Nuage Networks Provides Comprehensive Software-Defined Networking (SDN) Solution to Leading Health Provider UPMC

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California, Jan. 16, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Nuage Networks, the Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) venture focused on software defined networking (SDN) solutions, today announced that UPMC has selected its software-defined networking platform for deployment in the health system's backup network. After successful staging and verification, UPMC will begin a multi-year transition to Nuage Networks solutions for the rest of its datacenter network infrastructure to support the increased demand from employees, patients, hospitals, and healthcare insurers.

Challenged with static provisioning models and unused capacity, UPMC, which has a long-time strategic partnership with Alcatel-Lucent, will be deploying Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) and 7850 Virtualized Services Gateway (VSG).

"UPMC carries critical medical information in our datacenters and across our network. To meet the demand from our growing community of users, and to ensure the most effective handling of critical information, we looked to eliminate static provisioning models and to strengthen our network capacity and flexibility across our datacenter networks," said Bill Hanna, Vice President of Technical Services at UPMC.

The Nuage Networks SDN solution provides datacenter network virtualization and automation that transforms UPMC's datacenters into a reflexive environment that instantaneously establishes the network services required to deliver cloud applications across thousands of tenants in a policy-driven manner. Under the contract, Nuage Networks will provide a solution consisting of:

Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform (VSP): An SDN solution that fully automates datacenter networks, creating secure "slices" for each user group or tenant while reducing provisioning time from days to seconds. The software-based product components of VSP used by UPMC include:

• Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Controller (VSC): Serves as the robust control plane of the datacenter network, maintaining a full per-tenant view of network and service topologies. Through network APIs using interfaces, such as Openflow, the VSC programs the datacenter network independently from the datacenter networking hardware.
• Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Directory (VSD): Serves as a policy, business logic & analytics engine for the abstract definition of network services. Through RESTful APIs to the VSD, administrators can define and refine service designs and incorporate enterprise policies.

Nuage Networks 7850 Virtualized Services Gateway (VSG): Working in concert with Nuage Networks VSP, the 7850 VSG provides an ideal alternative for companies with a significant investment in non-virtualized assets that want to leverage automation and control across their virtualized and non-virtualized infrastructures. It allows UPMC to establish policies to be instantiated and enforced across all of its assets, within and across private and shared datacenter facilities, regardless of whether the servers or appliances are virtualized.

According to Sunil Khandekar, CEO of Nuage Networks, "We are pleased that our innovation can help UPMC reap the benefits of policy-driven network automation and deliver added value to its user groups. For UPMC, the Nuage solution eliminates manual provisioning and improves the flexibility of network assets while minimizing delay and human error. We are helping UPMC to fully virtualize and automate its network infrastructure across distributed datacenters, and provide instant, secure connectivity to various user groups."

UPMC is a $10 billion integrated global health enterprise headquartered in Pittsburgh. The largest nongovernmental employer in Pennsylvania, UPMC integrates more than 62,000 employees, 22 hospitals, 400 doctors' offices and outpatient sites, a 2.2-million-member health insurance division, and international and commercial operations. Affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences, UPMC ranks No. 10 in the prestigious U.S. News & World Report annual Honor Roll of America's Best Hospitals. For more information, go to UPMC.com.

ABOUT NUAGE NETWORKS
Nu-ahj: From French, meaning 'cloud'. Nuage Networks brings a unique combination of groundbreaking technologies and unmatched networking expertise to the enterprise and telecommunications industries. The Silicon Valley-based start up has applied radically new thinking to the problem of delivering massively scalable and high programmable SDN solutions with the security and availability required by business-critical environments. Nuage Networks, backed by Alcatel-Lucent's (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) rapidly growing IP division, has the pedigree to serve the needs of the world's biggest clouds. The cloud has made promises – the mission of Nuage Networks is to help you realize them.

For more information, visit Nuage Networks on: www.nuagenetworks.net, read the latest posts on the Nuage Networks blog http://www.nuagenetworks.net/blog/ and follow the company on Twitter: https://twitter.com/nuagenetworks.