Telefónica's Alcalá Data Center Achieves TIER IV Gold

Telefónica's state-of-the-art Alcalá Data Center located outside of Madrid has been named Europe's largest data center and the third largest in the world.  The facility has achieved TIER IV Gold certification from the Uptime Institute, which certifies the center's operational sustainability and attests to its high level of infrastructure availability. The Alcalá Data Center, which recently completed its first year anniversary of launching...

Read More

Microsoft Turns on Azure in Southern Brazil

Microsoft's Azure cloud service is now generally available in its Brazil South region, located in the state of Sao Paulo. Early customers at the new data center include Brazil-based credit rating company Boa Vista Servicos, business management software provider Totvs, computing systems provider SiplanControl-M and e-commerce website platform Shop Delivery. Microsoft noted ongoing demand for its global enterprise public cloud offering:  globally,...

Read More

Taiwan's FarEasTone Launches LTE on APT700 Band with Ericsson

Taiwan's FarEasTone Telecommunications (FET) is the first mobile operator to launch a commercial LTE service on the APT700 band.  Ericsson was the key supplier for the deployment. APT700 band is a globally standardized band for LTE which is gaining momentum across Asia and Latin America and has the potential to serve over 2.1 billion people. Yvonne Li, President of FarEasTone, says: "We are proud to roll out the first commercial LTE network...

Read More

Zain Tests NSN's Liquid Applications on Live Network

Zain KSA has successfully demonstrated Nokia's Liquid Applications running on its live network in Saudi Arabia. The demonstration was the first of its kind in the Middle East and Africa, and was carried out in Zain’s live network, powered by Nokia’s radio and core network elements. Nokia said Liquid Applications solution brings applications, services and content into the base station to allow local storage, along with access to real-time radio and...

Read More

Nokia Acquires Masaplexx for RF Filter Technology

Nokia has acquired Mesaplexx Pty Ltd, a privately-held company that develops compact, high performance radio frequency (RF) filter technology for the mobile industry.  Financial terms were not disclosed. Mesaplexx has offices in the UK and Australia. Nokia said the Mesaplexx technology can enhance its Flexi family of radio access base stations and potentially reducing small cells form factors by 30% or more. “Those familiar with radio technologies...

Read More

Infonetics: A Carrier Survey on Packet-Optical, MPLS, and Control Plane Strategies

A survey of Global service providers published by Infonetics Research has found that SDN vendor strategies currently are not critical factors in purchasing optical transport equipment for the majority of operators. “No topic has generated more discussion in the past 12 months than software-defined networking (SDN), though most carriers have been publicly silent on their plans for SDN in the transport network. Our latest packet-optical study found...

Read More

Cloudera Acquires Gazzang for Hadoop Encryption

Cloudera, which specializes in enterprise analytic data management powered by Apache Hadoop, has acquired Gazzang, a start-up working on big data security.  Financial terms were not disclosed. Cloudera said the addition enables it to deliver enterprise-grade data encryption and key management for securing and processing sensitive and legally protected data within the Hadoop ecosystem, thus fulfilling a requirement in myriad compliance regulations...

Read More

OpenDaylight Project Adds Three Members

The OpenDaylight Project,  which  is dedicated to promoting an open, common platform for SDN and NFV, announced three new members: Extreme Networks, Flextronics and Oracle. Since launching 13 months ago, the OpenDaylight community has grown to 195 developers working collaboratively to create an open source platform that can be used within any SDN and NFV architecture. OpenDaylight’s next software release, Helium, is scheduled to be...

Read More

Dell'Oro: Wireless Packet Core Market Grew 26% YoY in 1Q2014

The overall Wireless Packet Core market grew 26% during the first quarter of 2014 versus the year-ago period, according to a new report from Dell'Oro Group.  The higher growth portion of the market that is used to manage LTE wireless networks, called Evolved Packet Core (EPC), experienced significantly higher growth than the total market. Some highlights: North American session growth jumped to over 250% of 4Q13 levels.  This follows...

Read More

Orange Business Builds Global WAN for Switzerland's Oetiker Group

The Oetiker Group, a worldwide supplier of clamps, rings and quick connectors based in Switzerland, has selected Orange Business Services to provide a global wide area network and embedded security services.   The Orange network will connect 1,200 Oetiker employees in 21 countries in Europe, the Americas and Asia. Orange Business Services is providing a Web protection suite with malware scanning and Zscaler, a Web filtering bundle, as part of...

Read More