Thursday, July 24, 2014

Huawei and China Unicom Cloud Company Sign SDN Pact

China Unicom Cloud Data Co. Ltd. and Huawei formally signed a strategic cooperation agreement on SDN.

Under the pact, the companies will cooperate on SDN controllers. The strategic cooperation aims to explore SDN technology values for scale virtual tenant access, Virtual Machine on-demand deployment and migration, network centralized management, energy saving, and data center capability openness, etc., to further enhance China Unicom’s cloud service competence.

Mr. Jiao Gang, general manager, China Unicom Cloud Data Company, said: "China Unicom Cloud Data Company is a subsidiary of China Unicom group, focusing on IDC and cloud computer services, that aims to provide its customers with secure, stable, and reliable IDC and cloud computing services through professional, visualizable and granular solutions. By introducing technology innovations like SDN, we hope to improve our operational efficiency and service quality. This strategic cooperation will fully exploit the operational advantages from China Unicom and technology advantages from Huawei, providing top-quality cloud computing services for China Unicom customers."

Mr. Zha Jun, president, Huawei's fixed network product line, said: "This SDN agreement marks the beginning of a new era based on the continuation of positive past strategic cooperation between the two sides. Both China Unicom Cloud Data Company and Huawei will cooperate closely in the field of new technologies and new services, by establishing joint working committees, enabling both parties to benefit from their respective strengths, build future-proof competitive advantages."

http://pr.huawei.com/en/news/hw-356427-sdn.htm#.U9HjhfmWWSo

HP Bets $50 Million on Hortonworks for Hadoop

HP is making a $50 million equity investment in Hortonworks, a start-up based in Palo Alto, California, that offers enterprise Apache Hadoop solutions. The companies said the investment builds on the reseller agreement put in place last year.

The companies also plan to integrate the Hortonworks Data Platform with key HP technologies including the marquee HP HAVEn offering.

http://hortonworks.com/blog/hp-hortonworks-deepen-relationship/

In March 2014, Hortonworks announced an oversubscribed $100 million funding round to support it enterprise Apache Hadoop solutions.

Hortonworks develops, distributes and supports a 100% open source Apache Hadoop data platform that deeply integrates with existing IT investments and upon which enterprises can build and deploy Hadoop-based applications. The company has deep relationships with the key strategic data center partners, including Microsoft, SAP, Teradata, HP and others.

The new funding round was led by funds managed by BlackRock and Passport Capital, joined by all existing investors.

http://www.hortonworks.com

Telefónica launches "Sinfonier" CyberSecurity Community

Telefónica introduced Sinfonier, a collaborative security working environment for developers and researchers to share cybersecurity intelligence.

Telefónica said its goal with Sinfonier is to provice security researchers and intelligence analysts a free infrastructure so they can create and collaborate on security topologies.

Sinfonier is made up of an open, collaborative community with a real-time framework (Apache-STORM) alongside an intuitive graphic interface and an abstraction layer to facilitate the development of new functions. Developers and researchers feed content into the algorithms in the form of topologies, maximising the use of information. Through this collaborative model information is obtained from a variety of sources and is transformed, thereby generating a digital intelligence environment which can then be used by all the users of the community in order to generate their own intelligence algorithms and solutions.

Telefónica is recently been showcasing Sinfonier in Madrid (RootedCON) and Mexico (Campus Party Guadalajara).

http://pressoffice.telefonica.com/
http://sinfonier-project.net/

Telstra to Decommission 2G Network in 2016

Telstra announced plans to permanently shut off its 2G (GSM) network by the end of 2016.

In a blog posting, Mike Wright, Group Managing Director Networks at Telstra, writes that 2G traffic already accounts for less than 1% of the carrier's total network traffic.... and Telstra has not sold a 2G phone in years.

http://exchange.telstra.com.au/2014/07/23/its-time-to-say-goodbye-old-friend

Amazon Web Services Usage Growing at 90% YoY Rate

During Q2, Amazon Web Services usage growth was close to 90% year-over-year, according to the company's newly released financial report.  Amazon highlighted the following AWS milestones:

  • The AWS team grew by thousands of employees this past year, expanding AWS infrastructure, enterprise and public sector sales capabilities and allowing the team to innovate at an accelerating pace.
  • AWS has made 250 significant service and feature releases year-to-date and announced  substantial price reductions for customers ranging from 28% to 51%.
  • AWS announced a new general purpose instance type for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) with prices starting at $0.013 per hour -- its lowest-cost EC2 instance option.
  • AWS announced several new capabilities to make it easier for developers to build, deploy, and scale mobile applications, including Amazon Cognito for identity management and syncing.
  • AWS announced Amazon Zocalo, a fully managed, secure enterprise storage and sharing service with strong administrative controls and feedback capabilities.
  • AWS enhanced its secure block storage service, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), announcing new encryption capabilities, introducing a new lower-cost SSD-backed EBS volume type, and reducing prices on EBS Provisioned IOPS volumes by 35 percent. 

Amazon also disclosed that revenue for Amazon Web Services (North America), Advertising Services, and Co-branded Credit Cards grew at a 38% YoY rate in Q2 2014, reaching $1.12 billion.  Internationally, revenue for this same category was $50 million for the quarter.

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-irhome

Microsoft Posts Triple Digit Growth Rate for Cloud Services

In its quarterly financial report earlier this week, Microsoft highlighted surging revenue associated with cloud services, offset by declines by its recently acquired Nokia business.  Two highlights:

  • Office 365 Home and Personal subscribers totaled more than 5.6 million, adding more than 1 million subscribers again this quarter.
  • Commercial cloud revenue grew 147% with an annualized run rate that exceeds $4.4 billion.

"We are thrilled with the tremendous momentum of our cloud offerings with Office 365 and Azure both growing over 100% again,” said Kevin Turner, chief operating officer at Microsoft. “Looking forward, we are excited by the amazing opportunities enabled by our technology roadmap and our strong engagement across partners, customers, and developers.”

New Construction in Silicon Valley - Moffett Place

New construction underway at Moffett Place, a campus of 6 eight story towers on 55 acres in Sunnyvale, California.  Located near Moffett Field, in close proximity to Lockheed Martin, Yahoo!, Juniper Networks, Infinera, Aruba Networks and many other Silicon Valley firms.




July 24, 2014

NextNav Raises $70 Million for Wireless Location Service

NextNav, a start-up based in Sunnyvale, California, announced $70 million dollar Series D financing for its wireless location service, which combines accurate, in-building horizontal positioning with floor-level height precision.

NextNav's Metropolitan Beacon System ("MBS") positioning network. MBS provides reliable, accurate horizontal and vertical location services inside buildings and in urban areas where satellite-based GPS signals aren't available or reliable. The company is deploying its MBS network much like a cellular network, resulting in wide-area coverage that delivers its location services to every building within its network footprint.

The round was led by leading venture capital firms New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Oak Investment Partners, who were joined by existing investors Columbia Capital, Telcom Ventures and Goldman Sachs Investment Partners. Peter Barris, Managing General Partner at NEA, and Bandel Carano, Managing Partner at Oak will join NextNav's Board of Directors.

"NextNav's mission is to deliver GPS-like reliability, accuracy and ubiquity to the indoor and dense urban environment," said NextNav CEO, Gary Parsons. "We are delighted to have the support of top-tier venture partners and the deep domain and industry expertise of our new board members as we bring this powerful new technology to market."

http://www.nextnav.com


  • NextNav is headed by Gary Parsons, who is known as the founder of XM Satellite Radio. He was also founder and former Chairman of SkyTerra Communications and TerreStar Networks. Prior to founding XM Radio, Gary was EVP of MCI Communications.
  • NextNav was founded in 2007.

Telefónica Picks Nokia for LTE Upgrade in Spain

Telefónica has selected Nokia Networks as key supplier for radio access equipment and professional services in Andalusia, Galicia, Castilla Leon and Levante over a period of three years. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Specifically, Nokia Networks will upgrade Telefónica’s mobile network and implement 4G using its Single RAN Advanced solution, based on the compact, scalable Flexi Multiradio 10 Base Station.  The company will also deliver its Multicontroller Platform for the 3G Radio Network Controller (RNC) to further increase efficiency and resilience. Telefónica’s networks will be monitored, managed and optimized by Nokia’s NetAct management system.

As part of the agreement, Nokia Networks will also provide Customer Experience Management, including its Serve atOnce Traffica real-time monitoring platform, Serve atOnce Intelligence (SAI) reporting solution and Customer Care Automation solution.

http://nsn.com/news-events/press-room/press-releases/telefonica-modernizes-expands-its-radio-network-in-spain-with-nokia-networks

F5 BIG-IP App Services Now available for VMware vCloud Hybrid

F5 Networks' BIG-IP application services are now available for VMware vCloud Hybrid Service.  This enables enterprise networks to extend application services they trust in their own data center to run in the cloud. Specifically, global application availability, automation, and cloud bursting are enhanced with F5 and VMware, bolstering disaster recovery and business continuity efforts.

“Maintaining application availability and performance while moving workloads to the cloud is key for a seamless user experience across a hybrid environment,” said Ajay Patel, Vice President of Application Services, vCloud Hybrid Service, VMware. “With F5’s BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager validated in vCloud Hybrid Service, our customers can seamlessly manage application availability, performance and failover.”

http://www.f5.com
http://www.vmware.com

Microsemi Acquires Mingoa for Ethernet OAM

Microsemi Corp. has acquired Cork, Ireland-based Mingoa, a provider of semiconductor IP for hardware accelerated Ethernet OAM and embedded tests. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Mingoa, founded in 2009 as a private venture capital funded company, specializes in developing highly efficient and scalable embedded hardware/software for real time Ethernet operations, administration and monitoring (OAM) with IP level monitoring for SLA enforcement. Target applications for this technology include enterprise carrier Ethernet business services, mobile/small cell backhaul applications and datacenter interconnect.

"The acquisition of Mingoa is yet another example of Microsemi's commitment to serving the communications infrastructure market, bringing our organization enhanced capabilities in Carrier Ethernet, as well as the silicon implementation that will enable our customers to deliver better services to end users," said James J. Peterson, Microsemi's chairman and CEO. "We are pleased to have Mingoa's experienced team join Microsemi and we look forward to providing greater value to our communications customer base with new capabilities that elevate our competitive position."

http://www.Microsemi.com


  • Microsemi's current product lines include high-performance and radiation-hardened analog mixed-signal integrated circuits, FPGAs, SoCs and ASICs; power management products; timing and voice processing devices; RF solutions; discrete components; security technologies and scalable anti-tamper products; Power-over-Ethernet ICs and midspans; as well as custom design capabilities and services. The company is based in Aliso Viejo, California.


Earlier this year, Microsemi acquired Symmetricom for approximately $230 million. Symmetricom specializes in highly precise timekeeping technologies for data, voice, mobile and video networks and services. It provides timekeeping in GPS satellites, national time references, and national power grids as well as in critical military and civilian networks. The company is based in San Jose, California.