OREANDA-NEWS. NEC Corporation of America (NEC), a leading provider and integrator of advanced IT and communications solutions, and a pioneer in OpenFlow-based Software-defined Networking (SDN), and NEC Corporation in Japan today announced Version 5.1 of its award-winning ProgrammableFlow Networking Suite, which introduces a new OpenFlow-based, software-defined data center interconnect solution - the Unified Network Coordinator (UNC).

NEC will be demonstrating the UNC and the ProgrammableFlow Networking Suite at Booth #301 at the Open Networking Summit (ONS) in Santa Clara, CA.

The demand for improved data center interconnectivity addresses challenges facing today's businesses, including:
* Higher business continuity requirements because of news risks, increased regulation
* Greater bandwidth demands generated by new applications, big data needs and customer responsiveness
* Better access to geographically dispersed applications and data
* Need to reduce the complexity of managing data centers
* Requirement for increased visibility for better security

NEC's new UNC tackles those issues and improves scalability of the network controller by 10 times over previous ProgrammableFlow controllers. The UNC enables construction and orchestration of virtual networks across multiple controllers within a data center as well as across interconnects between data centers. The UNC's capability of linking virtual networks across and between data centers gives customers the ability to link to specific policies within the UNC. In turn, users gain the ability to have an end-to-end policy across multiple controllers and multiple domains.

"Data center interconnect (DCI) is an area of increasing focus for IT organizations as they address the expanding regulatory requirements for exchanging, storing, processing and accessing corporation information as well as the emergence of big data as a key component of business functions," said Nav Chander, senior analyst, IDC. "We recently surveyed senior data center and CIO executives at 200 enterprises about DCI and found they are looking for solutions such as the UNC to help them fully leverage their networks. At the top of their list of concerns are business continuity and disaster recovery. An interconnect solution will be particularly attractive because of the investment protection and the variety of technology approaches it affords."