From a software perspective, Alcatel-Lucent’s networking portfolio is also upgrading their Linux-based AOS operating system. The upgrade will provide SPB support as part of a mesh deployment to enable low-latency connectivity. SPB is an alternative to the older spanning tree protocol and it is competitive with TRILL (transparent interconnection of lots of links) effort that other vendors including Cisco are promoting.
In Grossner ‘s view, SPB provides scalability both within a data center and across data center sites and it’s also cloud compatible. With SPB the option for a customer identifier field in the header enables Alcatel-Lucent to support multi-tenancy in a data center or service provider environment. Grossner added that SPB is a superset of provider backbone bridging (PBB), which means that existing tools will work end to end providing visibility or application delivery control for service providers.