Lucent Technologies yesterday announced partnerships with EMC, IBM, and Sun Microsystems to support integrated, high-speed networking and data centre services for a growing class of service providers, which Lucent has dubbed "CyberCarriers."
Driven by the need for ever-faster and more efficient bandwidth, CyberCarriers offer services, including Web hosting, servers, storage and network transport to ASPs (applications service providers), ISPs (Internet service providers), Web hosting companies and others, Lucent said in a statement.
Lucent and its partners plan to develop and provide these CyberCarriers with software, server, storage and networking products, Dick Muldoon, a Lucent spokesman, said in a phone interview. The partners intend to develop and deliver these services in a "CyberCarrier Reference Architecture" for data centres and networks managed by Lucent, and through a professional services offering from Lucent and from IBM's Global Services unit.
Lucent will establish several laboratories to develop interoperability testing and certification for the services offered to CyberCarriers. Initial development work will occur at Lucent's Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey. Other labs will be sited in Hilversum, The Netherlands; Nuremberg, Germany; and Tokyo.
Over the next three years, the market for professional services, data centre and network infrastructure needed by CyberCarriers is expected to mushroom with the development of the Internet, Muldoon said. "There is an opportunity on the Internet to deliver rich, faster, and more reliable services," he added.
Lucent and EMC will work to qualify EMC's intelligent storage systems as part of Lucent's service offerings for CyberCarriers. EMC's Symmetrix 8000 series of enterprise storage systems, its Celerra enterprise network file server and its Connectrix Enterprise Storage Network system will be qualified for use in CyberCarriers. EMC and Lucent will also test and develop interoperability to ensure compatibility between EMC systems and software, and Lucent's OptiStar optical networking technology.
IBM and Lucent will certify IBM servers and software for CyberCarriers. These products include IBM's WebSphere software platform, its MQSeries messaging software, its DB2 database, its Lotus groupware, and selected Tivoli systems and network management technology.
Sun and Lucent will extend an existing alliance between the companies that already seeks to deliver carrier-grade communications networking and network computing infrastructure for e-business applications. The companies will certify products for use in CyberCarrier networks. These include Sun's server and storage systems, application and Web server software and messaging and e-commerce applications from iPlanet E-Commerce Solutions, part of the Sun-Netscape Communications alliance.