Netsocket Debuts SDN for for the Distributed Enterprise

Netsocket introduced its Virtual Network solution for enterprise campuses and distributed office LAN and edge networking environments. Most SDN solutions target data center or metro networks.

Netsocket's Enterprise Edition NVN vNetCommander orchestration application, which now commercially available, is comprised of a three-tier SDN architecture – providing end-to-end virtual networking, centralized orchestration and automation, and superior interoperability and integration with legacy routed networks as well as higher-level management systems such as Microsoft System Center. The Netsocket Virtual Network interconnects enterprise branches in just a few minutes, with no networking expertise required at the site. Its switching and routing components are automatically deployed and provisioned to each branch office using the centralized, intuitive network management application vNetCommander. The company said its web-based GUI, the vNetCommander, can handle automated deployment, installation, configuration and orchestration of virtualized networks all from a centralized console.

 “One of the advantages of NVN for distributed enterprises is that it facilitates an extremely low risk and low cost path to try SDN virtualized networking and to evaluate the benefits”, said Fletcher Hamilton, president and CEO of Netsocket.  “There is so much hype in the SDN world that it’s hard to know what solutions are really ready for prime time.   By implementing SDN first at a branch location, a solution like NVN can be seamlessly proven interoperable and operational within your existing network in just a few hours.  This allows an enterprise to easily separate the hype from the facts.”

http://www.netsocket.com.

http://www.virtualnetwork.com

In July, Netsocket, a start-up based in Plano, Texas, unveiled its flagship Netsocket Virtual Network (NVN) product suite for bringing SDN-based orchestration and automation capabilities to enterprise infrastructure based commodity x86 servers.

Netsocket has developed a three-tier SDN architecture for interoperability and integration with legacy routed networks as well as higher level management systems such as Microsoft System Center.  The NetSocketdesign uses a vFlow controller with routing, firewall, and VPN capabilities built-in.

Key goals include flexibility of configuration and management, seamless legacy network interoperability via the intrinsic routing capability in the controller,  and commoditization of switching functions by eliminating the need for any network hardware other than commodity layer 2 switches and off-the-shelf x86 servers.  The framework provides automated networking through NVN applications that are network configuration and operational state 'aware,' and capable of adaptively monitoring and controlling underlying network services. This would enable enterprises to cap their purchases of proprietary routers and layer 3 switches and begin to migrate towards an agile software-based network infrastructure that relies only on commodity servers and inexpensive layer 2 switches.

The Netsocket Virtual Network (NVN) product suite consists of software for x86 virtual server platforms.  Key components include:

• vFlowController -- an SDN controller with intrinsic vRouter, vTunnel and vFirewall components.
• vNetCommander -- a centralized management system for NVN that handles automated installation, provisioning and orchestration of the network.
• vNetOptimizer -- a next generation virtualized version of Netsocket’s Cloud Experience Manager service assurance product, and will provide for real-time network service analytics, automation and optimization of the network.

Netsocket is natively targeting all of the popular hypervisors, including Microsoft Hyper-V. It is working on interoperability with OpenStack & Microsoft System Center.

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Omnitron Integrates Power-over-Ethernet into Carrier Ethernet NID

Omnitron Systems introduced a Carrier Ethernet (CE) 2.0 Network Interface Device that integrates up to 60W Power over Ethernet (PoE) to directly power small cell equipment.

Omnitron said that by integrating CE 2.0 demarcation and PoE functions into a compact device, it can simplify small cell deployments by eliminating the need for power wiring to the cell or, alternatively, the usage of midspan power equipment.

“Complexity, power requirements and high backhaul equipment cost, have been critical factors slowing down small cell deployments,” said Rammy Bahalul, Omnitron Vice President of Marketing. “The compact yet highly-integrated GM4-PoE now enables Service Providers to reduce installation complexity, simplify power delivery to the small cell and achieve the target cost structure required to accelerate small cell deployments.”    

GM4-PoE NIDs are available in two PoE basic models; GM4-PoE+ and GM4-HPoE. Both models support the 802.3af PoE (15.4W) and 802.3at PoE+ (25.5W) standards per port, while the GM4-HPoE models also provide up to 60W of power per port.  The GM4-PoE NIDs are available with full PoE power on up to four RJ-45 ports, and feature up to two SFP fiber ports that support G.8032 Ethernet Ring Protection Switching to enable resilient ring configurations. 

htt://www.omnitron-systems.com

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Ciena Introduces New Switches for 10GbE Services

Ciena announced new packet networking solutions for supporting 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) services.

Ciena’s new 5160 and 5142 Service Aggregation Switches are small form-factor platforms that enable efficient delivery and aggregation of large quantities of data at speeds of 1GbE to 10GbE while meeting increasingly stringent SLAs.

Key capabilities include: 10GbE service activation testing, extended temperature range support, full synchronization support, and greatly reduced power and space footprint.

Ciena said its new E-Suite platforms are seamlessly integrated with the latest packet capabilities on the widely deployed 6500 Packet-Optical Platform and leverage the field-proven, full-featured Service-Aware Operating System (SAOS) provided by Ciena’s existing portfolio of packet networking and converged packet optical solutions.

http://www.ciena.com

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SAP Ventures Raises US$1 Billion in One Year

SAP Ventures, the independent venture capital firm affiliated with SAP AG, has raised more than US$650 million for a new direct investment fund, SAP Ventures Fund II.  The company has raised a further US$405 million for its SAP HANA Real Time Fund, which invests in early stage VC funds.  Inclusive of SAP Ventures Fund I, a US$353 million direct investment fund launched in 2011, the firm's total assets under management increased to more than US$1.4 billion.

SAP Ventures noted its record results this year: 12 initial public offering (IPO) and merger and acquisition (M&A) events to date in 2013. Five of its portfolio companies went public, including Control 4, Just Dial, Marin Software, Tremor Video and Violin Memory. Seven of its portfolio companies were acquired, including Aepona, Apriso, Datria, ExactTarget, Ignite, ScaleIO and Voxeo.

"SAP Ventures is an integral partner of the innovation drive and intellectual renewal happening at SAP. They are helping us build a broader ecosystem that includes some of the most innovative founders, developers and venture capitalists," said Dr. Vishal Sikka, member of the Executive Board of SAP AG. "I have been a big supporter of SAP Ventures over the years. We are proud of our commitment to their newest fund and I look forward to supporting them on their journey."

http://www.sapventures.com/

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WD's New My Cloud Delivers Terabits of Personal Storage

WD introduced a new family of "My Cloud" personal cloud drives that provide consumers with multiple terabytes of digital content storage that is accessible to friends and family over the web and can be integrated with major public cloud services, including Dropbox, SkyDrive and Google Drive.

WD is positioning its My Cloud as a solution for users to organize, centralize and secure the digital content from all of their computers and mobile devices.  The HDD, which is available in 2 TB, 3 TB, and 4 TB capacities, connects via USB 3.0 to serve as a digital hub for the home network.

"We believe that there's no place like home for the cloud," said Jim Welsh, executive vice president and general manager of WD's branded products and consumer electronics groups. "Everyone is inundated with thousands of digital files scattered across multiple computers and mobile devices, and controlling that chaos is a challenge. WD's personal cloud is the easiest, most secure and most affordable way for customers to control that chaos, with access to all of their files anywhere, anytime."

The average household will own approximately 3.3 terabytes (TB) of digital content by 2016, according to research from Gartner.  WD believes that automated software will be key to connecting, sharing, syncing, and backing-up digital content from all the smartphones, tablets and computers in the home.

A two drive and four drive My Cloud configuration will be available in the future.
http://www.wd.com/en/

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Enabling Bluetooth for Smart Wireless Charging Stations

The Bluetooth SIG and Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP) have set-up a formal liaison relationship to advance smart wireless charging station.

As a first step, the Bluetooth SIG has issued a Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) to the A4WP for adoption in its baseline system specification (BSS).  The A4WP BSS utilizes the Bluetooth Smart radio standard to carry the session management and power control between an A4WP charging station and an A4WP-certified device, e.g., smartphone.

The organizations said benefits of their collaboration include:

• Consumers will benefit from devices initiating a charge more quickly when coming into contact with charging surfaces
  
• Consumers will also see improved power control features such as giving one device prioritized charging when multiple devices are charging at the same time
  
• OEMs and developers will be able to create a new class of applications  to leverage these smart wireless charging stations (e.g., mobile payments, location based services)

"Bluetooth Smart is a foundation technology for the Alliance for Wireless Power," said Dr. Kamil A. Grajski, president of the A4WP.  "By combining Bluetooth Smart with magnetic resonant wireless power transfer technology, the A4WP delivers a next-generation user experience that features one charging station to many simultaneous devices, freedom of placement on tabletops, desktops and automotive environments, and charging solutions that scale seamlessly from wireless headsets to smartphones, to tablets and laptops."

http://www.a4wp.org/

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Infonetics: 16G Fibre Channel Passing 8G This Year

The global SAN equipment market, including Fibre Channel switches and iSCSI and Fibre Channel host bus adapters, totaled $631 million in 2Q13, an increase of 4% from 1Q13, but a decline of 8% from the year-ago quarter (2Q12), according to a new report from Infonetics. One of the biggest trends is the ramp in 16 Fibre Channel.

"Cisco's 16G Fibre Channel ports are finally hitting the market, and we believe its customers' pent-up demand for Fibre Channel inter-switch connection will help push 16G revenue past 8G by the end of 2013," predicts Michael Howard, Infonetics Research's co-founder and principal analyst for carrier networks. "Meanwhile, Brocade, which enjoyed a similar jump start when it came to market with 16G Fibre Channel in 2011, is settling in for the longer-term 16G replacement of 8G as the speed of choice."

Cliff Grossner, directing analyst for data center and cloud at Infonetics, adds: "We're forecasting 16G Fibre Channel switch revenue to grow at a 46% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2013 to 2017."

Additional highlights:

• In the adapter segment, combined Fibre Channel and iSCSI revenue fell 5% in 2Q13 from the previous quarter
• Thanks to its introduction of 16G Fibre Channel, Cisco was able to buck a down quarter that plagued many of the other leading vendors in the SAN space
  
• In 2Q13, the worldwide high-performance interconnect equipment (HPI) market, including converged FCoE/Ethernet switches and converged network adapters, grew 26% sequentially, and is up 43% year-over-year
  
• Growth in the HPI market continues to reflect operators' ongoing investments in data center infrastructure and interest in LAN/SAN convergence
  
• Sales of converged FCoE/Ethernet switches are up 26% in 2Q13 from 1Q13 

http://www.infonetics.com/pr/2013/2Q13-SAN-and-High-Performance-Interconnect-Equipment-Market-Highlights.asp

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RAD Joins Cyan Blue Orbit SDN Ecosystem

RAD is the latest company to join the Cyan Blue Orbit ecosystem of partners focused on multi-vendor SDN and network functions virtualization (NFV) applications.

RAD’s joining of Blue Orbit follows the recent completion by Cyan of end-to-end Ethernet services provisioning and "one-click OAM" as well as alarms and topology support for the RAD ETX-2. This integration enables network operators to have visibility and management of RAD platforms through Cyan’s Blue Planet SDN Platform.
 
“There is a lot of industry chatter around the promise of SDN/NFV, but when it comes down to it, carriers want proof beyond the hype to know our solutions can be successfully deployed,” said Yuri Gittik, Head of Strategic Marketing, RAD. “The Blue Orbit ecosystem allows us to test and demonstrate interoperability between our innovative solutions, including Distributed NFV, and other multi-vendor SDN solutions to ensure smooth infrastructure rollouts.”

http://www.cyaninc.com

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Samsung Intros SSDs for VMware Virtual SANs

Samsung Electronics introduced a high-performing solid state drive (SSD) for VMware Virtual SANs, which allows customers to pool server disks and flash resources to create a resilient, high-performance and dynamic shared storage solution for virtual machines.

The SM1625 SSD, Samsung’s first dual-ported SAS SSD with densities of up to 800 GBs, has been certified for VMware Virtual SAN for use in data centers and other enterprise applications. The newly certified SAS SM1625 enterprise storage, which is produced using 20 nanometer (nm) class technology, can read data sequentially at 950 MB/s (megabytes per second). In addition, the SM1625 has a random read speed of 120,000 IOPS (inputs/outputs per second). Further, it can handle up to 10 drive writes per day, an endurance rate that covers a typical warranty period for its full five years.

“VMware Virtual SAN provides customers a simpler and more flexible tier of storage for their virtual machines,” said John Gilmartin, vice president, Cloud Infrastructure Products, VMware. “By clustering flash and direct-attached storage, VMware Virtual SAN provides a shared storage solution that is high-performing, cost-effective, and seamlessly integrated into VMware vCenter™ Server. We are pleased to have Samsung’s SM1625 SSD as a high-performance storage option for our joint customers.”

“We are very enthusiastic about this SM1625 certification as the basis for partnering with VMware to offer a SAS storage solution for the enterprise,” said JaeHyeong Lee, vice president of memory product planning & application engineering, Samsung Electronics. “We will work closely with not only our OEM customers but also global software companies such as VMware in looking to develop high performing and environmentally-friendly IT systems for data center applications and enterprise storage.”

http://www.samsung.com

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Aricent Partners with Broadcom on Mobile Backhaul Framework

Aricent announced a collaboration with Broadcom to develop  a carrier-grade mobile backhaul reference framework.

Aricent's Intelligent Switching Solution (ISS), which is a software framework that offers Layer 2 switching, IPv4/v6 routing, QoS, security, and management capabilities, has been tested and deployed in the field on Broadcom's StrataXGS BCM56440 Ethernet Switch leveraging Broadcom's latest Software Development Kit (SDK).

The joint solution can render  Layer 2 and VLAN switching, Layer 3 routing, MPLS, MPLS-TP, provider backbone bridging (PBB), operations, administration and management (OAM), protection, timing, and synchronization features to help equipment vendors build next generation carrier grade mobile backhaul solutions. ISS on Broadcom's StrataXGS BCM56450 platform will be available by the end of this year.

http://www.aricent.com

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