Alcatel-Lucent SDN company puts bare metal to the pedal

Nuage Networks, the SDN company of Alcatel-Lucent, has rolled out a gateway for linking bare metal servers to its virtual network environment.

The gateway, called the 7850 VSG, is designed for large data centers with a large number of bare metal servers. A bare metal server is one that contains no operating system or software, perhaps nothing more than a hard disk for storing virtual machines.

[SIMILAR STRATEGIES:Like Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent funding SDN startup]

The 7850 is intended as a hardware-accelerated gateway for those environments into a virtual server/VM environment. It is based on merchant silicon and features "full" Layer 2 switching and Layer 3 routing capabilities, Nuage says.

The 7850 is based on Alcatel-Lucent's Service Router Operating System, the same one used in the company's routers. It is optimized for 10G and 40G Ethernet and features terabit capacity in a 1RU form factor, Nuage says.

The gateway also has an integrated Linux sandbox for isolating untested code or code in development. The 7850 will be available in the fourth quarter and initial customer trials are being established, Nuage says.

Nuage did not disclose pricing for the 7850.

Jim Duffy has been covering technology for over 27 years, 22 at Network World. He also writes The Cisco Connection blog and can be reached on Twitter @Jim_Duffy.

Read more about data center in Network World's Data Center section.