India's Reliance Jio Infocomm Selects DragonWave for LTE Backhaul

Reliance Jio Infocomm, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), has selected DragonWave's packet microwave radio systems for its nationwide 4G/LTE network.

DragonWave will provide several thousand turnkey Horizon Compact+ links to support traffic backhaul from the LTE network. The deployment will also include services to be delivered by DragonWave’s Indian joint venture, DragonWave HFCL.  The first orders have been received for 5,000 links and related services.

DragonWave’s Horizon Compact+ was extensively tested by Reliance Jio and found acceptable for use as transport system for high capacity backhaul to support their upcoming 4G network. Horizon Compact+ uniquely offers a combination of 2048 QAM modulation together with the industry’s only bandwidth accelerator bulk compression capability, to deliver unsurpassed spectral efficiency.

“We are delighted that DragonWave products have been selected by Reliance Jio. This selection demonstrates DragonWave’s product leadership.  This is also DragonWave HFCL’s first major services win in India, showing our deployment capabilities have matured,” said Ram Raghavan, DragonWave HFCL CEO.

“We believe that the Horizon Compact+ radio brings considerable value in India where backhaul spectrum is both limited and expensive. We look forward to delivering un-paralleled spectral efficiency in our customer’s network,” said Peter Allen, DragonWave’s President and CEO. “These orders underpin and reinforce the momentum we discussed on our recent earnings conference call.”

http://www.dragonwaveinc.com

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DragonWave video: Accelerating the Small Cell Market

Traffic growth and spectrum exhaustion will necessitate the further rollout of small cell networks. In this video, DragonWave discusses the key elements for successful small cell deployments, including:

0:23 - Building Blocks
1:46 - Performance Specs
2:30 - Spectrum
3:00 - Scalability for LTE-A
3:46 - Aesthetics
4:41 - Market timing

Presented by Peter Allen and Greg Friesen.

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Telefónica Teams with Red Hat/Intel for NFV Reference Lab

Telefónica is working with Red Hat and Intel to create a virtual infrastructure management (VIM) platform based on open source software running on standard Intel-based servers.

Telefónica said this collaboration will become part of its recently created Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) Reference Lab aimed at helping their ecosystem of partners and network equipment providers (NEPs) test and develop virtual network functions along with upper service orchestration layers.

Specifically, the NFV Reference Lab will be based on the following technologies:

• Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 V2
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor, well-regarded for industry-leading performance and configuration options;
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, providing the tools needed to manage a large, dispersed pool of hypervisors and virtual machines, with a focus on automation and integration options; and
• OpenFlow-enabled switching equipment.

”For NFV we need to avoid closed and non-interoperable environments, which would hamper its widespread adoption. For that purpose, we have launched the Network Functions Virtualisation Reference Lab, where Telefónica, along with key players from the industry, is working to enhance baseline virtualisation technologies from the open source community and contributing them back to the upstream community, to avoid technological fragmentation,” stated Enrique Algaba, Global CTO and Network Innovation and Virtualisation Director, Telefónica I+D.

“Red Hat is currently the leading contributor to the upstream Linux kernel, KVM, and OpenStack projects which create a foundation for NFV workloads. This deep experience in the open source community, along with Red Hat’s focus on performance, reliability and security, offers CSPs a unique value proposition. We’re thrilled to bring our technical expertise, community experience and product offerings including Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform to the collaboration with Telefónica and Intel to help CSPs reap the benefits of NFV first hand,” said Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, Virtualization and OpenStack, Red Hat.

“By applying our experience of cloud technologies and business models along with our server and virtualization technology leadership to NFV applications, Intel aims to improve total cost of ownership and reduce time-to-market for applications for service providers, Through our work with Telefonica and Red Hat on this new lab, we will enable a broader ecosystem of developers that will accelerate the commercial availability of NFV solutions,” said Rose Schooler, vice president and general manager, Communications and Storage Infrastructure Group, Intel.

http://pressoffice.telefonica.com/

• At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year, Telefónica unveiled UNICA -- it's end-to-end vision for virtualized network infrastructure for transforming the company into a "Digital Telco."  Telefónica described UNICA as a paradigm shift in the way networks are designed, installed, provisioned and managed.  Its first goal is to address the logical re-grouping of resources needed to deploy a new services via the new generation data centers it is building.  The idea is to use extremely efficient data centers to deploy platforms and telecommunication services faster than ever before. Telefónica will pursue an "Open Telco" model with a global network infrastructure on which multi-vendor platforms, features and services can be developed in standardized form. Telefónica also said that it believes the redesign of its network should be gradual and seamless and foresees an implementation start date of sometime in June 2014.  The company expects to have more than 30% of its new infrastructures managed in accordance with this model by 2016.
  At #MWC14, Telefónica demonstrated a few UNICA use cases, including the idea of multi-tenancy (where the same basic solution works for multiple organisations) or NaaS (Network as a Service), using pre-installed templates to deploy virtualised equipment in real time and with integrated resource management.
  In partnership with Huawei, Telefónica showed UNICA’s capabilities and performance requirements.
  In addition, Ericsson and Telefonica launched a joint R&D program focused on NFV and service provider SDN. The companies will define a joint view on how the transformation of networks should take place, sharing a common outlook on the order in which network functions will be virtualized and which applications are likely to give the most benefit.
  
• In 2013, Telefónica inaugurated the first phase of its massive Alcalá Data Centre project outside of Madrid, which aims to be one of the largest Tier IV data centers in Europe and the world. The first phase, which is now operational, is a new building measuring 24,700 m2, with seven IT rooms covering an area of 682 m2 each. The complete project, which will progress gradually, will cover a total area of 65,700 m2 (over 700,000 square feet) and include a further 16 IT rooms, on a 78,400 m2 plot of land (the size of 8 football pitches). Telefónica said the new facility is key to transforming the company into one of the leading companies in the new digital world.  The data center will be home for the whole range of ICT services, from housing, infrastructures and cloud computing to full outsourcing of customer applications. It will also operate as Telefónica’s cloud services base for Europe and will house platforms for customers in Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany and the Czech Republic.

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Cyan Collaborates with Telefónica on NFV Architecture

Cyan is collaborating with Telefónica and Red Hat to develop a network functions virtualization (NFV) architecture to support the deterministic placement of virtualized network functions (VNFs).

Specifically, Cyan is delivering the NFV orchestrator that will make use of enhancements being made to OpenStack developed by Red Hat in close collaboration with Telefónica. Cyan’s Blue Planet SDN Platform uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack to orchestrate the deterministic placement of virtual network functions in the server infrastructure to maximize the performance of that VNF.

“Telefónica believes NFV is an important and transformative technology,” said Enrique Algaba, Network Innovation and Virtualisation Director at Telefónica I+D-Global CTO Unit. “We believe that the deterministic allocation of CPU, memory, I/O, and storage relative to a particular type of VNF is critical to delivering the predictable performance needed for telco-grade network functions. This new deterministic architecture transforms a generic cloud computing data center into a Telco Data Center capable of supporting NFV.”

http://www.cyaninc.com/

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Huawei Announces Agile Data Center Cloud Connect Solution

Huawei introduced its Agile Data Center Cloud Connect Solution that ties together its CloudEngine series of data center switches, the Huawei Agile Controller and cloud applications.

The solution, which was launched at the Huawei Network Congress 2014 (HNC) held in Beijing this week, helps IT administrators to provision network resources.

Each type of service can be represented by an independent application profile. The Agile Controller is capable of interpreting three types of perspectives: the application profile perspective, the logical network perspective, and the physical network perspective. The Agile Controller automatically converts application profiles into the required logical networks, and delivers the associated configurations to physical network devices, allowing network resources to be dynamically migrated or adjusted on-demand and based on service requirements.

Huawei said it is actively building a cloud computing data center ecosystem. It Cloud Connect Solution connects to VMware’s vCloud cloud management platform and NSX network virtualization platform to provide automated network policy migration and VxLAN based hardware gateway solutions.

"In 2012, we launched the Cloud Fabric Data Center Solution and the industry's highest performance data center switches, the CE12800 series, allowing us to build scalable, virtualized, and open cloud data center networks for customers. To date, more than 360 global customers have implemented the Cloud Fabric solution and around 1,800 CE12800 switches have been deployed in cloud computing data centers", said Mr. Liu. "Today, we’ve introduced the Agile Data Center Cloud Connect Solution and we want to work with our partners to build a fully integrated cloud service system. The solution will integrate network, compute, and store resources in data centers to unify the virtual and physical network worlds, implementing multi-cloud connectivity and cloud-based network automation to make cloud computing simpler."

http://pr.huawei.com/en/news/hw-340353-ict.htm#.U4Z1EPldWP0

In May 2013, Huawei introduced its CE12816 CloudEngine (CE) switch for the data center core, boasting the a 64 Tbps total capacity.  The new switch uses Huawei's next-generation VRP8 software to deliver high-performance L2/L3 switching capabilities. Like all the switches in Huawei's Cloud Engine 12800 family, the CE12816 provides support for 1, 10, 40 and 100 GE connectivity. Densities supported on the CE12816 include up to 192*100GE, 384*40GE, or 1536*10GE line-speed ports.

The CloudEngine series provides high bandwidth of up to 2 Tbps per slot(scalable to 4 Tbps) and switching capacity of 64 Tbps.

Huawei's CloudEngine series incorporates a Cluster Switch System (CSS) feature to virtualize multiple switches into one logical switch, as well as the Virtual System (VS) feature to virtualize one switch into multiple independent logical devices. Huawei said its CSS and VS capabilities turn the network into a resource pool, allowing network resources to be allocated on demand.

The CloudEngine series also supports virtual machines by allowing network administrators to build large-scale Layer 2 networks with over 500 nodes based on TRILL, allowing for fast migration and flexible service deployment. Combined with the usage of the nCenter, network management system, the CloudEngine series is able to achieve over 10 times the virtual parallel processing capability of the industry average.

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Ericsson Silicon Valley to Relocate to New Campus

Ericsson signed a long-term lease for a new campus in Santa Clara, California that will consolidate its operations in Silicon Valley.  The new Santa Clara Square facility, which is currently under construction by the Irvine Company, will include over 400,000 square feet of workspace for Ericsson in two buildings, located along the Great America/Bowers corridor at Highway 101.

Ericsson plans to move approximately 2,000 employees from its IP division in San Jose and its newly-acquired Mediaroom TV business in Mountain View to the new campus.

Per Borgklint, Senior Vice President and Head of Business Unit Support Solutions for Ericsson said: "Ericsson's new campus unites our rapidly expanding Silicon Valley workforce and creates an environment that will inspire our employees and customers. So much of our research and development is built on internal and external collaboration. Together with our customers and partners, Ericsson is driving IP, TV and Media innovation, and accelerating development of the media enabled, interoperable and programmable network of tomorrow."

"Over the years, Ericsson's growing presence in Silicon Valley has significantly enhanced our ability to innovate and collaborate with our customers and partners in the region. With our new campus, we're accelerating Ericsson research, development and innovation even further," said Maya Strelar-Migotti, Vice President of Development Unit IP and Broadband and Head of Ericsson Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley is also a center for Ericsson innovation in TV and Media. As a leader in the convergence of IP, TV and Media, Ericsson is uniquely positioned to develop the technologies that will transform the television and video entertainment experiences seen by millions of people every day.

http://www.ericsson.com

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Palo Alto Networks Hits Record Revenue of $151M, up 49%

Palo Alto Networks reported record quarterly revenue of $150.7 million for its Q3 ended 30-April-2014,  up 49% compared with $101.3 million for the same period in 2013. GAAP net loss for the fiscal third quarter was $139.1 million, or $1.86 per diluted share, compared with a net loss of $7.3 million, or $0.10 per diluted share, in the fiscal third quarter of 2013.

"We reported record revenue in our third quarter driven by strong customer demand for our next-generation enterprise security platform. We achieved the highest rate of new customer acquisition in our history and now serve more than 17,000 customers globally to address their security needs and prevent increasingly sophisticated and complex cyber attacks from compromising an organization's critical assets," said Mark McLaughlin, president and chief executive officer of Palo Alto Networks. "We also announced this afternoon that we have reached a settlement with Juniper Networks of all litigation matters between us; this allows us to further focus our resources and time on our customers and growing our business."

"Year-over-year revenue growth of 49 percent was driven by our land, expand and retain model, as product, recurring subscription and support revenue all delivered substantial growth," said Steffan Tomlinson, chief financial officer of Palo Alto Networks. "Additionally, we continue to demonstrate the power of our hybrid SaaS model as gross margin and operating margin improved sequentially, and we generated $28.4 million of free cash flow in the quarter, bringing our fiscal year to date total to $83.2 million."

http://www.paloaltonetworks.com

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Palo Alto Network to Pay $175M to Settle Lawsuit with Juniper

Palo Alto Networks has agreed to pay $175 million to Juniper Networks to settle patent litigation between the firms.  Under the terms of the settlement, Palo Alto Networks will make a one-time payment to Juniper Networks of $75 million in cash and $100 million in shares of common stock and warrants to purchase common stock. The companies have agreed to dismiss all patent litigation pending in Delaware and California.

"Juniper Networks initiated this litigation in order to protect our intellectual property and investment in innovation that is reflected in our leading security products," said Mitchell Gaynor, executive vice president and general counsel, Juniper Networks. "This settlement fully achieves those objectives, and we are very pleased with this resolution."

http://www.juniper.net
https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/

• Palo Alto Networks was founded by Nir Zuk (CTO), Rajiv Batra (VP of Engineering) and Yuming Mao (Chief Architect). Zuk was previously CTO at NetScreen Technologies, which was acquired by Juniper Networks in 2004. Prior to NetScreen, Nir was co-founder and CTO at OneSecure, a pioneer in intrusion prevention and detection appliances. Nir was also a principal engineer at Check Point Software Technologies and was one of the developers of stateful inspection technology.  Batra previously was the Vice President of Engineering at Peribit, which was acquired by Juniper Networks in 2005. He also co-founded VitalSigns Software and served as Vice President of Engineering at Bay Networks. Mao previously was Chief Architect and a Distinguished Engineer at Juniper Networks, which he joined through the NetScreen Technologies acquisition. At NetScreen, he was one of the initial engineering architects.

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Canada's F6 Networks Deploys Packet/Optical with Ciena

F6 Networks is deploying Ciena’s converged packet optical and packet networking solutions to deliver 100G connectivity between Saint John and Fredericton, New Brunswick.

F6 Networks is building an open access, dark fibre network that provides broadband connectivity between Atlantic Canada and the Northeastern United States for public sector organizations, private enterprises, Internet services providers and wireless carriers.  The deployment features Ciena’s E-Suite family, including Ciena's 6500 Packet-Optical Platform, Ciena’s Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) CE2.0-certified 5142 Service Aggregation Switches, and Ciena’s CE2.0-certified 3916 and 3930 Service Delivery Switches.

Ciena’s Service-Aware Operating System (SAOS) will provide zero-touch provisioning, line-rate service activation testing, and remote troubleshooting – all of which help to reduce operating costs for F6 while improving user experience.

“To thrive in the global economy, Atlantic Canada must maintain a telecommunications infrastructure that is both world-class and cost-effective. F6 is part of a growing tech community striving to drive economic development, job creation and quality of life in the region and Ciena’s platforms position us to meet this goal," stated Eric Morin, chief technology officer, F6 Networks.

http://www.ciena.com
http://f6networks.ca

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HP Debuts Private Cloud for Public Sector

HP Enterprise Services is building a secure private cloud solution designed for governments and public sector agencies.

HP said its new Helion Managed Private Cloud for Public Sector will offer a managed, dedicated private cloud that enables federal, state and local governments to implement a shared service model across multiple departments. The managed private cloud allows agencies to act as IT brokers by accessing a web-based portal to manage consumption and monitor resources, allowing charge back of costs to departments and business units.

It is designed to address the unique certification and regulatory compliance needs of the federal government, including the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMPSM) moderate impact level, FISMA high, HIPAA and the Defense Information System Agency Enterprise Cloud Service Broker (DISA ECSB) impact Level-5.

“With a robust hybrid portfolio of enterprise cloud services already in place for commercial clients, our priority has been making sure that they are available to meet government demands,” said Stacy Cleveland, director, Global Practices, U.S. Public Sector, HP Enterprise Services. “HP Helion Managed Private Cloud for Public Sector allows defense, civilian and other organizations to easily adopt HP managed cloud solutions to increase business agility, innovation, and lower their IT costs.”

http://www.hp.com/govcloud

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Matrixx Software Lands Investment from Telstra

MATRIXX Software, a start-up based in Mountain View, California developing a unified policy and charging solution for network operators, has received financial backing from Telstra Ventures.  Financial terms were not announced. Telstra Ventures was joined by existing investors Swisscom Ventures, Innovacom, Greylock Partners, Adams Street Partners and Tugboat Ventures in the round.

MATRIXX has developed new real-time technology designed for the intensive demands of the digital services environment. The company says its real-time charging, policy and analytics solutions can drive the transformation of a service provider’s business from traditional communications to digital services.

http://www.matrixx.com/

• MATRIXX is headed by Dave Labuda, who previously co-founded Portal Software in 1994, creating the first real-time billing and revenue management solution for internet and communications service providers. Portal Software was acquired by Oracle in 2006. 

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