Monday, April 28, 2014

Overture Debuts Ensemble Service Orchestrator and Ensemble Network Controller

Overture is stepping up its game in software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) with the commercial availability of its Ensemble Service Orchestrator (ESO) and Ensemble Network Controller (ENC), two key pieces of its open architecture for service automation.

Overture said its goal is to bring together open automation and management of both the physical Carrier Ethernet and virtual infrastructure.  The will use open APIs for deployment into third-party infrastructure.any service provider architecture, Ensemble Service Orchestrator and Ensemble Network Controller may be deployed together as a system or integrated independently.

·       The Ensemble Service Orchestrator is an open, extensible carrier-class NFV service lifecycle management and orchestration system that coordinates virtual resources and physical network elements to create, activate and assure services using one or more virtual network functions. ESO uses the OpenStack™ cloud controller – bundled with ESO – to manage the virtual compute environment, including virtual machines, virtual switches and top-of-rack datacenter switches. For management of the physical wide area network traffic flows, ESO leverages Overture’s Ensemble Network Controller but can also be integrated with other third-party network controllers.
·       The Ensemble Network Controller is a service-aware network controller and management system for the Carrier Ethernet metro service edge. With native support for all Overture network elements, ENC is extensible to support third-party network elements and automates service creation, service activation, device detection, fault management and performance monitoring. By presenting a complete network picture, ENC helps service providers add new services and virtualized network functions without compromising existing network operations.

Overture has a number of field trials and proofs of concept underway.

“The automation and virtualization challenges at the metro service edge differ greatly from those in the data center, which led us to create a true carrier-class orchestration and control solution specifically focused on the part of the network where services are actually delivered,” said Mike Aquino, president and CEO, Overture. “Service providers need to be able to automate and orchestrate the complete service lifecycle across both the virtual and physical metro edge domains. We have been extremely pleased with the response that Ensemble OSA continues to receive from our service provider customers.”

http://www.overturenetworks.com

Overture's vE-CPE bundles Virtual Branch Office Router, Firewall, VPN

Overture introduced a turnkey network functions virtualization (NFV) solution for virtual managed enterprise CPE (vE-CPE).

The pre-tested, integrated solution bundles third-party virtual branch office router, firewall, and VPN functions with Overture’s Ensemble OSA software and enablement services. Additional pre-integrated virtual network functions (VNFs)are available as options. Through the Overture Ensemble orchestration and control software, the vE-CPE functions can be deployed in a centralized environment, such as a datacenter or central office, or may be distributed out to virtualization platforms on the customer premise.

Overture said this solution combines its strength in Carrier Ethernet 2.0, its new Ensemble OSA NFV orchestration and control software, a set of third-party VNFs, Overture enablement services, and technical support to create a fully integrated solution.

“In a growing ecosystem of independent software vendors, communications service providers (CSPs) that want to explore modern virtualization options may be resource-constrained to adequately evaluate all of the choices as well as perform all the required system integration work,” said Mike Aquino, president and CEO, Overture. “The Overture vE-CPE Ensemble Solution Pack provides an open, pre-integrated, fully-supported NFV solution to help them accelerate their enterprise service deployments.”

http://www.overturenetworks.com

IBM Opens its Cloud Marketplace and BlueMix Garage in SF's SOMA

IBM launched a new cloud marketplace that provides gateway for the company's extensive global business partner ecosystem to tap into the growing $250B cloud market opportunity.

Clients can access a full suite of IBM-as-a-Service with 100 SaaS applications, IBM's Bluemix platform-as-a-service with composable services, the powerful SoftLayer infrastructure-as-a-service and third party cloud services.

"Increasingly cloud users from business, IT and development across the enterprise are looking for easy access to a wide range of services to address new business models and shifting market conditions," said Robert LeBlanc, Senior Vice President, IBM Software & Cloud Solutions. "IBM Cloud marketplace puts Big Data and Analytics, mobile, social, commerce, integration ---- the full power of IBM-as-a-Service and our ecosystem --- at our clients' fingertips to help them quickly deliver innovative services to their constituents."

Initial third-party cloud providers in the marketplace include SendGrid, Zend, Redis Labs, Sonian, Flow Search Corp, Deep DB, M2Mi and Ustream.

In addition, IBM added 30 additional cloud services to BlueMix, its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to help developers quickly integrate applications and speed deployment of new cloud services.  Additionally, IBM is launching BlueMix Garages, collaborative locations where developers can create new apps on BlueMix, learn new development skills, and access IBM's developer ecosystem. The first such faclity is in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood.

IBM is leveraging BlueMix's foundation on SoftLayer. The goal is to combine  IBM's middleware software with third-party and open technologies to create an integrated development experience in the cloud.

http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/us/en/

Virtus Data Centres Adds Microsoft Azure Direct Connection in London

Virtus Data Centres began offering the availability of direct, private connections to Microsoft Azure from its data center in London.  The connection is provided Level 3’s network from Virtus Data Centres.

Virtus already offered direct connection into AWS, also provided over Level 3.

http://blog.virtusdatacentres.com/

Microsoft Bumps OneDrive Cloud Storage from 25GB to 1TB

Microsoft is increasing OneDrive for Business storage from 25GB to 1TB per user.  The boost affects all Office 365 ProPlus subscribers.  Microsoft is also developing tools to help businesses to migrate their content to OneDrive.

https://onedrive.live.com/about/en-us/


  • In its latest quarterly report released last week, Microsoft stated that Office 365 revenue grew over 100% year-over-year, and commercial seats nearly doubled, demonstrating strong enterprise momentum for Microsoft’s cloud productivity solutions.

AT&T Eyes Air-to-Ground LTE In-Flight Service

AT&T is looking to launch an LTE-based in-flight connectivity service for airlines and passengers in commercial, business and general aviation over the continental United States.

AT&T said it is working with Honeywell to provide hardware and service capabilities to deliver the in-flight connectivity solution. The companies did not disclose which spectrum bands already owned by AT&T they would use or how the new air-to-ground network would be configured.  They expect in-flight broadband performance will exceed current offerings and that the service could be available as soon as late 2015.
“Everyone wants access to high-speed, reliable mobile Internet wherever they are, including at 35,000 feet,” said John Stankey, Chief Strategy Officer at AT&T. “We are building on AT&T’s significant strengths to develop in-flight connectivity technology unlike any other that exists today, based on 4G LTE standards. We believe this will enable airlines and passengers to benefit from reliable high speeds and a better experience. We expect this service to transform connectivity in the aviation industry – we are truly mobilizing the sky.”

http://about.att.com/story/mobilizing_the_sky_att_building_4g_lte_in_flight_connectivity_service.html

HP Fortifies its Mission-Critical Cloud Platform

HP announced performance and reliability enhancements to the HP-UX operating environment and HP CloudSystem Matrix with HP-UX, as well as new HP Integrity NonStop entry-class servers.

The latest HP-UX 11i v3 solution reduces planned downtime for maintenance and upgrades while increasing capacity and performance. With this release, customers can now:

  • Perform zero-downtime platform upgrades of virtualized applications btween HP Integrity i2 and HP Integrity i4 servers.
  • Virtualize larger workloads, with double the virtual machine capacity from previous versions, now with up to 32 processor cores and 256 GB memory.
  • Reduce reboot times by up to 50 percent with Soft Reboot, available now for HP Integrity i4 server blades.
  • Reconfigure virtualized I/O without system downtime.

With enhancement to HP CloudSystem Matrix with HP-UX, customers can improve efficiency and service level agreement (SLA) performance with:

  • Larger private cloud deployments to enable better performance and flexibility, by provisioning workloads running vPars (v6), or with direct I/O networking.
  • Lowered entry cost of HP-UX private cloud deployments with new two socket license bundles.
  • Increased data center processing capacity by identifying inefficient server processes, so they can be eliminated and resources can be made available for key workloads.

“Enterprises everywhere are required to handle significant data volume while providing customers continuous access and availability to their mission-critical workloads,” said Ric Lewis, vice president and general manager, Enterprise Servers Business, HP. “The latest enhancements to our HP Integrity solutions demonstrate HP’s commitment to provide customers with purpose-built, highly-available infrastructure capabilities for their most critical applications.”

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/hp-news/press-release.html?id=1631138#.U18m0vldWP0

Fujitsu+Panasonic Silicon Venture Gets Funded

Fujitsu Semiconductor and Panasonic received funding support from Development Bank of Japan for a new venture that would combine certain semiconductor assets from each company.

Based on the agreement reached so far, Fujitsu, Panasonic and DBJ have agreed that DBJ will make a maximum investment of 20.0 billion yen in equity capital in the new company and will provide a maximum credit line of 10.0 billion yen to the new company. As a result, at the time of the business integration, it is expected that the ratio of voting rights held in the new company by Fujitsu, Panasonic and DBJ will be 40%, 20%, and 40%, respectively. The new company will operate independently.

http://www.fujitsu.com/global/news/pr/archives/month/2014/20140423-01.html