HP has partnered with Japanese IT giant NEC to integrate each other's software-defined networking (SDN) products.

The two companies said they had been working to ensure interoperability between HP's switches that support OpenFlow, the popular SDN protocol, and NEC's SDN controller. NEC is also working to port its Virtual Tenant Network (VTN) application to integrate with HP's SDN controller and include the app in the partner's SDN App Store.

VTN, which originally uses ProgrammableFlow (NEC's own SDN controller based on OpenFlow), enables network admins to create multi-tenant networks. It integrates with OpenStack (the open source cloud infrastructure software) and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

Shinichi Shoji, executive VP at NEC, said the company was among pioneers in commercializing SDN. “It is vital for NEC to accelerate technical innovation and maximize customers’ investment efficiencies,” Shoji said.

The announcement comes two days after NEC announced release of the latest version of the ProgrammableFlow suite. In version 5.1, the company introduced an OpenFlow-based software-defined data center interconnect solution, called Unified Network Coordinator (UNC).

It enables creation of virtual networks across multiple controllers in a data center as well as across multiple data centers. This capability enables users to have uniform policy across multiple controller or data center locations.

Don Clark, director of business development at NEC's US subsidiary, said UNC enables workload mobility. “Customers can deploy the UNC to move workloads across multiple data centers and control how traffic flows across WAN links,” he said.

“This allows the pooling of resources, which equates to better utilization of not only networks, but also storage and servers.”

With UNC, ProgrammableFlow can run across 10 controllers, 10 sites or 10 zones in a large data center. It can control 2,000 switches (as opposed to 200 switches per controller in the previous version) and 30,000 virtual tenant networks.

HP and NEC have been working in tandem since 1995, selling NEC's mission-critical enterprise IT systems running HP's Unix-based operating system called HP-UX. This week's announcement marks expansion of the partnership, adding a networking element to a collaboration that has been focused on enterprise servers.