Avaya Takes Aim at DatacenterAvaya Takes Aim at Datacenter

A raft of new partnerships and a new Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture represent Avaya's claim to a seat at the table for enterprise datacenter decisions.

When Avaya acquired Nortel Enterprise last year, there was widespread speculation/friendly advice that suggested they should jettison Nortel's data/switch/routing business. Instead, over the course of 2010, Avaya has made a series of product announcements making it clear that, far from getting out of the data business, Avaya is doubling-down.

The culmination of this movement comes with today's announcement of the Avaya Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture, a set of products, integrations and partnerships that establish, as Avaya's newly-minted data CTO told me today, "We're a player in the datacenter."

The announcement follows closely on Monday's announcement of the new Data Solutions CTO role, to be taken by William Seifert, a data industry veteran whose move to Avaya brings him full circle: He was CTO of Wellfleet, the pioneering router company that merged with Synoptics to form Bay Networks--which in turn was acquired by Nortel and formed the basis of the data networking operation that Avaya opted not to divest after acquiring Nortel Enterprise out of bankruptcy. Seifert also founded Agile Networks, an ATM switching company that was acquired by Lucent in 1996.

VENA includes a set of partnerships with key players in the datacenter world including VMWare for virtualization; QLogic for converged networking; Coraid for Ethernet SAN storage; and Silver Peak for WAN optimization. The partnerships are the culmination of two years' work, Seifert told me in an interview today.

Seifert described the "meat" of VENA in terms of three key points:

1.) Implementation of the IEFT Shortest Path Bridging standard (802.1aq) to replace Spanning Tree as a more efficient way of finding the shortest path between clients and switches.

2.) Automated provisioning of datacenter infrastructure in the same management system used for Avaya's communications platforms such as Aura.

3.) The products themselves, primarily at the start, the VSP9000 hardware platform that Seifert described as the "bottom layer of VENA," along with the Ethernet Routing Switch 8600/8800 product line.

By integrating the new partners' products into Avaya's management system, VENA gives network managers simpler, more automated management and provisioning across the network, Seifert said, as shown below:

And being able to integrate these systems with Avaya's Unified Communications and Contact Center platforms will be a key differentiator as Avaya makes the case for itself as a datacenter player, Seifert told me.

There's an increasing amount of interest in how you run a contact center in the cloud--a private cloud," he said. "Integrating UC and Contact Center products with maangement systems, and layering that on top of VENA is a very powerful story."

Finally, Seifert told me that now is the time for Avaya to roll out VENA, because Avaya anticipates that enterprises will be deploying 10 Gbps Ethernet in volume, but that the bulk of these upgrades will come in late 2011-early 2012, giving Avaya time to make its case: "We see this as the platform for scaling up in the datacenter" to support he 10-Gbps deployments, he said.

A story powerful enough to give Avaya a toehold in the datacenter? We'll see.

But one thing seems clear: Faced with the decision, post-Nortel, between focusing on voice/unified communications and making that its key differentiator; or bulking up and trying to compete head-to-head with the Ciscos and HPs of the world--Avaya has, surprisingly, apparently chosen the latter.