China Mobile's key northern and southern base data centers will be equipped with a new advanced network functions virtualization (NFV), as the company not only maintains its IP services but also transitions to a large-scale cloud service provider for major enterprise and government customers.

The company's involvement in the Chinese Government's Internet Plus initiative is aims to increase competitiveness and support new IT business model development in traditional industries.

The company says development areas include internet connectivity, cloud computing, big data and the Internet of Things (IoT).  This is in addition to the cloud service provisions the company hopes to move into.

China Mobile will implement Brocade software-defined networking (SDN) and NFV infrastructure. Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager (vTM) will also be deployed in its data centers.  The vTM will run within the Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform, a commercially-supported version of the standard-based OpenStack SDN orchestration environment.

Brocade China's country manager Henry Zhu says that NFV offers a promise to scale services on demand.

“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. We're naturally delighted that Brocade's advanced NFV appliance technology has been selected by China Mobile. This is a groundbreaking project within China's service provider landscape and we are fully committed to ensuring it results in complete success,” he says.

Brocade states that its vTM runs on the same hardware and virtualization environment that is used throughout China Mobile data centers.  During testing, the project team reached a vTM instance of 200 Mbps on a single virtual machine host.

Brocade says its vTM can achieve elastic capacity from 1 to 1000 Mbps on a single virtual machine host, especially for the China Mobile data center upgrade.