MapR Raises $110 Million for Apache Hadoop

MapR Technologies, a start-up based in San Jose, California, raised $110 million in venture funding for its distribution for Apache Hadoop software.

MapR has significant production Hadoop environments in financial services, healthcare, media, retail, telecommunications, and Web 2.0 companies.  The financing will be used to continue growth in the big data and analytics segment, especially to fund additional engineering resources and support open source projects, such as Apache Drill, Hadoop 2.2 with YARN, and Apache Spark.

Google Capital led the $80 million equity financing. Also participating was Qualcomm Incorporated, through its venture investment group, Qualcomm Ventures, and existing investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, NEA and Redpoint Ventures.  In addition to the equity financing, MapR completed a debt facility of $30 million led by Silicon Valley Bank.

"Google has a long-standing commitment to Hadoop, making Google Capital an ideal investor for MapR. This investment round recognizes our customers’ rapid adoption, their tremendous results and ROI, and also the capital efficiency of our business model,” said John Schroeder, CEO and co-founder of MapR Technologies. “It’s extremely gratifying to bring these high-caliber strategic investors on board, including Qualcomm who is the leader in the mobile ecosystem and also at the forefront of the Internet of Things, to help us accelerate growth and position the company for global leadership.  Our installed base of more than 500 paying licensees provides a strong foundation and we are excited to move forward with the tremendous resources from our new and current financial investors.”

“Hadoop is a cornerstone for the big data ecosystem, and MapR has demonstrated its leadership in the space,” said Albert Wang, director, Qualcomm Ventures. “We invested in MapR because of the strength of its technology in leveraging the expanding Internet of Things and providing immediate business benefits."

http://www.mapr.com/company/press-releases/mapr-closes-110-million-financing-led-google-capital

• In March 2014, Cloudera confirmed that its latest funding round, which included a strategic investment from Intel, amounted to $900 million.  This financing round includes the previously-announced $160 million of funding from T. Rowe Price and three other top-tier public market investors, Google Ventures, and an affiliate of MSD Capital, L.P., the private investment arm of Michael Dell and his family, and a significant equity investment by Intel that gives them an 18% share of Cloudera.
  Cloudera offers enterprise analytic data management software powered by Apache Hadoop, which is the underlying technology behind a growing number of Big Data projects.

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Huawei Launches 1T WDM Line Card

Huawei launched the world's first 1T WDM line card.

The line card delivers 800-km transmission based on common G.652 fibers and erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs), but without regeneration. It can encapsulate client signals of any rate into an OTN-based 1 Tbps channel for transmission.

A demonstration was shown at the Next Generation Optical Networking Forum last week using Huawei's flagship OSN 9800 platform.

Huawei said its line card uses Optical Digital Signal Processing (oDSP) algorithm for processing high-speed signals. Switching between short-haul metro mode (ultra-high-capacity transmission) and ultra-long-haul backbone mode (ultra-long-haul transmission) can be implemented through software-based modulation scheme reconfiguration. The short-haul metro mode reaches a capacity of more than 20 Tbit/s per fiber, nearly triple that of current mainstream commercial 100G systems. The ultra-long-haul backbone mode supports more than 10 Tbit/s transmission per fiber over a distance of 3,000 km.

Huawei noted that it has deployed over 200 commercial 100G networks worldwide to date.

http://pr.huawei.com/en/news/hw-346706-1twdm.htm#.U7F1PfldVF4

• In 2013, Huawei demonstrated a 40T Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) prototype at the OFC/NFOEC 2013 event in Anaheim, California. The prototype supports simultaneous transmission of 20 C-band optical channels running at 2 Tbps, providing an industry-leading capacity of up to 40 Tbps per fiber. Huawei cited three innovations in its platform:
  The combined use of Electrical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (eOFDM) and frequency-domain Hybrid Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) technologies substantially improve spectrum efficiency to 10 bit/s/Hz.
  The combined use of Flex-Optical Digital Signal Processing (Flex ODSP) and Hybrid Soft-/Hard-Decision Multi-level Coding (HMLC) technologies extend the transmission distance to beyond 1,000 km over common single-mode fiber and Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplifiers (EDFAs).
  Software-implemented transceiver technology allows optical modulation formats such as Quadrature Phase-Shift Keying (QPSK), 16QAM, 32QAM, and 64QAM to be adjusted or combined, achieving a configurable transmission rate and distance for each service. As a result, dynamic service needs in varied scenarios can be easily met.

• In 2012, Huawei completed a 2 Tbps WDM field trial with Vodafone, achieving up to 3,325 km transmission for 2 Tbps signals. The 40T WDM prototype is another major breakthrough in high-speed transmission proving current commercial optical networks will be ready for the upcoming flood of digital traffic.

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China Unicom Deploys Software-Defined IP Radio Access Network with Huawei

The Sichuan Branch of China United Network Communications (Sichuan Unicom) has deployed a software-defined networking-based IP radio access network (SDN IPRAN) in the city of Chengdu.

The deployment, believed to be the first of its kind in the world, uses Huawei’s SoftCOM technology.

Huawei said the use of SDN technology on the IPRAN simplifies network O&M and enables a high-quality packet bearer network for wireless services. After deployment, Sichuan Unicom’s SDN IPRAN increased the efficiency of service provisioning by 60% compared with traditional networks. Virtual management of large volumes of end devices significantly reduces the network management scale and improves O&M efficiency. The control plane is decoupled from the forwarding plane, thus implementing new service provisioning regardless of forwarding devices. This significantly shortens LTE service go-to-market periods and helps respond to market requirements quickly and supports new LTE service development and rapid future innovation.

Huawei also highlighted its IP Flow Performance Measurement (IP FPM) technology, which delivers real-time service performance measurement per service per user.  This makes network performance visible and predictable, helping carriers locate specific network performance bottlenecks.

"We are glad to cooperate with Huawei in the SDN IPRAN field and successfully commercialize the SDN IPRAN. We expect these innovations to improve network operation efficiency, promote rapid innovative service delivery and go-to-market, further improve user experience in UMTS/LTE services, and create more value for our customers," said Mr. Qiao Guiping, general manager of Sichuan Unicom.

http://pr.huawei.com/en/news/hw-346708-sdn.htm#.U7F42_ldVF4

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IBM Inaugurates SoftLayer Data Center in London

IBM 's SoftLayer group is opening a new data center in London this month.

The new facility will have capacity for more than 15,000 physical servers and will offer the full range of SoftLayer cloud infrastructure services, including bare metal servers, virtual servers, storage and networking. It will seamlessly integrate via the company’s leading private network with all SoftLayer data centers and network PoPs around the world, including the existing SoftLayer Amsterdam data center and London network Point of Presence (PoP), both launched in 2012.

“We already have a large customer base in London and the region; we’re excited to give those customers a full SoftLayer data center right in their backyard, with all the privacy, security, and control the SoftLayer platform offers,” said Lance Crosby, SoftLayer CEO. “The work these businesses are doing—the solutions and services that they are building in the cloud—is inspiring. Organizations of all sizes are using SoftLayer services to disrupt their industries or even their own operations, creating new business models and applications.”

http://www.softlayer.com/London

• The London facility is the latest of 15 new data centers that IBM plans to open as part of a $1.2 billion dollar global investment to strengthen and extend its cloud services in Europe and around the world.

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Jibe Mobile Launches joyn for DT's COSMOTE Romania and Slovak Telekom

Deutsche Telekom's regional operating companies in Romania and Slovakia, COSMOTE Romania and Slovak Telekom, rolled out their joyn services developed by Jibe Mobile and delivered over the Jibe IP Communication Cloud.

joyn powered by COSMOTE and joyn by Telekom, provided by Jibe Mobile, let customers use a single application to connect via video call, text, instant messaging, group messaging, as well as share their favorite photos and videos — on their iPhone and Android- powered smartphones.

"This rollout further demonstrates the significant role that Jibe is playing to help carriers
transform the future of telecom services for mobile consumers throughout the world by delivering
IP communications services rivaling the best of OTT,” said Amir Sarhangi, co-founder and CEO
of Jibe Mobile. “Jibe's cloud-based technology and economics are enabling the rapid cost efficient transition to a globally connected IP mobile network able to deliver the most innovative and engaging communication services."

http://www.jibemobile.com

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Cisco Acquires Assemblage for One-Click WebRTC/HTML5

Cisco announced its acquisition of Assemblage, a start-up developing WebRTC/HTML5 collaboration tools.  Financial terms were not disclosed.

Assemblage offers real-time collaboration apps for shared whiteboarding, presentation broadcasting and screensharing. Users are able to collaborate simply via their browser with one-click, instantly accessing collaboration apps delivered via the cloud. Assemblage’s technology also integrates with popular third party cloud services and supports 40 different file types to enable quick and efficient collaboration.

Cisco said the acquisition brings a strong team of engineers with deep web development expertise to Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group.  The goal is to integrate Assemblage's technology into Cisco's next-generation collaboration platform.

http://blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco-announces-acquisition-of-assemblage/
http://www.assemblagehq.com/

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OIF and ONF Collaborate on Transport SDN

The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) and the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) are collaborating on Transport Software Defined Networking (Transport SDN) demonstrations being conducted this year in several carrier-hosted labs.

The testing, which will begin in late August in a number of global carrier labs, will leverage the OIF’s carrier representation, knowledge of transport networks, and worldwide interoperability testing experience for optical equipment, with ONF’s leadership role for the OpenFlow protocol and SDN architecture. OpenFlow extensions for optical transport developed in the ONF Optical Transport Working Group will be prototyped in the demo.

The OIF is currently working on several initiatives supporting Transport SDN including a carrier-driven Requirements Document and an SDN Framework Document identifying SDN application programming interfaces for a carrier environment.

ONF currently has a number of carrier-focused initiatives underway, including SDN transport, mobile and wireless network applications, carrier-grade SDN, and large-scale network migration.

“We expect SDN, in tandem with Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), to shape the future of telecommunications networks,” said Vishnu Shukla, of Verizon and OIF president. “It is exciting to have these two prominent groups combining resources, innovative thinking and industry support to put together a very relevant and important demo.”

“We are pleased to join forces with the OIF, who have been contributing to our efforts to extend OpenFlow to support optical transport networks,” said Dan Pitt, executive director of the Open Networking Foundation. “The OIF/ONF Transport SDN demonstration will showcase how transport networks will benefit from SDN and NFV.”

http://www.oiforum.com
http://www.opennetworking.org

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Crehan Research: Intel's Grantley Platform to Drive Server Networking

A new report from Crehan Research forecasts that 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) will finally eclipse one Gigabit Ethernet (1GbE) by 2016 to become a majority of total shipments, which closely follows the mass adoption of servers based on Grantley, Intel’s latest micro-architecture platform.

“Although Romley and Nehalem, Intel's prior two server platforms with new processor micro-architectures, were capable of driving enough bandwidth to warrant the incorporation of 10GbE networking, many supporting factors to push broader 10GbE adoption were not yet in place,” said Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research. “With the impending arrival of Grantley, these supporting factors – including broad market portfolios of lower-priced adapters and data center server-access switches, in addition to more compelling 10GBASE-T offerings – are falling into place to facilitate strong growth in the 10GbE server attach rate,” he said.

In its 4Q12 report, published in early 2013, Crehan Research identified three major stages of mainstream 10GbE server networking adoption, the first centering around blade servers and converged networking, the second around public cloud and hyper-scale data centers and the third around enterprise rack and tower servers. These three major stages are also correlated with the broad adoption of Intel’s micro-architecture server platform cycles, respectively, Nehalem, Romley and Grantley.

http://www.crehanresearch.com/

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