Nokia has announced a significant boost to its efforts to expand its business with data center operators and hyperscalers, and reduce its dependence on its traditional telco base. The Finnish firm has greatly expanded its existing partnership with Microsoft Azure to include its latest data center switching solutions. Nokia has been selected to supply its 7250 IXR chassis-based interconnect routers to support high-density 400GE applications in Microsoft’s ‘Tier 2’ network architecture. Nokia will also supply fixed-form factor platforms into other Microsoft network applications. The new agreement builds upon the companies’ collaboration in the open source SONiC initiative to develop chassis-based platforms for high capacity data centers. The 7250 IXR offers a range of chassis-based and fixed-form factor options for data…