RESTful APIs and embedded Python scripting capability and has demonstrated integration with NEC, which will be showcased as part of the InteropNet SDN Lab.

• Management of the Intelligent Fabric technology - The OmniVista 2500 Management system provides full visibility into the network, devices and applications flowing across it and includes a unique predictive network analytics tool to help IT teams better understand future capacity requirements.

The Intelligent Fabric technology is supported in both the data centre switching and the converged campus network solutions, enabling businesses to benefit from a single consistent approach for all network infrastructure needs. The Intelligent Fabric technology is now available for the OmniSwitch 6900 and OmniSwitch 10K platforms, including the recently released OmniSwitch 6900-Q32 platform later this year, this innovative technology will be expanded to support, via a software upgrade, the OmniSwitch 6860 advanced access switch to provide true network agility from the network edge to the core to the data centre.