Level 3 to Acquire tw telecom for its Metro Reach

Level 3 Communications agreed to acquire tw telecom in a deal that will combine its global fiber network and international data centers with tw telecom's extensive metro footprint in major U.S. markets. The stock-and-cash transaction is valued at $40.86 per TWTC share, or $5.7 billion in aggregate, based on market close as of June 13, 2014. tw telecom stockholders will receive $10 cash and 0.7 shares of Level 3 common stock for each share of tw telecom...

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Google Open Sources its Container Cluster Management Tool

Google has posted its "Kubernetes" container cluster management tool as open source code on GitHub. Kubernetes, which runs on Google Compute Engine, builds on top of Docker to construct a clustered container scheduling service.  The concept of Docker is to provide a container for individual applications. The concept of Kubernetes is a pod of containers that are scheduled on the same physical node. The goal is to have each pod have an IP in...

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Google Cloud Adds HTTP Load Balancing and SSD Persistent Disk

Google introduced HTTP Load Balancing and SSD Persistent Disk capabilities for its Cloud Platform. HTTP Load Balancing Google claims the new HTTP Load Balancing can scale to support more than 1 million requests per second with no “warm up.” It also supports content-based routing. Load balancing can also be enabled across different regions -- balancing traffic across Google data centers located in different parts of the world. SSD Persistent Disk Google's...

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Altera Collaborates with Microsoft on Software Defined Data Centers

Microsoft Research is testing Altera's FPGAs to accelerate its Bing search engine and other cloud services. Details on the project were disclosed in a research paper titled, “A Reconfigurable Fabric for Accelerating Large-Scale Data Center Services” that was presented by Microsoft at the 41st International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) in Minneapolis. (link to the paper is below) Altera’s software defined data center technology offerings...

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Equinix to Add Orange Business Services to its Cloud Exchage

Orange Business Services is joining Equinix Cloud Exchange, a new service that provides seamless, on-demand and direct access to multiple clouds and multiple networks inside Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers.  Equinix first announced its Cloud Exchange in in April 2014. Specifically, Orange Business Services plans to offer its Business VPN Galerie cloud-ready network solution, to enterprises in selected International...

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Hitachi Scales its MME/SGSN with Juniper's Contrail

Hitachi Communication Technologies America has integrated its massively scalable, virtual MME/SGSN as a virtualized network function (VNF) with Juniper Networks' Contrail SDN/NFV controller. Juniper said its Contrail orchestration simplifies Hitachi CTA's MME/SGSN rollouts by independently scaling based on operator deployment requirements: subscriber sessions - enabling the millions of new LTE and mobile to mobile (M2M) devices; and transactions...

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Sprint Extends LTE Network with Rural Roaming Deals

Sprint announced roaming deals with 12 rural and regional network carriers that significantly extend the coverage of its LTE service. Along with Sprint’s previously announced amended agreement with nTelos to extend their Strategic Network Alliance through 2022, the Rural Roaming Preferred Program - which was developed in conjunction with CCA - now extends coverage to 23 states, over 352,000 thousand square miles and a population of over 34 million...

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SanDisk to Acquire Fusion-io for Flash PCIe Arrays

SanDisk agreed to acquire Fusion-io (NYSE: FIO), a leading developer of flash-based PCIe hardware and software solutions, for approximately $1.1 billion, net of cash assumed. Fusion-io, which is based in Salt Lake City, generated sales of $432 million in 2013 for its NAND Flash-based storage arrays for data centers.  The Fusion-io software creates a virtual storage layer that enables file systems, volume managers, and applications to access...

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Texas Instruments Debuts IoT Wi-Fi Chips

Texas Instruments (TI) introduced its new, low-power SimpleLink Wi-Fi CC3100 and CC3200 family aimed at embedded Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Key features: low power consumption for battery operated devices with a low power radio and advanced low power modes. flexibility to use any microcontroller (MCU) with the CC3100 solution or leverage the CC3200’s integrated programmable ARM Cortex-M4 MCU development tools for quick connection,...

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