Nokia may have missed out on the most recent round of 5G RAN awards made by the three Chinese operators, but it has announced a major contract with China Mobile in the cloud arena.
The vendor’s Nuage Networks division will supply software-defined networking (SDN) technology for China Mobile to help expand its public cloud service, a deal that Nuage’s CEO, Sunil Khandekar, described as an “immense opportunity for Nokia, given the rapid growth of China Mobile Cloud”.
Nokia will supply its Nuage Networks Virtualized Cloud Services, which consists of an SDN controller and gateway, software switch, firewall, load balancer and VPN. This will be used to connect virtual private clouds at different data centers to help push applications closer to end users. It will also help to automate data center interconnection; and support non-virtualized workloads through bare-metal-as-a-service.
China Mobile has been using Nuage SDN for its public and private cloud services since 2015 but this is a significant expansion of the relationship and the largest single deployment for Nuage, since China Mobile will be expanding its cloud to “tens of thousands of servers spread across more than 30 large data centers”. The network will be about 30 times larger, by the end of 2021, than it was in 2018.