Orange Business Boosts Capacity in Latin America

Orange Business Services will increase the capacity of its Latin American network to accommodate customers' needs for expanding high-speed broadband services, including MPLS (IP VPN and Business VPN), International Ethernet Link and video services, such as Telepresence.


The new network ring, which will offer 10X the capacity of the current one, will connect Latin America to the East Coast of the United States via Brazil and to the West Coast of the United States via Chile (through Peru and Panama). The upgrade will enhance quality of service for customers with improved latency to the West Coast, while also supporting the growing capacity requirements from Asia-Pacific.
http://www.orange.com

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Dell Launches VMware vCloud Datacenter Service

Dell entered the enterprise cloud market with the launch of a VMware vCloud Datacenter Service that provides a seamless multi-tenant environment for running virtual systems. Specifically, Dell and VMware will provide Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) choice for customer organizations, hosting and outsourcing firms, system integrators and service providers. The service is currently in beta testing.


This is the first public and hybrid cloud offering by Dell. The company will also offer consulting, application and infrastructure services to help companies migrate to the cloud. Dell noted that it has one of the largest install bases of VMware customers and data center customers, making its entrance into cloud services a natural fit.


Dell Cloud with VMware vCloud Datacenter Services includes several options for customers:


Public - Dell Cloud with VMware vCloud Datacenter Service is an enterprise-class, secure offer of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IAAS) hosted in a secure Dell datacenter. This service provides access to vCPUs, memory, storage networks, IP addresses, firewalls, and catalog capabilities.


Private – Utilizing the same expertise, service and technology delivered in its own datacenters, Dell will build private clouds at either our customer's datacenter or Dell datacenters leveraging VMware offerings including VMware vSphere and VMware vCloud Director as well as Dell's vStart offering.


Hybrid - Dell and VMware provide a single source to substantially simplify the management of customers' physical and VMware vSphere-based virtual data center infrastructure adding flexibility to customer requirements. Utilizing VMware vCloud Connector, the hybrid cloud solution provides management of on- or off-premise private cloud and Dell's Public cloud offering.
http://www.dell.com
http://www.dellintheclouds.com/

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MultiService Forum and GSMA Host VoLTE Testing

The MultiService Forum (MSF) is expecting a strong turn out of 25 leading companies for its upcoming Voice over LTE (VoLTE) Interoperability Testing Event, which will be held next month in Beijing and Dusseldorf. Acme Packet, Alcatel-Lucent, Codenomicon, D2 Technologies, EXFO, IPneo, Metaswitch, Samsung, Stoke, Traffix Systems and VSS Monitoring are participating in the event, joining event sponsors GENBAND, Huawei, ZTE, Alepo, Bridgewater Systems, Cisco and WiChorus, a Tellabs company.


Unlike other recent VoLTE events the MSF VoLTE interoperability event is not focused solely on UE interoperability, but in addition targets interoperability of EPC, PCC, and IMS core elements supplied by different vendors. Test scenarios include VoLTE basic interoperability, but also focus on global Roaming and Interconnection as specified by the GSMA.


NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) launched a new MSF initiative to develop conformance test cases for the LTE EPC interfaces. The goal of this initiative is to develop a suite of EPC test documents that can be utilized by third party labs or network operators to evaluate whether a given vendor's implementation of EPC interfaces conforms to the 3GPP specifications. NIST is looking to develop public safety conformance tests, as the basis for a future MSF IOT Event.


Also announced at the MSF Q3 Technical Committee Meeting in Denver was appointment of Jesus Trujillo Gomez, Technical Marketing Engineer of Cisco Systems to the Technical Committee Leadership Team.


"The success of VoLTE requires interoperability to simplify interconnect and roaming. The participants in the MSF's IOT event demonstrate the diverse nature of the players that will make up the VoLTE ecosystem, and represents a significant step towards practical, interoperable implementations of VoLTE," said Dan Warren, Senior Director of Technology, GSMA.


"The event will give operators the confidence that Voice over LTE is a foundation on which to build tomorrow's voice and rich communications services networks," said Kyu-Ouk Lee, Project Leader and Principal Researcher at Korea's Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), and newly elected MSF President.
http://www.msforum.orghttp://www.msforum.org/interoperability/VoLTE.shtml

• The MSF will host the VoLTE IOT 2011 Event in the Vodafone Centre for Test and Innovation in Dusseldorf and the China Mobile Research Institute Lab in Beijing in September 2011. The event is backed by the GSMA following the launch of its global VoLTE initiative in 2010, which is supported by more than 40 leading organisations in the mobile space.

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Dell'Oro: Service Provider Market Up 26% in Q2

The worldwide service provider router market grew sharply by 26% in the second quarter of 2011 due to strong demand from the North American and Asia Pacific regions, according to a new report from Dell'Oro Group. The report points to mobile backhaul projects in the United States and fiber optic broadband initiatives in China as the underlying drivers of the market growth.


"Mobile backhaul has been a key market driver for several quarters, but this was the first quarter where we saw a substantial effect from the China broadband upgrade," said Shin Umeda, Vice President at Dell'Oro Group. "From a vendor perspective, Alcatel-Lucent jumped to an early lead in mobile backhaul, and Huawei is doing very well in its home China market, but we would expect Cisco and Juniper to pursue these opportunities as well," added Umeda.
http://www.delloro.com

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Samsung Develops ChatON Communications Service

Samsung Electronics introduced a free mobile communication service that works across mobile platforms and allows users to communicate instantly with any mobile phone.


Samsung's ChatON mobile communication service lets all users join in, with text, images, hand-written notes and video shared instantly. Users can chat in groups, while a Web client will allow the easy sharing of content and conversations between mobile and PC. Samsung is releasing ChatON in more than 120 countries, supporting up to 62 languages. A basic functionality option is available for feature phone users who prefer simple and easy usage, allowing users to share text, pictures, calendar, contacts and emotions through an easy-to-access client.
http://www.samsung.com

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Net Optics Introduces 10 Gbps Aggregation Switch

Net Optics introduced its Phantom HD high-throughput aggregation appliance for network monitoring. It supports 10 Gbps tunnel for aggregating traffic to monitoring tools.


The Phantom HD eliminates the need for a physical, wired connection between the monitoring and access layers and the instrumentation layer. This removes the physical proximity requirement for monitoring tools. Visibility into the virtual network allows raw network traffic to be transported from several remote locations to one central control site, then inspected and stored.


Net Optics said its Phantom HD can aggregate traffic of interest from multiple Phantom Virtual Taps (software Tap) at one location. Network managers can then view and inspect any traffic of interest (wired or virtual) from several remote offices in one central point. http://www.netoptics.com

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Mellanox Debuts 64-port 10GbE Switch

Mellanox Technologies introduced a low-latency 64-port 10GbE switch delivered in a top-of-rack 1U form factor.

The SX1016, which is based on the company's SwitchX switch silicon ICs, delivers up to 1.28 Tbps of switching bandwidth, extreme port density and 1.8W per port power consumption.

It also features Data Center Bridging and management support of IPv6, with the ability to extend L2 and L3 features through future software upgrades.

The SX1016 supports reversed airflow adding flexibility for data centers with different thermal designs, and consists of redundant fans and PSUs for higher availability. The SX1016 is equipped with enhanced chassis management capabilities supporting Web UI, industry-standard CLI, and is supported by Mellanox Unified Fabric Manager (UFM), which provides extensive end-to-end fabric orchestration and monitoring capabilities for virtualizing and scaling out data centers.


Separately, Mellanox announced it has added Multiple Physical Function (MPF) capabilities to its ConnectX-3 10/40GbE adapters for VMware ESXi 5.0. MPF allows each port of the ConnectX-3 10/40GbE adapter to present itself as multiple, individual physical NICs and to assign different bandwidth and priority to each physical NIC for different traffic types or functionality such as management, storage, VMotion, networking, etc. Mellanox supports up to 4 virtual NICs per port. http://www.mellanox.com

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Cisco Acquires Versly for MS Office Collaboration Plug-ins

Cisco has acquired privately-held Versly, a software developer based in San Francisco. Financial terms were not disclosed.


Versly integrates collaboration capabilities via a plug-in into Microsoft Office applications, simplifying the way people work by enabling more effective collaboration around content in documents, spreadsheets, presentations and email.


"Collaboration is a top priority at Cisco. With this acquisition we're enhancing our collaboration offerings and improving the user experience by integrating social technologies within the business applications individuals and teams use at work," said Murali Sitaram, vice president and general manager, Collaboration Software Group (CSG), Cisco. "Furthermore, the integration with Versly will drive productivity improvements for organizations and their knowledge workers, many of whom are among the 600 million Microsoft Office users."
http://www.cisco.com

• Cisco's 2011 acquisitions include Axioss for service fulfillment software (August), newScale for Self-Service Portal Software (March), Inlet for Digital Media Processing (February 2011) and Pari Networks for Security Alert Compliance (January).

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Juniper Adds Antivirus to Cloud Gateway

Juniper Networks has enhanced its vGW Virtual Gateway solution with virtualization-specific antivirus (AV) protections for continuous monitoring against malware and hackers. Added to vGW Virtual Gateway version 5.0 are increased protection, scalability and compliance features for virtualized workloads. vGW 5.0 integrates monitoring, firewall, intrusion detection and compliance capabilities with new layers of defenses including antivirus protection, hypervisor compliance monitoring, and large-scale virtualization security management capabilities, making it a universal threat management (UTM) solution for cloud computing. http://www.juniper.net

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