Qwilt Unveils its Unified, Transparent Video Caching

Qwilt, a start-up based in Redwood Shores, California, unveiled its QB-Series transparent-video delivery appliance for helping carriers gain control over Internet-video traffic on their networks. The company claims its QB-Series appliance can help operators reduce video traffic demands by 60-80%.


Qwilt is using proprietary video-content classification and analysis technology to transparently detect video content in an operator's Internet-traffic stream. Qwilt then adds optimized storage and delivery capabilities in a unified appliance.
http://www.qwilt.com

• In October 2011, raised $24 million in two rounds of funding for its development of video infrastructure products. The company's mission is to help Internet Service Providers to more efficiently and cost-effectively deliver high-quality video to their customers from sources like Netflix, YouTube and Amazon. The platform will identify, monitor, store and deliver Internet video. Qwilt's funding comes from Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Crescent Point Group and other investors. The company, founded in 2010 by veterans of Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks.



• Qwilt is headed by Alon Maor, who previously was at Cisco where he oversaw the development and operations of the Service Control Engine (SCE) product line. Alon joined Cisco following the $200M acquisition of P-Cube.

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Cisco Updates its Unified Computing Systems (UCS)

Cisco announced a series of enhancements and upgrades to its Unified Computing System, which integrates network, compute, virtualization and management. The changes, which are aimed at delivering third-generation fabric computing, leverage the newly announced Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family and includes multiple server form factors. The new Intel silicon provides far greater server density and efficiency, with up to eight times the memory capacity and four times the I/O compared to previous UCS servers. In addition, the Cisco UCS Manager now allows IT administrators to manage both blade and rack servers as a common entity, and extends the management domain to span thousands of servers across data centers around the world.


In the second half of 2012, Cisco will introduce technology to support large-scale UCS deployments through centralized management for multiple UCS domains, spanning thousands of servers either in a single data center or spread across data centers around the world, providing industry-leading automation and orchestration for cloud environments.


Some highlights:


The chassis I/O module 2204XP provides options for 80Gbps and 160Gbps down to each chassis to handle workload bursts. The module also offers port channeling, which allows load balancing across all ports to improve efficiency and resiliency through higher link utilization and bandwidth.


The Cisco UCS 6296UP Fabric Interconnect doubles the switching capacity of the UCS fabric (from 960Gbps to 1.92Tbps) and reduces end-to-end latency by 40 percent.


The Cisco UCS 6200 Series combined with the Cisco Nexus Fabric Extender extends Cisco UCS Manager benefits to larger scale UCS deployments for both blade and rack form factors.


Cisco UCS B200 M3 Blade Server: The enterprise-class Cisco UCS B200 M3 server provides performance, versatility, and density in a half-blade form factor, delivering balanced, industry-leading density through its 24 DIMM slots and up to 80 gigabits of I/O bandwidth. Greater density, performance and bandwidth mean business applications can run faster, more cost-effectively, and more efficiently.


UCS C220 M3 Rack Server: The Cisco UCS C220 M3 Rack Server is a one-rack-unit (1RU) server designed for performance and density for a wide range of business workloads, from Web services to distributed databases.


UCS C240 M3 Rack Server: The Cisco UCS C240 M3 Rack Server is a two-rack-unit (2RU) server designed for both performance and expandability over a wide range of storage-intensive infrastructure workloads, from big data to collaboration.


Cisco also cited growing market traction for UCS. Since it was introduced in, 2009, nearly 11,000 customers worldwide have deployed Cisco UCS to unify their data centers.
http://www.cisco.com

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Ericsson Scales its Packet Optical Transport Platform to Multi-Terabit

Ericsson is extending its SPO Packet Optical Transport Platform (POTP) family from the Metro Access to the Metro Regional network to support popular packet, TDM and wavelength services on one platform.


Ericsson’s SPO 1400 family, which leverages a Unified Packet/OTN Switch Fabric, integrates OTN, SONET/SDH and PDH support and performance, L2 connection oriented Ethernet switching and aggregation and WDM technology. The product family previously scaled from 2-service slots and 40G of capacity to a chassis-platform offering 16-service slots and 800G of capacity.


The new SPO 1480 scales the solution to 32/40 service slots and a switching fabric with 3.2 Tbps of capacity. It brings fully non-blocking ODU-0 granularity to the metro regional aggregation and it also introduces 100 Gbps Coherent DWDM interfaces.


Ericsson said the value proposition of its SPO POTP family is the ability to deliver low and high order TDM and packet and wavelength services across the Metro Access and Regional network on a common set of platforms with a single multilayer IP Transport Network Management Systems (IPT NMS). The hybrid TDM-WDM-Packet architecture provides the flexibility to optimize node configurations for location and cost with the ability to scale optical capacity without sacrificing shelf switching capacity.


"Ericsson’s latest SPO release provides network operators with a single platform that spans the metro from access/aggregation to regional/core," said Phil Winterbottom, Head of Optical & Metro Product Management at Ericsson. "By providing an integrated platform that supports all the networking layers from WDM to TDM and Packet, we have provided the simplest and most cost-effective path for modernizing metro optical networks delivering real value to our customers."


The new platform was on display at this week's OFC/NFOEC in Los Angeles.
http://www.ericsson.com

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Altera Lowers Q1 Financial Guidance

Altera lowered its first quarter 2012 revenue guidance. Initially, the company expected a 5 to 9 percent sequential revenue decline, largely the result of program timing in the military vertical market and continued softness in sales to wireless customers. Altera now says that as the quarter has progressed, it has experienced somewhat more pronounced and broader than anticipated inventory adjustment related weakness and now believes that first quarter revenue will be 7 to 9 percent lower than fourth quarter levels.


The company continues to expect that revenue in the second quarter of 2012 will be above first quarter levels. Quarter-to-date book to bill remains above 1.0.
http://www.altera.com

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TI Lowers Financial Guidance, Cites Weaker Wireless Sales

Texas Instruments lowered its expected ranges for revenue and earnings per share (EPS) for Q1, citing lower demand for its wireless products.


The company currently expects its financial results to be within the following ranges:


Revenue: $2.99 – 3.11 billion compared with the prior range of $3.02 – 3.28 billion

EPS: $0.15 – 0.19 compared with the prior range of $0.16 – 0.24.
http://www.ti.com

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Mindspeed Intros Third-Generation Burst-Mode Laser Driver

Mindspeed Technologies introduced the third generation of its burst-made laser drivers for optical networking units (ONUs) for GEPON GPON. The highly integrated solution features power-saving sleep and current reduction modes and supports data rates to 3.1Gbps in a small 4x4 mm package.


"The M02099 family of burst-mode laser driver chipsets builds on the feature set of our widely deployed M02090 and M02098 drivers, including lower power dual-closed-loop EyeMinder™ technology that delivers real-time monitoring and compensation for laser aging and temperature effects,�? said Gary Shah, vice president of product marketing, high performance analog (HPA) at Mindspeed.
http://www.mindspeed.com

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Exinda Raises $12 Million for WAN Optimization

Exinda, a start-up based in Boston, raised $12 million in series B funding for its WAN optimization solutions incorporating Unified Performance Management.

Unlike conventional approaches to WAN optimization which focus primarily on mass data compression and optimization, Exinda’s performance assurance technology introduces user and application profiling for precision optimization. Exinda’s assurance architecture targets 52 unique user and application attributes to optimize traffic to assure the network meets its business service level agreements.

The round saw participation from existing investor OpenView Venture Partners as well as attracting new investment from Greenspring Associates.
http://www.exinda.com

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