Alcatel Promises Better Clouds for Carriers


Grazed from PCWorld. Author: Stephen Lawson.
Alcatel-Lucent is developing a cloud computing platform for carriers that aims to take full advantage of their networks to deliver guaranteed performance.
Carriers can use the platform, called CloudBand, both to run their own software and to offer cloud computing services to enterprises. For internal purposes, the cloud can make it faster and cheaper to launch and operate services, and for subscribers it will offer more predictable performance than current clouds, according to Alcatel. Carriers will be able to sell cloud computing services with guaranteed availability and response times, the company says.
Service providers already can build their own cloud data centers and link them to their infrastructure, which can provide an edge in performance over using the open Internet, said Dor Skuler, vice president of cloud solutions at Alcatel. But CloudBand goes beyond this with software that examines a wide range of conditions and user requirements to find the best settings for a given application at a certain time…

