Cyan Intros Planet Orchestrate Application for Cloud and NFV Services

Cyan introduced its Planet Orchestrate, a multi-vendor and multi-domain, NFV and Cloud orchestration application for its Blue Planet SDN platform. The application combines the power of WAN service creation and automation with the orchestration of virtual resources.  The goal is to help network operators quickly introduce, automate, and operationalize new virtualized services between data centers, on top of existing network services, and across the WAN.

Specifically, Planet Orchestrate provides multi-domain orchestration, cloud services orchestration, and NFV orchestration (based on the ETSI NFV ISG Management and Orchestration framework). This new Blue Planet application utilizes open APIs to ensure interoperability with different OSS/BSS platforms, cloud management systems, SDN controllers, and virtualized network function (VNF) managers.

Cyan highlighted the following key features:

• Multi-Domain Service Orchestration: Planet Orchestrate enables seamless service delivery across multiple domains. It can leverage existing SDN controllers (e.g., Cyan’s Blue Planet SDN Platform, OpenDaylight, etc.) and management platforms (e.g. cloud managers, network managers, element managers) to deploy end-to-end services. Through a single “pane-of-glass”, Planet Orchestrate can help break down management silos and enables network operators to provision and manage services across networks comprised of both legacy and new SDN/NFV-enabled components. Multi-Domain Service Orchestration supports service-chaining between VNFs and physical network functions (PNFs) to allow operators to efficiently deploy services across networks. PoCs and trials are currently underway.  Commercial release is expected in Q3.
• NFV Orchestration: Planet Orchestrate is designed to fulfill the roles of the orchestrator and VNF manager functionality described in the ETSI NFV ISG architecture. Planet Orchestrate NFV orchestration is both VNF vendor and function neutral, providing a platform for operators to deploy and manage a variety of VNFs at varying degrees of scale and performance. Planet Orchestrate supports VNF management and orchestration across one or more data centers, as well as distributed architectures where VNFs may be deployed at the customer premise edge. Furthermore, the NFV orchestration engine supports intelligent VNF placement to maximize performance within a virtualized infrastructure. PoCs and trials are currently underway.  Commercial release is expected in Q3.
• Cloud Orchestration: Planet Orchestrate enables network operators to offer flexible data center service offerings, such as IaaS, PaaS, etc. and coordinate that across a wide area network. Operators will be able to offer their customers the ability to dynamically instantiate new cloud resources, such as virtual machines, new tenant networks, and storage, on-demand through an enterprise portal with the ability to control network (bandwidth-on-demand) and virtual (VM) resource allocation. PoCs and trials are currently underway.  Commercial release is expected in Q4. 

“Planet Orchestrate combines the capabilities of a WAN service automation and network management system with an SDN controller and orchestrator to enable network operators to deliver new services, on both physical and virtual infrastructure, more quickly and at a lower cost,” said Michael Hatfield, President, Cyan. “Developed in collaboration with network operators and other industry-leading Blue Orbit partners, Planet Orchestrate is ahead of the market and has already proven its viability and interoperability via multiple real-world trials and proof-of-concept demonstrations.”

Cyan also noted that its Blue Planet platform is currently deployed and providing SDN control and service automation in over 120 networks today.

http://www.cyaninc.com

Earlier this month, Cyan announced that CenturyLink is sponsoring an ETSI NFV ISG-approved proof of concept (PoC) solution based on RAD’s dedicated customer-edge D-NFV equipment running Fortinet’s Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) and Certes Networks’ virtual encryption/decryption engine as Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) with Cyan’s Blue Planet system orchestrating the entire ecosystem.

The companies said their D-NFV allows the placement of VNFs where they will be both most effective and least expensive, including at the customer edge. The model enables service providers to quickly and easily roll out new services and implement advanced capabilities without having to put capital expenditures upfront into the data center or redesign the network.

Cyan's Blue Planet can orchestrate both NFV and multi-vendor Ethernet services.

VNFs at the customer edge are implemented with RAD’s ETX-2, a D-NFV empowered NID, the cornerstone of RAD’s Service Assured Access solution. RAD's solution integrates an x86 server platform to host value-added service capabilities, as well as network functionalities that run on virtual machines. 

Fortinet and Certes Networks provide VNFs that are instantiated on RAD’s ETX-2 by Cyan’s Blue Planet SDN Platform. Fortinet’s FortiGate-VM enforces next-generation firewall security functions that provide network and application layer protection. Real-time security updates are pushed to the FortiGate-VM by FortiGuard subscription services to ensure it is aware of and enforcing protection from the latest security threats. FortiGate-VM is managed by Fortinet’s FortiManager-VM and FortiAnalyzer-VM, which provide centralized configuration, control and security analytics.

The virtual Certes Enforcement Point (vCEP) is a virtual encryption solution that secures data in motion over any public or private network. vCEPs can be dynamically provisioned to create Certes’ CryptoFlow VPNs, fully meshed multi-point VPNs safeguarding data in physical, virtual and Cloud environments. CryptoFlows protect critical data for any application with automatically enforced policies and simplified control of encryption keys.

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Cisco to Acquire Tail-f for Network Mgt and Service Orchestration

Cisco agreed to acquire privately held Tail-f Systems, a leader in multi-vendor network service orchestration solutions for traditional and virtualized networks, for approximately $175 million in cash and retention-based incentives.

Tail-f, which is based in Stockholm, Sweden, is known for its multi-vendor configuration management and network automation software.  The Tail-f Network Control System (NCS) provides a single network-wide interface to all network devices and all network applications and services, as well as a common modeling language and datastore for both services and devices. Engineers can use NCS to gain fine-grained control over multi-vendor equipment using a single tool.

The Tail-f ConfD software for on-device management provides automatic rendering of all northbound interfaces. It implements the NETCONF protocol and YANG modeling language.

Cisco said the acquisition of Tail-f accelerates its cloud virtualization strategy while supporting its commitment to open standards, architectures, and multi-vendor environments.  With Tail-f’s network service orchestration technology, Cisco’s service provider cloud and virtualization portfolio will simplify and automate the provisioning and management of both physical and virtual networks.

“With a rapidly increasing number of people, devices, and sensors connecting across the Internet of Everything (IoE), service providers require new capabilities to deliver value-added, cloud-based services and applications,” said Hilton Romanski, senior vice president, Cisco Corporate Development. “Our goal is to help to eliminate the bottleneck caused by operational complexity within the network. The acquisition of Tail-f’s network services configuration and orchestration technology will extend Cisco’s innovation in network function virtualization, helping service providers reduce operating costs and the time it takes to deploy new services, making agile service provisioning a reality.”

Upon completion of the acquisition, Tail-f employees will join Cisco’s Cloud and Virtualization Group led by Gee Rittenhouse, vice president and general manager. The deal is expected to close in Q4.

http://www.tail-f.com/
http://newsroom.cisco.com/release/1438152

• In October 2013, Tail-f Systems announced its NCS plugin for the Havanna release of OpenStack.  This helps organizations to automatically provision a multi-vendor network in response to OpenStack Cloud Network configuration changes. Tail-f said its NCS plugin allows OpenStack networking to simultaneously utilize the variety of layer 2 networking technologies found in complex real-world data centers.
• In February 2014, AT&T announced the first group of companies selected to participate in its  Domain 2.0 supplier program, which was announced in September 2013.  This group included Tail-f Systems.

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AWS Adds Lower-Cost SSD Storage

Amazon Web Services announced the availability of a new, lower cost SSD-backed volume type for Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). Customers can now choose between three Amazon EBS volume types: General Purpose (SSD), Provisioned IOPS (SSD), and Magnetic volumes.

AWS said the new General Purpose (SSD) volumes are designed to support the vast majority of persistent storage workloads and are the new default Amazon EBS volume.  AWS cites five nines of availability and the ability to burst 3,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) per volume, independent of volume size, to meet the performance needs of most applications and also deliver a consistent baseline of three IOPS per gigabyte. Prices start at $0.10/GB.

Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes are designed for I/O-intensive applications such as large relational or NoSQL databases where performance consistency and low latency are critical. With Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes, customers choose the amount of IOPS they require, up to 48,000 IOPS per Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, and they only have to provision and pay for the storage they need.

Customers can launch General Purpose (SSD) volumes using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or AWS SDKs. General Purpose (SSD) volumes are available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Brazil (Sao Paulo) Regions.

http://aws.amazon.com/ebs

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Instart Logic Builds a New Framework for Web Acceleration

Instart Logic, a start-up based in Mountain View, California, introduced its InstantLoad cache optimization and SmartVision, a new computer vision-based image analysis technology - both of which are aimed at improving web application delivery performance. The company says these features enable its software-defined application delivery service to boost application performance up to 50 percent across all device form factors using its delivery framework.

Instart Logic has developed a new communications protocol, IPTP (Interproxy transport protocol) to overcome inefficiencies of TCP, HTTP, and HTTPS over global distances. It leverages open-source protobuf technology, which Google uses extensively for implementing its own internal communication protocols.  Once dynamic assets enter the Instart Logic network, a persistent matrix of ramped-up IPTP connections are established to Instart Logic serving locations.   On the client side, Instart Logic uses an HTML5-based, thin virtualization layer that is injected into the browser. Instart's cloud-based software manages the control plane for application delivery

The new InstantLoad features leverages this client-cloud architecture and browser caching improvements defined by HTML5 to accelerate web application performance. The company says InstantLoadis particularly useful for SaaS applications that use a lot of JavaScript and CSS — content types that are critical to fast page load performance and typically directed to the slowest cache in default browser configurations. InstantLoad redirects heavily used CSS and JavaScript to faster caches, delivering visibly faster page response.

SmartVision is a new technology that enhances Instart Logic's Image Streaming service feature. SmartVision uses advanced computer vision algorithms to analyze the content of an image and determine how much of an image must be initially streamed for a user to recognize the image on their device without perception of degraded image quality. This allows web applications to send up to 70 percent less image data to the browser for initial loads, reducing time-to-interaction even as the full image quality data continues streaming down in the background to provide a full fidelity experience.

"The future of application delivery is being driven by software and algorithms," said Peter Blum, vice president of product management, Instart Logic. "The strong customer responses we’ve seen to InstantLoad and SmartVision are prime examples of how software-based approaches are trumping older hardware-centric approaches like CDNs, WAN Optimization and ADCs."

http://www.instartlogic.com

• Instart Logic is funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sutter Hill Ventures, Tenaya Capital and several notable Silicon Valley angel investors. 
• Instart Logic was founded by Manav Mital, Raghu Venkat and Hariharan Kolam, all previously with Aster Data, a pioneer in Big Data analytics that was acquired by Teradata Corp. 

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Radisys' WebConnect JAVA Bridges to SIP

Radisys introduced WebConnect JAVA, a JSR-309 compliant adapter which is compatible with the entire Radisys Media Resource Function (MRF) product family.

Radisys WebConnect translates JSR309 media processing requests, in a Java EE environment, into Session Internet Protocol (SIP) and Media Server Markup Language (MSML RFC 5707) XML-based control commands – which are compatible with any Radisys MRF.

The new capabilities mean that Radisys MRF resources can be used for IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS)  services as well as Over The Top (OTT) and WebRTC services delivered on web application servers based on traditional Internet communication and programming standards, such as Java.

“Adding support for JSR309 was a simple decision as many of the leading web application server platforms on the market today are Java EE based,” said Grant Henderson, VP of Marketing and Product Management at Radisys. “In addition, the world has far more computer programming professionals with expertise in Java programming than telecommunication service developers with expertise in SIP. Radisys WebConnect is focused on opening up this market by delivering first-class media processing capabilities to the broad community of IT professionals developing real-time communication services using Java platforms be they WebRTC, video or audio based.”

http://www.radisys.com/2014/radisys-extends-market-leading-media-processing-capabilities-9-million-java-developers-worldwide/

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Aruba: Study Sees Demand for All-Wireless Workplace

Seven in ten (70%) IT professionals are under increasing pressure to deliver and support an all-wireless workplace, according to a new study commissioned by Aruba Networks. Top executives and #GenMobile employees who are demanding greater flexibility and better collaboration.

The study, which surveyed 1,000 global IT professionals, examined key trends in the workplace over the past year, including the expectations of younger workers accustomed to mobile devices.

Some highlights:

• 51% of global organizations saw a rise in mobile/remote working last year and 77% noted an increase in #GenMobile employees using mobile devices for work during the past year.
• The spike in mobility has resulted in nearly 70% of IT professionals feeling pressure to deliver improvements in mobile working.
• To support top executives and #GenMobile mobility demands, 71.1% of IT departments increased their investment in Wi-Fi, while another 46% were granted increased budgets for future mobility projects.
• 55.5% of companies surveyed globally actually encourage or have no policy banning the use of personal devices at work. Only 12.4% discourage the use of personal devices for work.
• 76.6% of C-level executives expressed greater levels of interest in mobile technologies in the workplace to support #GenMobile employees.
• The debate about how to support BYOD is becoming a thing of the past as 58.7% of IT professionals said their company has already fully embraced employee BYOD or implemented new policies to support it.

“Executives and #GenMobile employees alike prefer an increasingly mobile style of working and IT organizations are feeling the pressure to adapt existing technology investments to meet their requirements,” said Ben Gibson, chief marketing officer for Aruba Networks. “The workplace of the future will not only need to be rightsized to align with IT budgets but it will also require a mobility-centric and secure wireless infrastructure, a move towards employee self-service, and a willingness to embrace consumer IT technologies to enhance #GenMobile productivity.”

http://news.arubanetworks.com/

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Infonetics: DDoS Appliance Sales Topped $348 Million Last Year

The worldwide DDoS prevention appliance market closed 2013 strong, reaching $348 million in revenue, an increase of 26% from the prior year, according to a new report from Infonetics Research. However, 1Q14 revenue was flat sequentially, totaling $91.5 million.

Some highlights:

• North America comprised the majority of DDoS prevention appliance revenue in 1Q14, followed by EMEA, Asia Pacific, and the Caribbean and Latin America (CALA)
• Consolidation and new product announcements continue, with F5 picking up cloud provider Defense.net, and ADC vendor A10 launching a new line of DDoS mitigation appliances
• The data center and mobile DDoS prevention segments are projected to maintain healthy double-digit CAGRs from 2013–2018
• Software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) are pervasive trends in network and telecom infrastructure, and they will eventually touch all areas of security, including DDoS mitigation.

“Buyers need protection from a new wave of sophisticated application layer attacks and massive amplification attacks, and we're seeing renewed focus on DDoS mitigation from a wide range of established data center and security players like Check Point, Fortinet, Juniper, F5, and Huawei,” notes Jeff Wilson, principal analyst for security at Infonetics Research. “Arbor Networks maintains a strong leadership position in the DDoS mitigation space despite having a wide range of challengers, from focused product vendors in adjacent markets to large established networking and security vendors.”

http://www.infonetics.com

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Trend Micro Intros Deep Security for VMware's vCloud Hybrid Service

Trend Micro introduced its "Deep Security" solution for VMware's vCloud Hybrid Service, which enables customers to seamlessly move their on-premise or private cloud deployment to the public cloud. The solution combines security capabilities, including intrusion detection and prevention, anti-malware, integrity monitoring, vulnerability scanning, firewall and SSL to simplify security operations while enabling regulatory compliance and accelerating the ROI of virtualization and cloud initiatives.

Deep Security for vCloud Hybrid Service provides security controls and policies managed across physical, virtual and cloud environments. The company said that interoperability with VMware vCloud Director and other VMware technologies enables network administrators to automatically detect virtual machines (VMs) and apply context-based policies to them for consistent security across the data center and into the public cloud. Among other capabilities, customers will benefit from features such as virtual patching, which shield the VMs from vulnerabilities, decreasing risk and reducing patch management overhead.

"Security is a priority for our customers as they migrate to the public cloud from on-premise or hybrid environments," said Ajay Patel, vice president, vCloud Hybrid Service, VMware. "With the Trend Micro Deep Security solution on VMware vCloud Hybrid Service, customers can now seamlessly extend their security policies from on-premise to cloud and benefit from advanced threat protection for their hybrid workloads."

http://www.trendmicro.com/us/business/cloud-data/index.html
https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/

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