Nokia Oyj (NYSE: NOK) confirmed that as part of a multi-faceted contract, it will deliver its data centre switching solutions to Microsoft's data centre facilities to enable bandwidth growth for Microsoft Azure. The agreement strengthens the firms' long-standing partnership, which has focused on bringing massively scaled, agile, and highly resilient networking to the data centre.
Nokia's next-generation data center switching portfolio platforms provide modern data center networks with the size, openness, aggregation, and interconnectivity they require. For data centre top of rack (TOR), leaf, spine, and super-spine applications, the 7250 IXR offers a wide choice of high-performance chassis-based and fixed-form-factor options. Port speeds up to 400GE are supported, with a roadmap to 800GE, as well as extensive IP and Ethernet feature sets.
Furthermore, Nokia's 7250 IXR chassis-based interconnect routers have been selected to serve high-density 400GE applications in Microsoft's 'tier-2' network architecture, owing to the increasing expansion of cloud services and cloud computing, as well as the migration to 400GE. Nokia will also provide fixed-form-factor platforms for Microsoft's other network applications. The firms previously collaborated as part of the open-source SONiC initiative to develop chassis-based solutions tailored to the needs of high-capacity data centers.
Nokia disclosed that today's data centers have their own unique operating issues and Nokia has been collaborating with Microsoft to comprehend its changing data center demands and requirements for some time now. Its ability to design and develop high-performance chassis-based systems was a major factor in its decision.