Dell'Oro Tracks Rise of FCoE -- Now 7% of New Servers

Approximately 7 percent of servers, or 150,000 units, shipped with Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) capable network connections in the first quarter of 2011, according to a new report from Dell'Oro Group. Most of those server connections were driven by HP blade servers with Emulex FCoE LAN on Motherboard (LOM). Not all HP's blade servers were operating FCoE, but the rate of adoption more than doubled sequentially during the quarter.


"HP, in its first full quarter of end-to-end FCoE connectivity in its ProLiant BladeSystem, captured 23 percent of FCoE switch market port shipments," said Tam Dell'Oro, President of Dell'Oro Group. "Cisco, the "small but mighty" blade server market new entrant, differentiates its UCS blade servers by connecting them all with FCoE, and is the market share leader in overall FCoE switch shipments," added Dell'Oro.


The report discusses the remarkable growth in FCoE during the first quarter amidst Cisco just beginning its product transition to its new generation FCoE switches. It also discusses the progress of Dell and IBM FCoE connectivity within the blade servers.
http://www.delloro.com

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Dell'Oro: Optical Transport Market up 10% YoY to $3 Billion in Q1

Worldwide optical transport equipment market revenues grew 10 percent year-over-year to $3 billion in the first quarter of 2011, according to a newly published report from Dell'Oro Group. The study predicts that the market will grow 9 percent to over $13 billion by year-end.


"As expected, the optical market declined sequentially in the first quarter due to seasonality, but grew a healthy 10 percent year-over-year in 1Q11," said Jimmy Yu, Sr. Director of Optical Transport research at Dell'Oro Group. "This was the third consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth for the Optical Transport market following the market slump that began in 4Q08 which extended through the middle of 2010. There was strong demand for optical equipment in North America and Latin America, where revenues were 17 percent and 34 percent higher, respectively, over the same period last year. The only region that showed a weak start to the year was China, where we estimate that optical sales declined 16 percent year-over-year," added Mr. Yu.


The report also indicates that Huawei's market share in 1Q11 declined by seven percentage points compared to the year-ago quarter to 18 percent, and that Alcatel-Lucent's market share increased by two percentage points to 17 percent. The manufacturers with the third and fourth highest market shares were Ciena and ZTE.
http://www.delloro.com

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YouTube: 3 Billion Views per Day, up 50% YoY

Google released some remarkable stats about YouTube, including:

YouTube is now delivering 3 billion views per day, a 50% increase over last year.

More than 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube , every minute, a 37% increase over the last six months and 100% over last year.

YouTube is celebrating its six year anniversary.
http://www.youtube.com

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Freescale Prices IPO at $18 Per Share

Freescale Semiconductor (NYSE: FSL) priced its initial public offering of 43,500,000 common shares at $18 per share.


The common shares are expected to begin trading on May 26, 2011, on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "FSL."http://www.freescale.com

• For Q1 2011, Freescale Semiconductor reported net sales for the first quarter of 2011 of $1.19 billion, compared to $1.18 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010 and $1.02 billion in the first quarter last year.   The loss from operations for the three months ended April 1, 2011 was $3 million, compared to
  a profit of $17 million in the fourth quarter of 2010 and a loss of $61 million in the first quarter
  of 2010. The net loss for the first quarter of 2011 was $148 million, compared to a loss of $10.

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CASSIDIAN and Alcatel-Lucent Target 400 MHz LTE for Emergency Responders

Cassidian and Alcatel-Lucent are jointly developing an LTE mobile broadband solution for emergency response and security communications systems operating in the 400 MHz spectrum band. The system will be able to support mobile video security, location-based video services and smart vehicle integration of devices and applications to complement the current voice and data systems.



Cassidian will develop radio heads and terminals specific to the needs of these systems in the 400 MHz spectrum, which ensures deep coverage and wide bandwidth services. Cassidian will also lead marketing and sales efforts for the solution in the public safety and defence markets where the 400 MHz spectrum is in use. Alcatel-Lucent will leverage its leadership in LTE to jointly integrate and validate the entire solutions and will lead marketing and sales efforts in transportation, energy and other industries.http://www.alcatel-lucent.com http://www.cassidian.com

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South Africa's Cell C Deploys GSM 900/1800MHz and DC-HSPA+

Cell C which is one of the top three mobile operators in South Africa, is the first mobile operator to operate a GSM 900MHz/1800MHz dual-band network. The GSM/UMTS 900M network uses ZTE's SDR base-stations, which simultaneously support both GSM and UMTS, and allows migration to HSPA+/LTE.　



Last July, ZTE and Cell C jointly announced Africa's first HSPA+ 900MHz network, which was upgraded to 42M DC-HSPA+ in less than a year.http://www.zte.com.cn

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AT&T to Launch LTE in 5 Markets this Summer

AT&T announced plans to launch LTE in five markets this summer -- Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Atlanta and San Antonio. It plans to add 10 or more markets in the second half of the year. Trials have delivered performance that is consistent with others. This would give AT&T an LTE footprint covering 70 million Americans by year-end.



In a presentation at a Barclays Conference, John Stankey noted that the average actual speed on the nationwide AT&T has improved by 40% thanks to upgrades to HSPA 7.2 and more recently HSPA+.http://www.att.com

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Extreme Networks Adds FCOE Support

Extreme Networks has added support for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) protocols in multi-vendor environments. The company recently launched its Extreme Networks "Open Fabric" data center solutions providing increased scale, virtualization, and automation to maximize performance and efficiency.



Extreme Networks also recently completed testing in conjunction with the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) FCoE Plugfest, held at the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab (UNH-IOL). This Plugfest focused on end-to-end tests that included FCoE with multiple FCFs (Fibre Channel Forwarders), Extreme Networks and other vendors Data Center Bridging (DCB) Ethernet switches and high availability configurations. The Plugfest provided an environment where leading Fibre Channel and Ethernet vendors came together to work in partnership on their respective FCoE products to ensure both interoperability and configurability between vendors. A total of 14 companies participated in the testing.



"Broad vendor interoperability testing and acceptance of emerging storage network technologies such as FCoE are critical to the wide scale adoption of converged storage networks," said David Ginsburg, sr. vice president of strategic marketing for Extreme Networks. "The successful testing of both FCoE and iSCSI with Extreme Networks DCB Ethernet switches in recent months at UNH IOL helps validate our Open Fabric approach."
http://www.extremenetworks.com

• The Extreme Networks Open Fabric data center architecture incorporates standards-based OpenFlow technology to simplify network provisioning and supports Data Center Bridging (DCB) to provide consolidation of LAN and storage fabrics in the data center, including iSCSI and FCoE. The company said its design goals with this new architecture were to scale for huge switching capacity, support vast number of highly dynamic virtual machines, while leveraging standards-based technologies and existing investments. The Extreme Networks Open Fabric data center solution leverages the ExtremeXOS operating system end-to-end and emphasizes wire-speed switching of Virtual Machines (VMs), intelligence to automate VM mobility through XNV, standards-based, non-blocking high density 10Gbs server connectivity and non-blocking high density 40Gbs fabric interconnect with multi-path forwarding that is also designed to evolve for 100GbE.

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