Alcatel-Lucent extends reach of its Application Fluent Networking

Alcatel-Lucent is introducing new products that enable enterprises to accommodate a more mobile workforce. These products address requirements for a better user experience accessing real-time applications anytime, anyplace - on the corporate network, at a branch office or from the cloud.
Today’s employee-driven mobility requirements present a challenge matched by IT's need to reduce operational and capital expenditures. Together, these are driving the deployment of virtualisation technology throughout the entire network, including the enterprise data centre, and require the automation of many IT workflows.

With these new products -- the OmniSwitch 6450L, OmniAccess WLAN 4x50 controllers and a new range of Remote and Branch Access Points, and the OmniSwitch 6900 10GBaseT -- Alcatel-Lucent is meeting new IT and mobile worker needs by extending the reach of its Application Fluent Network (AFN) capabilities to the branch office and reduces the cost of entry for application fluency to the corporate LAN and data centre. An AFN network is capable of automatically tuning its performance to the application in use.

These new solutions provide many benefits to enterprises for both the users and the IT team. End users benefit from a high quality user experience and from access to their applications from any location, which now includes the branch office. The enterprise IT team benefits from reduced capital costs, simplified operations and being able to keep pace with the rapid and dynamic performance tuning required by mobile and virtualised applications.

The new products include:
· The Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch 6450L for Campus LAN gives businesses a low-cost entry to expanding their network. The fully-featured, stackable, energy efficient Fast Ethernet OmniSwitch 6450L products can grow as the customer’s needs grow via a simple software upgrade to 1GigE connectivity with 10GigE uplinks. Additional enhancements for the entire OmniSwitch 6450 family including remote stacking capabilities, Energy Efficient Ethernet (802.3az) support, and zero-touch provisioning when deployed with Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX Office products.
· The Alcatel-Lucent OmniSwitch 6900 10GBaseT (copper) wire-rate, top-of-rack switching for enterprise data centres enables reduced cabling costs with 10GigE copper server to top-of-rack connectivity and provides legacy 1GigE copper server connectivity.

· Added to the Wireless LAN portfolio are new Alcatel-Lucent OmniAccess WLAN Controllers, and new 802.11n Remote and Branch Access Points. The products offer higher performance and scalability for the campus network while supporting significant growth in bandwidth demands driven by new multimedia business applications as well as the explosion of Wifi connected end points.

Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst, ZK Research
"The evolution of business critical applications across the enterprise are causing businesses to pause as they realise their traditional network environments weren’t made for today’s world of applications. IT departments need to shoot for the goal of being able to deliver higher levels of automation across the data centre and even out to the campus. The Application Fluent Network approach from Alcatel-Lucent provides a programmable network, one that enables automation, provides a resilient architecture, and simplified operations to meet these goals."