Coming Soon -- 25 and 50 Gigabit Ethernet

A new industry consortium, including Arista Networks, Broadcom, Google, Mellanox Technologies, and Microsoft, announced the availability of a specification optimized to allow data center networks to run over a 25 or 50 Gigabit per second (Gbps) Ethernet link protocol. The specification prescribes a single-lane 25 Gbps Ethernet and dual-lane 50 Gbps Ethernet link protocol, enabling up to 2.5X higher performance per physical lane or twinax copper wire between the rack endpoint and switch compared to current 10 Gbps and 40 Gbps Ethernet links. The new specification is being made available royalty-free by the Consortium members to any data center ecosystem vendor or consumer who joins the Consortium.

The 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium said its mission is to support an industry-standard, interoperable Ethernet specification that boosts the performance and slashes the interconnect cost per Gbps between the server Network Interface Controller (NIC) and Top-of-Rack (ToR) switch. The new specification covers 25 Gbps and 50 Gbps Ethernet physical layer (PHY) and media access control layer (MAC) behavior, including virtual lane alignment, autonegotiation, and forward error correction characteristics.

“We believe that 25 and 50 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) serves a focused market requirement for next-generation, performance and cost optimized server- and storage-to-switch interconnects and are proud to be a key contributor to the Consortium’s 25 and 50 GbE specification," stated Rochan Sankar, Product Marketing Director, Infrastructure and Networking Group, Broadcom.

“The companies joining the 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium are taking a major step forward in increasing the performance of data center networks,” said Anshul Sadana, Senior Vice President, Customer Engineering, Arista Networks. “With ever-increasing server performance and with the uplinks from the leaf to the spine layer migrating to 100 Gbps in the near future, it makes sense to increase the access speed from 10 Gbps to 25 and 50 Gbps.”

http://www.25GEthernet.org

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Ericsson Shows Pre-standard 5G at 5 Gbps in 15 GHz band

Ericsson demonstrated pre-standard 5G technology delivering 5 Gbps throughput in the 15 GHz frequency band.

Ericsson's demo, which was presented for senior management at NTT DOCOMO and SK Telecom, employed a new radio interface concept and advanced Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) technology. Ericsson 5G network development activity includes new antenna technologies with wider bandwidths, higher frequencies and shorter transmission time intervals.

Ericsson said it is developing radio base stations built with baseband units and radio units specifically for 5G trials. Small cells in a heterogeneous network environment, new frequency bands (including 15 GHz) and high-speed, high-capacity backhaul transmission are also key 5G focus areas for Ericsson.

Johan Wibergh, head of Business Unit Networks, says: "5G will impact both the access and core of mobile networks so we are working closely with leading operators, including NTT DOCOMO and SK Telecom, to ensure a practical and proactive evolution. The development of advanced radio technologies is one of the first critical steps in the realization of a 5G future."

http://www.ericsson.com/news/1810070

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Microsoft Adds Encryption to Azure ExpressRoute, OneDrive, Office 365

Microsoft announced a set of security enhancements to its major cloud services and the opening of a Transparency Center on its campus in Redmond, Washington.  Highlights of the announcement include:

• Enhanced message encryption in Office 365 as well as Azure’s addition of ExpressRoute, a service that enables businesses to create private connections between Azure datacenters and infrastructure on their premises or in a colocation environment. 
  
  
  
• Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption is now enabled in Outlook.com for both outbound and inbound email.
  
• Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) encryption support is now enabled in Outlook.com for sending and receiving mail between email providers. Forward secrecy uses a different encryption key for every connection, making it more difficult for attackers to decrypt connections.
  
• OneDrive has now enabled PFS encryption support as well. OneDrive customers now automatically get forward secrecy when accessing OneDrive through onedrive.live.com, our mobile OneDrive application and our sync clients. As with Outlook.com’s email transfer, this makes it more difficult for attackers to decrypt connections between their systems and OneDrive.
  
• The new Microsoft Transparency Center provides participating governments with the ability to review source code for the company's key product. This is meant to assure software integrity and confirm there are no “back doors.” Microsoft plans to open addition Transparency Centers in other locations, including Brussels.  

http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2014/07/01/advancing-our-encryption-and-transparency-efforts.aspx

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Interxion Offers Direct Connection to AWS and Azure from European Data Centers

Interxion announced private connections to both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure from all of its 37 data centers across 11 countries.

Private connections are now available from leading AWS Direct Connect and Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute network partners such as Level 3, Verizon, AT&T, IX Reach and BT – who all have points of presence in Interxion data centres.

Private connections between public cloud platforms and enterprise IT infrastructure provide better performance, lower latency and improved security compared to Internet-based connections.

“Our data centres act as a true Cloud Hub, enabling interconnection between Cloud Services Providers, their customers and channel partners making it attractive to customers building and managing reliable and high performance hybrid IT solutions. Thanks to our rich carrier community, our customers are provided with a choice to order services from. For example, in London, Frankfurt, Paris and Amsterdam we have at least 6 AWS Direct Connect and all 4 network partners for Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute,” said Vincent in’t Veld, Director of Cloud Segment at Interxion.

http://www.interxion.com/sectors/enterprise/private-cloud-connection

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AWS Adds Lowest-cost EC2 Instance Option

Amazon Web Services announced the availability of T2 instances -- the lowest cost Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance type to date. Target applications include web servers, developer environments, and small databases.

Th new tier significantly reduces costs for applications that do not require sustained high CPU performance but benefit from the ability to burst to full core performance. T2 On-Demand Instance prices start at $0.013 per hour ($9.50 per month). When used with Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) General Purpose (SSD) volumes, T2 instances also bring high-performance storage options to customers at a very low cost.

Customers can launch T2 instances using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS SDKs, AWS Marketplace, and third-party libraries. T2 instances are available in three instance sizes and are initially available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Australia (Sydney), and Brazil (Sao Paulo) Regions. T2 instances can be purchased as On-Demand and Reserved Instances.

“Amazon EC2 provides an unmatched selection of instances to support customers running whatever workload they want on AWS. Some of our customers have requested instance types that optimize their performance and cost for applications that don’t use the full CPU capability frequently, but require the full CPU resources for short bursts,” said Matt Garman, Vice President, Amazon EC2 at Amazon Web Services. “T2 instances address this need by providing a consistent baseline performance with the ability to burst to full CPU core performance – all at a very low cost.”

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2

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EZchip to Acquire Tilera for its Multi-Core Processors

EZchip Semiconductor will acquire Tilera Corporation, a developer of high-performance multi-core processors, up to $130 million in cash.  The deal includes $50 million at closing and up to an additional $80 million is payable subject to the attainment of certain future performance milestones.

Tilera, which is based in San Jose, California, offers a line of multi-core processors, network interface cards and white-box appliances for data center networking equipment.

At the high end, Tilera's TILE-Gx8072 Processor includes 72 identical processor cores (tiles) interconnected with the company's iMesh on-chip network. Each tile consists of a 64-bit processor core as well as L1 and L2 cache and a non-blocking Terabit/sec switch that connects the tiles to the mesh and provides full cache coherence among all the cores. The company offers smaller versions with 9- 16, and 36-cores. Tilera offers its own line of accelerator cards based on its processors, as well as two 1RU appliances.

EZchip said Tilera complements its own portfolio.  EZchip’s next generation NPU family, the NPS, is targeting carrier edge routers as well as data center networking equipment.   For these markets, the NPS brings very high performance data-plane packet processing. Unlike the use cases for multi-core CPUs, the systems that use high-speed NPUs such as the NPS are high-end systems in which the data-plane is separate from the control-plane. In these high-end systems the control-plane is typically performed on a separate general purpose CPU.

EZchip currently expects the acquisition to be neutral to slightly dilutive in 2014 and accretive in 2015 to earnings per share on a non-GAAP basis. Following the closing, Devesh Garg, the CEO of Tilera, will serve as EZchip’s President in charge of all US operations.

“We welcome the Tilera team to the EZchip family. The addition of a multi-core product portfolio to EZchip expands and diversifies our product offerings and addressable markets. While our NPU portfolio and in particular our new NPS targets high-end carrier and data center equipment in which a high-performance data-plane only NPU is required, the Tilera multi-core CPUs address a wide range of data-center systems in which both data-plane and control-plane run on the multi-core CPU,” said Eli Fruchter, CEO of EZchip Semiconductor. “Furthermore, the combination of EZchip’s and Tilera’s market-proven leading technologies, in particular EZchip’s networking expertise and Tilera’s multi-core expertise, will enable us to develop new multi-core CPUs that uniquely integrate powerful networking capabilities with the highest number of processor cores addressing a wide range of applications and market segments.”

http://www.ezchip.com
http://www.tilera.com

• Tilera was founded in March 2005 and launched its first silicon product in August 2007.
  
• In January 2011, Tilera announced a $45 million round of funding, including investment from WestSummit Capital Management and Comerica Bank in addition to existing investors Walden International, Bessemer Venture Partners and Columbia Capital. Cisco Systems and Samsung Venture Investment Co. also participated, joining Tilera’s previous strategic investors: Broadcom, NTT Finance, VentureTech Alliance, and Quanta Computer.
  
• In March 2010, Tilera raised $25 million in Series C funding, including from Broadcom, Quanta Computer and NTT Financing.  This brought total funding in the company to $64 million.

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Databricks Raises $33 Million for Apache Spark-based Cloud

Databricks, a start-up based in Berkeley, California, announced $33 million in series B funding and the launch of its cloud platform.

Databricks Cloud is powered by Spark, a unified processing engine with support for interactive queries (Spark SQL), streaming data (Spark Streaming), machine learning (MLlib) and graph computation (GraphX) natively.  A single API is used across the entire pipeline.

Databricks said its cloud platform benefits from the rapid pace of innovation in Spark, driven by the 200+ contributors that have made it the most active project in the Hadoop ecosystem.

The company's hosted platform simplifies the provisioning of a Spark cluster. Users simply specify the desired capacity of a new cluster, and the platform handles all the details: provisioning servers on the fly, streamlining import and caching of data, handling all elements of security, and continually patching and updating Spark—freeing users of all the typical headaches and allowing them to explore and harness the power of Spark.

Databricks Cloud is currently available on Amazon Web Services.  The company is looking to add cloud providers in the future.

The funding round was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with follow-on investment from Andreessen Horowitz.

“Databricks remains committed to developing and expanding Apache Spark fully in the open and continuing to add to the capabilities that made it a vital big data platform,” said Matei Zaharia, CTO of Databricks. “We will continue to commit significant resources to drive open-source innovation in Spark alongside the community. Furthermore, we look forward to enabling a whole new set of users and developers to experience and leverage the power of Spark to drive enterprise value.”

http://www.databricks.com/cloud

• Databricks is headed by Ion Stoica (CEO), who is a Professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley and also co-founder of Conviva.  The Databricks' technical team is headed by Matei Zaharia (CTO), who is the creator of Apache Spark and an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at MIT.
• Apache Spark, which is part of the Hadoop movement, is an open-source data analytics cluster computing framework originally developed in the AMPLab at U.C. Berkeley. It promises to run programs up to 100x faster than Hadoop MapReduce in memory, or 10x faster on disk.  http://spark.apache.org/

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ADVA Supplies Transport/Aggregation for Washington's Noel Comm.

Noel Communications, a network operator based in Yakima, Washington, has deployed ADVA Optical Networking's FSP 3000 and FSP 150 to advance rural connectivity throughout Washington.  ADVA said it was selected for the installation based on the rapid scalability and ease of use of its optical transport equipment and Ethernet access and aggregation devices.

“Trust is a key part of our company, a key part of our team. It underscores everything we do. This is something that our customers depend upon,” said Nick Guy, director, Networking, Noel Communications. “It's this focus on trust that explains why we're working with ADVA Optical Networking."

http://www.advaoptical.com/en/newsroom/press-releases-english/20140701.aspx
http://www.noelcommunications.com/

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Ericsson Lands 7-Year Managed Services Deal in Romania

Ericsson signed a seven-year managed services agreement with leading Romanian operators Romtelecom and Cosmote, both subsidiaries of OTE, the Hellenic Telecommunications Organization, Group of companies.

Under the deal, Ericsson will manage the operators' wireline and wireless networks in Romania. Ericsson will assume responsibility for network operations and maintenance of wireline and wireless access, transmission, core and IP domains, as well as network operations for operations support systems, for Romtelecom and Cosmote Romania. Ericsson will add about 730 employees from the carriers to its Global Services division.

http://www.ericsson.com/news/1808570

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