Brocade announced its network functions virtualization (NFV) deal with telecom operator China Mobile.

China Mobile aims to deliver highly available and agile cloud services, while controlling operating costs by the deployment of the Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager (v) within key China Mobile data centers.

China Mobile is targeting to support the development of new business models within conventional industries through information technologies, such as fixed and mobile Internet connectivity, cloud computing, Big Data, and the Internet of Things.

China Mobile, in addition to providing IP connectivity services, has also taken on the role of a large-scale cloud service provider capable of meeting the needs of major enterprise and government customers.

China Mobile will initially deploy Brocade v at China Mobile’s Southern Base and Northern Base data centers in partnership with Nokia. Nokia, through its acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent, became China Mobile’s supplier of software-defined networking (SDN) and NFV infrastructure.

Brocade v software will run within the Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform, a commercially supported version of the standard-based OpenStack SDN orchestration environment.

“The promise of network functions virtualization is the ability to scale services on demand. When it comes to service providers, they don’t come much bigger than China Mobile in terms of potential scale,” said Henry Zhu, country manager of Brocade China.

During testing, the project team was able to spin up a Brocade v instance of 200 Mbps on a single virtual machine host. With the orchestration upgrade for China Mobile’s Cloud data center, Brocade v can achieve elastic capacity from 1 to 1000 Mbps on a single virtual machine host.

The testing revealed that getting the equivalent load balancing performance on a hardware-based application delivery controller would be 50 percent more expensive than the Brocade v solution.