Video interview with Cisco: What is OpFlex?

In this video, Tom Edsall, CTO of the Insieme business unit at Cisco, introduces OpFlex, a new policy protocol designed to support physical and virtual switching infrastructure.  OpFlex provides an abstraction that Cisco believes is better suited than OpenFlow is scaling out policy. Cisco has published an OpFlex draft in the IETF and will be releasing an OVS implementation in the public domain as well as a controller in the Open...

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Web Companies Call on FCC to Defend Open Internet

A coalition of leading Web companies published an open letter to the FCC asking commissioners to defend the principles of the Open Internet.  The letter comes in response to published reports that FCC Commissioner Tom Wheeler is circulating new rules concerning Net Neutrality.  Signatories of the Open Internet letter include: Amazon Cogent Dropbox Ebay Etsy Facebook Foursquare Google Kickstarter Level 3 LinkedIn Lyft Microsoft Netflix Reddit Tumblr Twitter Vonage...

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Wind River Delivers Accelerated vSwitch Optimized for NFV

Wind River announced a new performance benchmark for its accelerated virtual switch (vSwitch) integrated within Wind River Carrier Grade Communications Server, which is designed for network functions virtualization (NFV). Wind River said its accelerated vSwitch can deliver 12 million packets per second to guest virtual machines (VMs) using only two processor cores on an industry-standard server platform, in a real-world use case involving bidirectional...

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Dell Charts a Cloud-agnostic and Open Approach

Dell reaffirmed its commitment to open, standards-based architectures on which to build public, private and hybrid clouds. Dell highlighted an enterprise-ready OpenStack-based private cloud solutions that it has co-engineered with Red Hat. As part of the expanded relationship, Dell was the first company to OEM Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. In addition, Dell announced support for Docker containers in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In...

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Open Network Install Environment Lab Opens

The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) opened the first ONIE certification lab. ONIE is an industry standard network boot loader for installing software on network switches. “With each new platform and chipset, there is a significant amount of development work that is involved to ensure compatibility. ONIE certification and compliance leverages best practices to validate this process in the most expedient way possible,” said Carlos Cardenas,...

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Alcatel-Lucent Upgrades Transatlantic Apollo Cable to 100G

Alcatel-Lucent completed an upgrade of the Apollo undersea cable system which links the UK and France to the United States for 100G channels and over 25 Tbps of total capacity. The Apollo system consists of two of the most advanced fiber optic cables: Apollo North connects the UK to the US, and Apollo South connects France directly to the US, collectively spanning a total of 13,000 km. Alcatel-Lucent deployed its 1620 Light Manager (LM) submarine...

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CALIENT Offers 320x320 Port Optical Switches for Data Centers

CALIENT Technologies unveiled two new optical circuit switch subsystems aimed at data center, telecom or media networking applications. The new subsystems are based on CALIENT’s 320-port S320 Optical Circuit Switch that uses the company’s patented 3D MEMS optical switching technology. The new subsystems include the MSM-320, a 320x320-port pure optical switch with complete protocol independence and bandwidth scalability to 400 Gbps and up. The...

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Mexico's Alestra Implements 400G DWDM with ALU

Alestra has implemented Alcatel-Lucent 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS) platform in its network in Mexico to support channel speeds of 400 Gigabits per second.  The 400G capability has already been tested in Alestra's live network. “Once again Alestra revolutionizes ICTs optimizing our network to provide the most innovative solutions of Telecommunications and Informatics to the Mexican market. With the deployment of Alestra network leveraging...

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