Nokeena Optimizes CDN Video Servers for Scalability and QoE

Nokeena Networks, a start-up based in Santa Clara, California, unveiled its "Media Flow Director" software appliance for enabling massive stream scalability and television-like quality of experience (QoE) via standard Internet video servers.



Nokeena's Media Flow Director supports up to 40,000 streams and 10Gbps per rack unit while supporting online media's unique characteristics in the areas of multiple encodings, bit-rates, file sizes, viewing platforms, and delivery protocols. The Media Flow Director also ensures that the media content is delivered at a consistent rate in the presence of changes in network conditions and sudden shifts in viewer demand.


Nokeena Media Delivery System leverages several innovations, including a media file size that optimizes how content is stored and later retrieved from a disk. The system stores video content on the disk in a manner that ensures that fragmentation does not occur over time, thereby providing predictable throughput over time. Furthermore it treats each drive as an independent cache. A multi-tier caching system is employed and detailed analytics then automatically migrate content within the tiers based on the dynamics of the workload. The caching system is agnostic to the delivery protocol. This allows multiple delivery protocols to share the cache content.


Nokeena estimates that its innovations will yield a 10 to 1 reduction in number of servers needed to deliver same amount of media. The system works with generic x86 servers (including the latest Nehalem processors) along with various storage devices (SATA/SAS/SSD/NFS). Nokeena's first targets include content delivery networks and service providers.



http://www.nokeena.com

• Nokeena was co-founded by Rajan Raghavan (previously a co-founder at Xambala, RealChip Communications and Virtual Chips), Prabakar Sundarrajan (previously Citrix Systems, NetScaler and Exodus Communications), Jaspal Kohli (previously principal architect at Yahoo, and CTO at Mirapoint), and Kumar Narayanan (previously a Director of Engineering in the Storage Technology Group at Cisco Systems).

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Zarlink Announces Low Power VoIP Chipsets

Zarlink Semiconductor introduced a new VoIP chipset that it says consumes 50 percent less power than competing devices, enabling manufacturers more easily comply with emerging "green" environmental standards, such as strict energy consumption limits for broadband equipment outlined in the European Code of Conduct. In addition, the VE8820 chipset's low power performance ensures uninterrupted voice service in battery-backed systems in the event of a power outage.


Target applications for the VE8820 dual channel FXS chipset include a range of voice-over-broadband residential and business gateways as well as access network applications, including cable embedded multimedia terminal adaptors (EMTAs), xDSL integrated access devices (IADs) and fiber to the home (FTTH) optical network terminals (ONTs).


The highly programmable dual channel VE8820 chipset supports both wideband and narrowband telephony operation, and is software compatible with existing VE880 VoicePort Series devices. The product is supported by the VoicePath API-II Software Development Kit to help simplify design, speed product development and enable improved telephone line testing capability through the field proven VeriVoice Test Suite software.


The VE880 chipset is in full production.
http://www.zarlink.com/

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Intel Sees PC Market Bottoming Out

Intel reported better than expected first-quarter revenue of $7.1 billion, operating income of $670 million, net income of $647 million and earnings per share (EPS) of 11 cents.


'We believe PC sales bottomed out during the first quarter and that the industry is returning to normal seasonal patterns," said Paul Otellini, Intel president and CEO. 'Intel has adapted well to the current economic environment and we're benefiting from disciplined execution and agility. We're delivering a product portfolio that meets the needs of the changing market, spanning affordable computing to high-performance, energy-efficient computing."http://www.intel.com

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Telenor and Tele2 Announce LTE Network Sharing Deal in Sweden

Telenor Sweden and Tele2 Sweden announced an agreement to build a joint 4G network in Sweden. The companies will be equal partners in LTE network construction and sharing of spectrum. The roll-out of what will be Sweden's most extensive 4G network will start this year with the intent of launching high-speed mobile broadband services based on LTE-technology in the end of 2010, while at the same time improving voice coverage (GSM) for all customers.


"This is where the race to 4G begins. By building a joint network and sharing our spectrum we create a whole new playing field on the Swedish market, placing ourselves in pool position to provide high-speed mobile broadband with the best coverage and quality. Sharing this investment ensures cost-efficiency and enables a solid market position in the long run for Telenor in Sweden," said Lars-Åke Norling, CEO Telenor Sweden.


"Through this partnership, Telenor will be in the forefront of 4G worldwide. Telenor also holds a 4G license in Norway, and has already started testing in Norway. Telenor has a clear ambition of taking a leading mobile broadband position in Scandinavia, said Morten Karlsen Sørby, Executive Vice President and head of Telenor Nordic.


The agreement comprises spectrum sharing in the 900MHz and 2600MHz frequency bands.


In 2013, the operators expect 99 percent of the Swedish population to have access to mobile broadband at speeds of up to 80 Mbps in rural areas and up to 150 Mbps in urban areas. The roll-out includes an extension of the GSM network by 30-50 percent, resulting in better indoor and outdoor coverage on mobile voice communication.
http://www.telenor.com
http://www.tele2.com

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Cavium Unveils OCTEON Processors with 1 to 32 Cores

Cavium Networks introduced its next generation OCTEON II Internet Application Processor (IAP) family of multi-core MIPS64 processors designed to fuel the voice, video and data convergence driven by cloud computing, virtualization, HD video over IP, Web 2.0 and mobile 3G/4G applications. The OCTEON II IAP offers up to 4x performance over the existing and widely deployed OCTEON Plus processor family, with more than twice the performance/watt and performance/dollar. In addition, the new product family adds revolutionary new application acceleration engines.


The OCTEON II IAP family integrates 1 to 32 custom cnMIPS64 cores, up to 75 Application Acceleration Engines for QoS, packet processing, TCP, compression, encryption, RAID, de-duplication and regular expression and a flexible set of networking I/Os including gigabit Ethernet, 10 gigabit Ethernet, PCI Express Gen 2, USB2.0, serial Rapid I/O (sRIO) and Interlaken. Additionally OCTEON II features a new Hyperconnect crossbar with low-latency and virtualization features, up to 400Gbps of DDR3 memory bandwidth, up to 100Gbps of network connectivity.


Using an on-chip Power Optimizer the OCTEON II family consumes only 2W to 60W across the entire family. The OCTEON II Software Development Kit (SDK) builds upon the existing OCTEON SDK and includes Linux SMP, GNU Toolchain, Simple Executive for fast path applications, performance tools, simulator, feature rich APIs for hardware acceleration and an extensive set of examples. To accelerate customer development Cavium also offers production ready software toolkits and multi-core software architecture and design consulting services.


Cavium noted that over the past 2 years, general-purpose multi-core processors have become mainstream in embedded, networking, wireless, storage and high-bandwidth broadband applications. All major Tier-1 OEMs in the market have adopted multi-core processors and ported millions of lines-of-code of software, including proprietary operating systems, to achieve unprecedented gains in performance, power and cost savings. Multi-core designs span from fiber-to-the-home CPE (customer premise equipment) routers, 802.11n Wifi access points, and SME (small medium enterprise) routers to data center application delivery switches, service provider wireless gateways and core routers.


The OCTEON II family includes four different product lines: the CN68XX (16 to 32 cores), CN66XX (8 to 16 cores), CN63XX (2 to 6 cores) and CN62XX (1 to 4 cores). The first OCTEON II product line that will be commercially available will be the CN63XX which will be followed by the CN68XX.


Over 20 industry partners announced their support for Cavium's OCTEON II.
http://www.caviumnetworks.com

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BT Launches "Onevoice" Unified Communications SIP Enhancements

BT launched three new key unified communications and collaboration (UCC) enhancements to its "OneVoice" converged communications platform. Available in over 60 countries, BT Onevoice builds on its end-to-end, global virtual private network (VPN) service for all voice communications with the addition of session initiation protocol (SIP) connectivity, BT Onevoice Conferencing services and integrated 'on net" mobile phone access for international calls.


BT said the addition of SIP access is a vital development to the platform as it allows customers access to next generation UCC features such as presence and cost effective flexible IP access. BT's global SIP roll-out will take place through 2009 delivering UCC capability to all main BT Onevoice supported countries by the end of the year.


The second collaborative application now available on BT Onevoice is BT Onevoice Conferencing, creating a market leading combination of global UC capabilities and features, allowing BT MeetMe -- BT's audio conferencing service - calls to be delivered at significantly reduced 'on net" rates, with the convenience of short code dialling.


As well as global conferencing calls, the third enhancement is the ability to capture international mobile voice traffic through the BT Onevoice platform and deliver it through the converged voice and data network. Called BT Onevoice Mobile Access, these features allow commonly used calls to be routed directly onto the BT Onevoice global VPN and treated as 'on net" traffic allowing organisations to realise significant cost savings on international mobile calls from the user's home country.


BT also noted that in addition to enhancing BT Onevoice, the company leading a number of 'communications as a service" projects leveraging technology from recently acquired internet telephony company Ribbit. Based on SIP, the field pilots with a small number of customers are enabling 'on net" calling from any internet connected browser.
http://www.btplc.com

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LSI Introduces Four New Families of Tarari DPI Solutions

LSI announced four new families of Tarari Content and Security "plug-and-play" processor boards for deep packet inspection (DPI) applications.


The new series of Tarari Content and Security Processor board solutions complements the previously announced 8300 series, which provides standard PCI Express connectivity at speeds from 250 Mbps to 3 Gbps. All Tarari Content Processor board and chip solutions employ a common set of regular expression rules and application programming interfaces. The LSI portfolio of Tarari Content Processor board solutions consist of the following new families:

• 7900 series: Supports the mini-PCI form factor and offers from 250 Mbps to 1 Gbps performance. All 7900 series boards use the same form factor, which facilitates base design reuse.



• 8600 series: Supports PCIe 8 lane Gen 1/Gen 2 and offers performance at 6, 12 or 20 Gbps, while managing up to 8 million simultaneous network connections and processing up to one million regular expressions per second.



• 8800 series: Supports the AMC form factor for Advanced TCA (ATCA) and Micro TCA (uTCA) chassis. Offering performance at 3, 6 or 12 Gbps, these boards can offload deep packet inspection on a wide range of multi-core processors including Intel Xeon, AMD Opteron, Cavium Octeon and RMI XLS based blades.



• 8900 series: Supports mini-PCIe and is intended for applications from 250 Mbps to 3 Gbps where small size and low power are crucial. All 8900 series boards use the same form factor, which facilitates base design reuse.

The 7900, 8800 and 8900 series will sample in June. The 8600 will sample in July.

In addition to silicon-based, application-specific standard products and custom silicon, LSI now offers the widest range of form factor alternatives for deep content inspection in the industry. The new boards fit standard PCIe, mini-PCIe, mini-PCI and Advanced Mezzanine Card (AdvancedMC form factors, enabling Tarari Content and Security Processor solutions to be easily integrated with existing network security, quality of service, content-based billing and bandwidth management applications.
http://www.lsi.com

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eBay Plans 2010 Initial Public Offering for Skype

eBay announced plans to separate Skype from the company, beginning with an initial public offering that is intended to be completed in the first half of 2010. Specific timing of the IPO will be based on market conditions.


'Skype is a great stand-alone business with strong fundamentals and accelerating momentum," said eBay Inc.'s President and CEO, John Donahoe. 'But it's clear that Skype has limited synergies with eBay and PayPal. We believe operating Skype as a stand-alone publicly traded company is the best path for maximizing its potential. This will give Skype the focus and resources required to continue its growth and effectively compete in online voice and video communications. In addition, separating Skype will allow eBay to focus entirely on our two core growth engines -- e-commerce and online payments--and deliver long-term value to our stockholders."


In 2008, Skype generated revenues of $551 million, up 44 percent from 2007, and segment margins of approximately 21 percent. Registered users reached 405 million by the end of 2008, up 47 percent from 2007, and user metrics improved significantly throughout the year. The company recently announced that it expects Skype to top $1 billion in revenue in 2011, nearly doubling 2008 revenues.


The company also noted that the recent release of the Skype for iPhone application has generated a great response. More than one million people downloaded Skype for iPhone in the first 36 hours after it became available -- and Skype immediately became the No. 1 downloaded free iPhone application in more than 40 markets, including the U.S., UK and Japan. In just over a week, downloads passed the two million mark, putting Skype on more than 6 percent of all iPhones and iPod Touch -- and adding almost half a million new Skype users.
http://www.ebay.com
http://www.skype.com

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IDEA Cellular Selects Veraz's Media Gateway for MSC Interconnection

IDEA Cellular, a GSM operator with over 41 million users in India, has deployed a range of Veraz Networks' I-Gate 4000 EDGE systems in its network to provide cost-optimized, high-quality transmission links between selected nodes. Financial terms were not disclosed.


'Veraz's I-Gate 4000 EDGE media gateway provides IDEA with a highly reliable, cost-efficient interconnection solution," said Anil Tandan, Group CTO, IDEA Cellular. 'The unique features of the product help minimize network costs in selected areas while maintaining the high quality voice services that IDEA's customers expect."http://www.veraznetworks.com

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Sun Unveils Flash-Ready x64 Blade Servers Based on Intel Nehalem Processors

Sun Microsystems announced a line of Flash-ready x64 blade servers, rack servers and workstations powered by the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series. The dual-node Sun Blade X6275 server module is the first blade server to support onboard IB QDR for extreme network performance, power efficiency and ease of use. Each Sun Blade X6275 server module has two full-function compute nodes, each with two Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, up to 96GB of high-speed memory, integrated QDR IB Host Channel Adapter (HCA) and Gigabit Ethernet, optional Sun Flash Modules, and optional PCIe ExpressModule I/O. The configurability of the system ensures that the same blades can run compute-intensive, memory-intensive, communication-intensive or I/O-intensive applications, so customers can address nearly all of their HPC workloads with a single cluster system from Sun.


With the Sun Blade 6048 chassis, the Sun Blade X6275 server module also provides extreme density with 48 physical blades per rack -- supporting 96 nodes of two-socket, quad-core processors per node, resulting in a total of 768 processor cores and nine teraFLOPS of peak performance in a single 42U rack.


'Slow pipes and slow storage have limited high performance computing systems for years. The solution is to evolve the industry's view of high performance computing today to include high performance I/O and networking," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. "Our Open Network Systems approach first solved this problem with the Sun Constellation System. Today, Sun is taking integrated compute, software, networking and storage to the next level and our innovations are giving HPC customers the speed, scalability and simplicity to help solve the world's greatest challenges."http://www.sun.com/hpc

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Meru Delivers Video-over-Wireless Optimized for 802.11n Networks

Meru Networks has introduced a wireless LAN solution optimized for delivering high-quality video over 802.11n networks. Specifically, the company introduced a Video Services Module (ViSM) designed to address video-delivery issues specific to 802.11n networks, which are susceptible to unpredictable loss rates that can negatively impact video quality. The module applies application-aware optimization techniques to web streaming and real-time multicast video, the underlying technologies that enable a broad array of video applications, from wireless projection, IPTV and event simulcast to videoconferencing, telepresence and video surveillance.


The Meru Video Services Module uses several mechanisms to deliver video traffic based on application and user characteristics, allowing scaling to large numbers of concurrent video sessions without appreciably degrading user experience.

• Application-aware prioritization: synchronizes the voice and video components of a video stream, adapting the delivery of each frame based on its importance to the application. Higher-priority MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 marked frames are transmitted with greater assurance of reliability and timeliness.



• User- and role-based policy enforcement: provides granular control over application behavior (e.g., a teacher can be assigned higher priority than a student).



• Seamless video-optimized handoff: proactively reroutes the multicast delivery tree to prevent lost video frames during a transition between access points, and ensures zero-loss for mobile video.



• Multicast group management: optimizes delivery to only those virtual ports whose clients are members of the multicast group, reducing network waste both wirelessly and on the wired network.



• Graphical visualization: reveals which clients are running which applications (data, voice, video) to aid in monitoring network-wide application performance.

The Meru Video Services Module is available in June as an add-on module to Meru's System Director software. For a network with 100 wireless access points, the module is priced at $7,995.
http://www.merunetworks.com

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Glimmerglass Cites Energy Benefits of All-Optical Switches

Glimmerglass, a supplier of intelligent optical switching systems, announced that its all-photonic switches score 10 or better using the methodology of Verizon's Telecommunications Equipment Energy Efficiency Ratings (TEEER) for calculating the energy efficiency of transmission or switching equipment when carrying 10 Gbps traffic. This score translates to being at least 1,000 times more energy efficient than the industry average for traditional telecom equipment.


The TEEER metrics were established by Verizon to measure and compare the energy consumption of new products to existing products within its network with the stated goal of improving energy efficiency by 20 percent.


To further demonstrate the superior energy efficiency of its products, and to celebrate Earth Day, Glimmerglass also announced a new Carbon Offset Program under which Glimmerglass will fund carbon offsets to completely neutralize ten years of projected electrical usage of all of its Intelligent Optical Switches purchased between April 22nd and December 31st of this year.
http://www.glimmerglass.com

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ADTRAN Posts Q1 Sales of $110 Million

ADTRAN Q1 sales of $110,364,000 compared to $119,885,000 for the first quarter of 2008. Net income was $15,184,000 for the quarter, compared to $17,047,000 for the first quarter of 2008. Earnings per share, assuming dilution, were $0.24 for the quarter, compared to $0.26 for the first quarter of 2008.


ADTRAN Chief Executive Officer Tom Stanton stated, "Our results for the quarter reflect improved operating efficiencies as gross margins achieved another record high and total operating expenses decreased. Most notable during the quarter was the acceleration of our Fiber-to-the-Node business in the U.S. Our ongoing advancements in strategic areas and improvements in operating efficiencies leave our company poised for revenue and earnings growth when conditions improve."http://www.adtran.com

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