Huawei: SDN and the Future of Networking

In this video interview, Jane Li, Chief Operating Officer, Huawei Enterprise, discusses cloud networking and SDN as key trends reshaping the industry and leading to new opportunities for companies with a broad range of integration expertise.

00:08 - Where are the big opportunities in networking today?

01:21 - How is Huawei positioned to deal with the transition to SDN in enterprise and data center networks?

02:32 - Where is SDN in the market today?

03:19 - Is SDN just another marketing game or will the concept of openness really take hold?

05:40 - What elements does Huawei need in its portfolio to succeed in SDN?

Ajay Gupta, Director of Marketing, Huawei, comments on the following:

07:34 - Will bare metal servers/switches based on commodity silicon come to dominate the networks of tomorrow?

08:59 - Will the transition to SDN be about building overlays on top of conventional networks?

09:50 - What are the market drivers for SDN?

10:35 - From an SDN point of view, how does Huawei approach security?

11:21 - What is the best thing about SDN?

See video: http://youtu.be/QsZT0yjXRN0

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Red Hat to Acquire Inktank, Provider of Ceph Scale-Out Storage

Red Hat agreed to acquire Inktank, a leading provider of scale-out, open source storage systems, for approximately $175 million in cash.

Founded in 2012, Inktank’s main objective has been to drive the widespread adoption of Ceph, a scalable, open source, software-defined storage system that runs on commodity hardware.   The company's flagship technology, Inktank Ceph Enterprise, delivers object and block storage software to enterprises deploying public or private clouds, including many early adopters of OpenStack clouds. Ceph was developed by Inktank’s founder and chief technology officer, Sage Weil, and is a replacement for legacy storage systems and provides a unified solution for cloud computing environments. Inktank’s customers include Cisco, CERN and Deutsche Telekom, and its partners include Alcatel-Lucent and Dell. The company has offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Red Hat said the Ceph technology will be combined with its own existing GlusterFS-based storage offering, thus positioning Red Hat as the leading provider of open software-defined storage across object, block and file system storage.

http://www.redhat.com
http://www.inktank.com

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Equinix Cloud Exchange Simplifies Direct Connects to Public Clouds

Equinix launched its new Cloud Exchange, an advanced interconnection solution that enables seamless, on-demand and direct access to multiple clouds and multiple networks.  The goal is to give enterprises direct access to services for building sophisticated hybrid cloud solutions inside Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers.

With the Equinix Cloud Exchange customers can connect to Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute in Silicon Valley, Washington, D.C. and London with planned expansions into 13 additional markets by the end of 2014.  Customers can also access Amazon Web Services via the Equinix Cloud Exchange in Silicon Valley, Washington, D.C. and London. In addition, Equinix is working with other key cloud and network service providers to provide access to their services via the Cloud Exchange. Equinix provides a Cloud Exchange Portal and APIs to simplify the process of managing connections to multiple cloud services. Businesses can use the Portal and APIs to allocate, monitor and provision virtual circuits in near real-time with the provisioning of those circuits automated end-to-end from the Cloud Exchange to the service provider.

Equinix expects to be serving a total of 19 markets by the end of 2014 with its Cloud Exchange.

"Just as it was with the Internet, the key to realizing the business benefits of the cloud is how well connected it is," said Ihab Tarazi, chief technology officer at Equinix. "But companies are recognizing that the Internet has security and performance limitations, given that it is inherently open and shared publicly. By utilizing direct access via the Equinix Cloud Exchange, businesses no longer have to compromise on these essential requirements when accessing cloud providers."

http://www.equinix.com
http://www.ciena.com

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Riverbed Intros Virtual Cascade Express for Performance Monitoring

Riverbed Technology introduced a virtual version of its Cascade Express 460, which provides visibility into private cloud or software-defined data center environments running virtualized networks.

The Cascade Express 460 Virtual Edition network performance monitoring solution combines monitoring of traditional and virtualized network environments in a single virtual appliance that can be deployed easily into any type of environment.

“Software-defined data centers built on private cloud technology offer tremendous savings and flexibility, so businesses are increasingly adopting this approach to provision new services on demand,” said Dimitri Vlachos, vice president of marketing and products for Riverbed. “Cascade Express Virtual Edition enables customers to leverage powerful compute and network virtualization platforms while providing advanced application-aware network performance management. Customers gain a holistic view of their virtual and physical infrastructure, allowing them to have complete insight into application performance regardless of where the application is hosted and how it is delivered.”

Riverbed Cascade Express Virtual Edition runs on VMware vSphere.  Key capabilities:

• End-to-end monitoring, analytics and reporting. Avoid impact to the business from bad apps with advanced analytics that automatically detect, isolate and pinpoint changes in performance. Map cloud application dependencies to accelerate troubleshooting across complex application ecosystems.
• High-speed packet capture and storage with deep packet inspection of more than 1,000 popular applications combined with robust flow collection and deduplication for automated traffic and performance analysis.
• A concurrent user license of Riverbed Cascade Pilot for graphically analyzing traffic data on the Cascade Express appliance without having to transfer large trace files across the network.
• Support for network virtualization and overlay networks, such as VMware NSXTM, to give operations teams a unified view of network and application performance across the physical and virtual infrastructure.

http://www.riverbed.com

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SanDisk Readies Lightning Gen. II 12Gb/s SAS SSDs

SanDisk has begun sampling its Lightning Gen. II family of enterprise-class 12Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) solid state drives (SSDs) for mixed-use, read- and write-intensive application workloads common in data centers.

The new Lightning Gen. II SSD product family doubles interface speeds over previously available 6Gb/s SSDs, providing the highest performance possible for mission-critical and virtualized data center application workloads. SanDisk also highlighted error correction and detection technology, full data path protection, instant secure erase, thermal monitoring, and die fail recovery capabilities of the new drives.

“Business data needs are becoming so performance-intensive that even applications that are already using SSDs need an additional boost,” said John Scaramuzzo, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Storage Solutions at SanDisk. “The Lightning Gen. II SAS SSDs deliver double the throughput to each slot, empowering organizations to quickly and easily scale their performance infrastructure to meet this growing need.”

http://www.sandisk.com

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Integra Upgrades with Ciena's WaveLogic Photonics

Integra, an operator serving the western United States with a 6,400-mile long-haul fiber-optic network, 3,000 miles of metropolitan fiber and a nationwide IP/MPLS network, has deployed Ciena's converged packet optical to enhance a route that connects Salt Lake City to Sacramento.

With high-performance capacity of 100G per wavelength, this route is supported by Ciena’s 6500 Packet-Optical Platform, including WaveLogic 3 Coherent Optical Processors and Smart Raman with PinPoint advanced fiber analytics software. Ciena’s WaveLogic Photonics capabilities allow Integra to simply and quickly deploy high-capacity services across the 1400 km route without regeneration, bypassing numerous huts while reducing latency, power, and space requirements.

To monitor its network, Integra will utilize both Ciena’s Smart Raman with PinPoint software and OneControl Unified Management System. Through the use of integrated OTDR traces, PinPoint enables quick and controlled service turn-up of photonic services and precise localization of fiber faults, which accelerates repair time from days to hours. OneControl will be used for full service lifecycle management from low-touch service activation and end-to-end visibility for comprehensive service assurance to ensure that Integra can efficiently meet all end-customer service level agreements (SLAs). Financial terms were not disclosed.

http://www.ciena.com

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Ericsson Names Rima Qureshi to be Chief Strategy Officer

Ericsson named Rima Qureshi as its new Chief Strategy Officer, a position in which she will drive the company's mergers and acquisitions (M&A) strategy and activities. In addition, she will serve as Chairman of Business Unit Modems.

Hans Vestberg, President and CEO of Ericsson, said: "I am very pleased with this appointment. Rima's comprehensive experience in driving both business and M&A's, along with a solid track record in strategy development and execution, makes her ideal for the job. Rima successfully led the integration of the CDMA and LTE assets of the former Nortel Networks Corporation and ran the business unit CDMA Mobile Systems during the years 2010-2012."

Rima Qureshi has been Senior Vice President and part of Ericsson's Executive Leadership Team since 2010.

Rima Qureshi joined Ericsson in 1993, and prior to running Business Unit CDMA Mobile Systems, her career spanned leadership roles in R&D, sales, and Services, including managing Global Service Delivery Centers in Canada, the US, Mexico and Brazil.

http://www.ericsson.com

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Edgewater Raises $5 Million to Expand Portfolio

Edgewater Networks, which supplies Enterprise Session Border Controllers, secured $5 million in debt financing to develop new products that leverage SDN and NFV.

Edgewater said it now has more than 240,000 Edgewater Enterprise Session Border Controllers (ESBCs) currently deployed by leading service providers and integrators, including one of the two largest U.S. carriers and three of the top five U.S. cable operators.

“We believe that SDN and NFV are driving significant transformation in service provider networks and opening new avenues for service delivery,” said Dave Norman, CEO of Edgewater Networks. “We are excited about the expansion of our product portfolio and how it will help our customers to easily deliver a new class of profitable business services.”

The new funding was secured from Eastward Capital and brings the total debt and equity funding raised by Edgewater Networks to date to $36 million.

http://www.edgewaternetworks.com

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IBM Awarded Patent for Job Scheduling in Clouds

IBM was awarded a patent for a method of managing how resources are used and work is done within a cloud by distributing control throughout the interconnected systems.

IBM said this latest cloud computing invention, U.S. Patent #8645745: Distributed Job Scheduling In A Multi-Nodal Environment, was originally designed to help manage resources in high performance computing systems used for government and academic research. These systems consist of hundreds or thousands of computing resources that are connected to perform complex tasks where demands for system resources can rise and fall dynamically -- similar to the model for cloud computing. The job scheduling function is broken up into pieces and distributed throughout the system, with a job scheduler assigned to each node of a system or cloud. Each job scheduler can manage resources and prioritize requests within its own node. But if it determines that it needs more resources it can dynamically join with other nodes. One of the nodes becomes the primary node, controlling the shared resources within the node group.

"Try to imagine the tens of thousands of airplanes that fly across the United States each day being managed by a single air traffic controller, who must keep track of each one and determine what runways, gates, maintenance facilities, etc. are available at every airport across the country," said IBM inventor Eric Barsness. "The best way to complete that task efficiently and effectively is to break it up to thousands of air traffic controllers, each of which has a view of all resources available and can prioritize and direct traffic accordingly. That's effectively what this invention can do within a cloud computing environment."

http://www.ibm.com

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Cavium Posts 20% YoY Growth for Q1

Cavium reported Q1 2014 revnue of $83.2 million, a 2.5% sequential increase from the $81.1 million reported in the fourth quarter of 2013 and a 19.7% year-over-year increase from the $69.5 million reported in the first quarter of 2013. Net income (GAAP) was $2.3 million, or $0.04 per diluted share, compared to $0.2 million, or $0.00 per diluted share in the fourth quarter of 2013. Gross margins were 63.5% in the first quarter of 2014 compared to 64.2% in the fourth quarter of 2013. Total cash and cash equivalents were $124.1 million at March 31, 2014.

http://www.cavium.com

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