Tuesday, September 16, 2014

AT&T Readies SDN-Powered, "Network on Demand" Ethernet Service

AT&T is preparing to launch a "Network on Demand" capability that lets business customers order, add, or modify Ethernet WAN services on-demand via a portal.

AT&T said its new capability will be the first such software-defined networking solution of its kind in the United States when it launches later this year in Austin. A trial has been underway at the University of Texas at Austin since June.

Beyond Austin, AT&T is planning to deploy this and other new Network on Demand-enabled services, including Internet and virtual private network, in additional markets starting in 2015.

AT&T said key benefits of its "Network on Demand" include:

  • Intuitive and immediate click-through contracting and ordering of network services
  • Dialing up or dialing down broadband speeds in near real time instead of hours or days
  • Provisioning new communications ports in days compared to weeks

"By enabling companies to easily and immediately provision network services on their own, we're creating a truly world-class customer experience," said Roman Pacewicz, AT&T Senior Vice President – Marketing and Global Strategy. "Our new Network on Demand service will do for corporate networks what the cloud did for management of corporate data centers."

SDN-powered Ethernet services are part of AT&T's User-Defined Network Cloud strategy, which was first announced in February.

http://www.att.com


AT&T's User-Defined Network Cloud program, which aims to transform not only the company's infrastructure but how AT&T does business.

The User-Defined Network Cloud will place customers at the center of the network with a modern, cloud-based architecture.

“The architecture and deployment teams are finalizing their planned introduction of this new architecture, which we expect to roll out later this year and early 2015,” said Tim Harden, president, AT&T Supply Chain. “We look forward to collaborating with Fujitsu and Alcatel-Lucent to achieve our next-generation network.”

Cavium Enters Ethernet Switching with 3.2 Tbps XPliant Fabric

Cavium made its entrance into the merchant Ethernet switching silicon market with the launch of its programmable XPliant Packet Architecture and chips. The technology for this new product line originates with XPliant, a Silicon Valley start-up that Cavium agreed to acquire in July.  The new products target switches for cloud / enterprise data centers and service provider infrastructure, for both top-of-rack and backbone applications.

The XPliant team, which drew talent from Cisco, Juniper, Brocade and Marvell, formed in 2011 with goal of developing a more programmable and scalable design for software-defined networks. The company said its design approach with its XPliant Packet Architecture was to take the dedicated function blocks present in conventional Layer 2 switching silicon and replace then will a flexible Table Type structure that enables software personalities to dictate the exact operation to be performed – for packet parsing, table look-ups, packet re-writes, fabric scheduling, and statistics and counters – without impacting performance. The company said its design fits well with the spine/leaf architecture of scale-out data centers.

Key features of the CNX880xx family of switch chips:


  • 880 Gigabits per second to 3.2 Terabits per second in a single chip
  • Port density at 3.2 Tbps with many flexible configurations, including: 32 ports of 100G, 64 ports of 40G or 50G, or 128 ports of 10G or 25G.
  • Support for the new 25G Ethernet Consortium specification for 25G on a single lane or 50G on two lanes.
  • Standard API support
XPliant will provide source code for a complete set of switching and routing functions as well as several network overlays via its SDK (software design kit).  The newest protocols such as GENEVE are already supported. As new protocols are introduced, updated personalities can be provided, even to switches that are installed in the network. As innovations such as OpenFlow TTPs or VXLAN extensions are created, they can quickly be deployed across the network.

Cavium's first XPliant’s CNX880xx Ethernet Switch chip is expected to sample in Q4.

“Leading cloud-scale Internet companies need to cope with the rapid increase in traffic from mobile apps as well as video” said Eric Hayes, VP and general manager, Switch Platform Group. “With XPA, OEMs will be able to differentiate their products while drastically reducing the time to new service deployment, increasing automation and driving operational efficiency.”

http://www.cavium.com

Docker Raises $40 Million for its VM Container Strategy

Docker, Inc., the commercial sponsor of the Docker open source project, secured $40 million in series C funding for its strategy in delivering distributed applications in cloud infrastrecture.

The funding round was led by Sequoia Capital and includes existing investors Benchmark, Greylock Partners, Insight Ventures, Trinity Ventures, and Jerry Yang.  The company plans to use the funds to drive adoption of its platform in the enterprise and to broaden its rapidly growing ecosystem of application developers, system administrators, platform providers, and technology partners.

Docker provides a platform that enables any application to be created and run as a collection of consistent, low-overhead Docker containers that work across virtually any infrastructure. This new model liberates developers from application and infrastructure dependencies, significantly accelerates the software development lifecycle, and enables substantial improvements in infrastructure cost and efficiency.

There have now been 21 million downloads of the Docker platform, up from 3 million at DockerCon in June. Over 35,000 “Dockerized” applications are now available on the Docker Hub Registry, and more than 13,000 Docker-related projects have launched on GitHub. Docker has also seen rapid growth in the technology partner ecosystem with over 100 companies – including industry heavyweights Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware – having announced Docker–supporting platform initiatives.

“We are thrilled to have a firm like Sequoia – and an individual like Bill Coughran – join our team,” said Ben Golub, CEO of Docker. “This new partnership provides Docker with an unrivaled venture team and the resources to drive our vision for distributed applications. It’s a testament to the community and ecosystem that have helped Docker reach this important milestone.”

“Docker has emerged as the de facto standard of how you will build, deploy, and orchestrate applications for the cloud. Its impact on the industry will be huge. Ben, Solomon and the rest of the Docker team are incredibly focused on building an enduring technology company, and I am so proud of all they have accomplished in such a short period of time.” – Jerry Chen, partner at Greylock Partners and Docker board member

http://www.docker.com

  • Docker is an open platform which can be used to build, ship, and run distributed applications on various clouds. The use of a container allows the same app to run unchanged on laptops, servers, data center VMs or the cloud -- similar to the concept of shipping container for the transportation industry.
  • Kubernetes is a container cluster management tool developed by Google. It builds on top of Docker to construct a clustered container scheduling service.
  • In June 2014, Docker 1.0 was officially released, marking an important milestone for this open platform which can be used to build, ship, and run distributed applications on various clouds.  Docker enables applications to be quickly assembled from components and eliminates the friction between environments.  It consists of the Docker Engine, the de facto container standard, and Docker Hub, a new cloud-based service from Docker Inc., the start-up company behind the open source Docker project and chief sponsor of the Docker ecosystem.

Cloudyn Raises $4 Million for Cloud Mgt Tools

Cloudyn, a start-up based in San Francisco, raised $4 million for its tools for cloud monitoring and optimization.

Cloudyn's monitoring solution supports Amazon AWS, Google GCE and OpenStack. The company claims more than 2,400 customers worldwide, including F500 industry leaders in aerospace, infrastructure, consumer online travel services, IT management consulting, and manufacturing.

The funding round was led by Titanium Investments, with existing investors RDSeed also participating.

https://www.cloudyn.com/

New Network Functions Virtualization Forum Gets Underway

The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) is launching a new Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) Forum with a mission to develop use cases that identify emerging business opportunities, such as virtual network operator and service roaming.

The NFV Forum plans to build on solutions being developed by the ETSI NFV ISG specifications, OpenStack’s general purpose virtualization framework, the Linux Foundation’s Open Platform for NFV (core NFV functions), TM Forum Zoom’s program on management and operations, OpenDaylight’s open source SDN solution, and Open Networking Foundation’s OpenFlow.

“ATIS’ newest forum will provide the solutions that will take NFV from being an emerging technology to a true game changer in terms of enhancing the ability to integrate software across service providers in a uniform and automated way, and to scale application instances to meet the changing demand for services,” said ATIS President and CEO Susan Miller.

The Forum’s inaugural event is a virtual meeting to be held September 25.

http://www.atis.org/nfv

Orange Bids to Acquire Jazztel of Spain

Orange launched a public bid to acquire Jazztel, a network operator offering broadband and triple play services in Spain.  The offer of 13 euros per share in cash represents a premium of 34% compared to where the stock has been trading. The price of 100% of Jazztel’s capital amounts to 3.4 billion euros.

Orange said the acquisition would make it the second biggest fixed-line broadband operator and one of the most dynamic players in the mobile segment in Spain. Orange estimates synergies for the combined entity of up to 1.3 billion euros, in particular thanks to savings in operational expenditure and investments in networks.

http://www.orange.com
http://www.jazztel.com


Zayo Launches Tranzact Customer Platform

Zayo introduces a new portal that lets its customers get pricing, place orders, and view existing and pending services. Key features:

  • Shop and buy Bandwidth services in 2 minutes or less
  • Browse over 70,000 worldwide locations
  • Search by building, location type, data centers, and cloud providers
  • Simultaneously compare prices across multiple products, speeds, and locations
  • Access Zayo’s network using our advanced fiber mapping tool
  • Follow straightforward steps to add locations to quotes, even those not on Zayo’s network
  • View and manage existing services online
  • Access our mobile ready platform at your convenience

http://www.zayo.com/tranzact