Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Interoute to Acquire Vtesse for UK Network and Data Center

Interoute Communications has acquired the UK Vtesse group. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Vtesse operates an extensive fiber network connecting 55 data centres and 48 major towns and cities in England, Scotland and Wales.  The company provides metropolitan and Wide Area Network (WAN) solutions to some of the largest companies in the world both directly and via leading global system integrators, such as IBM, ARUP, Redstone and Logicalis. Its enterprise customers including Lloyds TSB, Poundland, Friends Provident, Invesco, DEFRA and the AA, will now have access to Interoute’s advanced Unified ICT portfolio of services.

Vtesse also operates a Tier 3 data center, situated 25 minutes from central London, with 2,700m² space, capable of accommodating 877 racks at 5kW each via a 5MW power supply.  The companies said this is an ideal site for colocation, disaster recovery back-up for Interoute’s London City data centers.

Interoute said the acquisition enables it to bring its VDC cloud service and its Enterprise Unified ICT portfolio of advanced Computing, Connectivity and Unified Communications solutions to businesses across the UK.

“When you look at the options for European businesses wanting to take advantage of flexible, scalable cloud infrastructure, they are often limited to the public cloud providers who think Europe can be served by one European data centre location connected by the public internet. With this acquisition Interoute is adding its twelfth data centre in Europe and over 7000km of UK network to its 60,000km pan-European global Cloud services platform. This provides a highly resilient, secure low latency Cloud platform that businesses everywhere can benefit from,” stated Gareth Williams, Interoute CEO.

http://www.interoute.com/
http://www.vtesse.com/

Google Trims Cloud Compute Pricing In Step with Moore's Law

Google announced a 10% price reduction in all Google Compute Engine instances types, across all regions, effective immediately.

Earlier this year, Google said it would price cloud computing in accordance with Moore’s Law, setting a new standard for economics in the public cloud. The latest price cuts are attributed to a decrease in Google's underlying cost of hardware and efficiency gains in running its service and managing its data centers.

https://atmosphere.withgoogle.com

HP Intros 64-bit ARM-based Servers

HP introduced two ARM-based servers, including the first enterprise-class 64-bit ARM-based server, as part of its  HP ProLiant Moonshot portfolio.

HP describes the launch as a major milestone in next-generation infrastructure.

The HP ProLiant Moonshot servers deliver high-density, ARM-based systems for hyperscale, data center environments to help customers improve application performance, drive business innovation and deliver breakthrough data center economics.

“ARM technology will change the dynamics of how enterprises build IT solutions to quickly address customer challenges,” said Antonio Neri, senior vice president and general manager, Servers and Networking, HP. “HP’s history, culture of innovation and proven leadership in server technology position us as the most qualified player to empower customers with greater choice in the server marketplace.”

HP is also extending the reach of the growing ARM ecosystem to enable developers to test and port code stacks and solutions to the ARM architecture with the launch of an ProLiant Moonshot Discovery Lab.

China Huaxin Acquires Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise

China Huaxin Post & Telecommunication Economy Development Center has acquired Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise for EUR 202 million. Alcatel-Lucent will retain a 15% minority stake in the divested business, as well as maintaining a commercial relationship with it in support of its growth ambitions under new ownership.

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, which has its headquarters in Paris, has over 2,700 employees worldwide and operations in more than 80 countries.

Alcatel-Lucent said the divestment of this division follows The Shift Plan, launched in June 2013, to refocus itself as a specialist in IP, Cloud and Ultra-Broadband Access, while realigning its balance sheet, implementing cost savings of Euro 1 billion and generating at least Euro 1 billion through selective asset sales by the end of 2015.

China Huaxin Post & Telecommunication Economy Development Center (“China Huaxin” ) is an industrial investment company that seeks long-term commercial growth opportunities in the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) sector.

YUAN Xin, President, China Huaxin said: “We are really excited by the acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. Our long-term investment approach will help Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise deliver on its ambition while enabling us to strengthen our strategic position in the enterprise communications arena. Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise has very strong assets and a recognized leadership in many markets across the globe. We are looking forward to leveraging our investment capabilities and experience to bring this business to the next level, both in size and market outreach.”

http://www.sinohx.com/en/news_content.aspx?id=128
http://enterprise.alcatel-lucent.com/

Compass-EOS Introduces SDN Forwarding Plane

Compass-EOS introduces its SDN Forwarding Plane, a new networking element that aims to replace expensive and complex routers used in service provider networks.

The Compass-EOS said key attributes of its SDN Forwarding Plane include:

  • A scalable, high-capacity, low-latency, programmable secure packet forwarding  platform
  • Support for SDN/NFV-based open-standard protocol
  • The Compass-EOS AnyFLOW Architecture, a unique, hybrid SDN architecture that combines network topology resolution and packet forwarding on multiple levels
  • Compass-EOS icPhotonics technology for scalability and low-latency

Compass-EOS has also joined the Open Daylight open-source SDN community and is planning to contribute code and expertise for WAN-centric SDN applications.

Compass-EOS also disclosed a new chip on its product roadmap that will enable its routers and SDN Forwarding Plane solution to grow from its current total capacity of 1.34 Terabits/sec to higher than 10 Terabits/sec.

“With the world’s first commercial technology combining high-capacity inter-chip optical interconnect and digital processing in the same silicon chip, Compass-EOS’ icPhotonics™ technology gives us the unique opportunity to completely transform the  information and communications technology industry as we know it, unleashing a new generation of devices and innovation that disrupts the current network equipment paradigm," said Matt Bross, Compass-EOS Chairman and CEO.

“This gives birth to a new network element – an SDN Forwarding Plane that takes its instructions from processes in the cloud and defines in detail what each flow in the plane is doing in a packet-by-packet basis,” Bross continued. “This type of technology capability simply doesn’t exist in legacy platforms. The SDN Forwarding Plane is more powerful yet less complex and power hungry. More importantly, it can also incrementally scale through the simple addition of more devices, just like servers are used to scale data centers today.”

http://compass-eos.com/

Pica 8 Raises $12.5 Million for its Open-vSwitch SDN

Pica 8, a start-up based in Palo Alto, California with R&D in Beijing, China, secured $12.5 million in Series B funding for its open SDN system.

Pica 8 leverages commodity bare metal switches for its Open-vSwitch (OVS) SDN solution aimed at high-end data centers. PicOS provides extensive support for traditional switching and routing protocols.  Pica8 can provide PicOS, switching hardware or both in a fully integrated package as part of an end-to-end data center SDN solution.

The new funding came from a group of investors led by VantagePoint Capital Partners, Cross Head and Pacific Venture Partners (PVP), bringing its total funding to date to over $20 million.

http://www.pica8.com/


  • Pica 8 is headed by James Liao, who previously led product strategy for switching and data center products at original device manufacturer Quanta.



StackEngine Delivers Manageability & Automation for Docker Containers

StackEngine, a start-up based in Austin, Texas, unveiled its platform to simply and massively deploy, manage, and scale resilient Docker applications.

The company says tools like Chef and Puppet were built to automate systems, not containers.  Its solution specifically targets Docker containers, providing tools to discover, visualize, and manage small- to large-scale Docker deployments. The goal is to intelligently automate change and configuration management for containers.

StackEngine also announced $1 million in seed funding from Silverton Partners and LiveOak Venture Partners.

"We deeply believe that automation is the answer to an emergent problem in Docker and container technologies," said StackEngine CEO and Co-founder Bob Quillin. "We also believe a new and radically different approach is needed. Containerization instantly shifts the problem up the stack. StackEngine bridges that gap and gives enterprises the ability to deliver product faster, deploy more frequently, operate more reliably and run wherever is most optimal."

http://www.stackengine.com

Ericsson Acquires Ambient for Smart Grid Techologies

Ericsson has acquired Ambient Corporation, a provider of smart grid communications technology for utilities. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The Ambient smart grid communications platform, which includes hardware and software elements, features an open IP network architecture. The platform supports multiple communications technologies in parallel, including cellular, Wi-Fi, radio frequency (RF) and power line communications (PLC), and also provides serial and Ethernet connections. The platform enables the integration of various smart grid applications, such as smart metering, demand response, distribution automation and monitoring, and direct load control into a common infrastructure.

Ambient will be integrated into Ericsson's Global Services organization, which employs 64,000 services professionals based in 180 countries.

"At Ericsson we are increasingly using our experience in communications and providing managed services for networks that serve more than 1 billion subscribers worldwide to assist partners and customers in the utilities sector. We're helping utilities to adopt new types of applications and enable new business models, and I believe Ambient could make a big contribution to that effort," stated Magnus Mandersson, Executive Vice President and Head of Business Unit Global Services at Ericsson.

http://www.ericsson.com/news/1859937

Ambient was founded in 1996 and is based in Newton, Massachusetts.

In July 2014, Ambient filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.