AT&T Rolls out NFV-based Network On Demand Service

AT&T launched a Network on Demand service that lets businesses add or change functionality in near-real time. The service uses Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technologies to create dynamic, on-demand services.


“Businesses need agility to compete and win in their industries. They need to sense and rapidly adapt to changing market dynamics,” said Steve McGaw, chief marketing officer, AT&T Business Solutions. “We’re the largest global integrated carrier for business, and Network on Demand makes our network dynamic and adaptive to meet our customers’ needs.”

AT&T cited three vendors: Brocade, Cisco and Juniper.

"Brocade is proud to work with AT&T on their industry-leading innovations bringing agile, new IP network services to customers," said Kelly Herrell, senior vice president and general manager of Software Networking, Brocade. "The cloud model taught the world that virtualizing the IT infrastructure speeds service delivery and provides greater flexibility. With Network on Demand, AT&T has proven this also holds true for enterprise network services."

“AT&T and Cisco are longstanding technology and business collaborators with a proven track record of success,” said Pankaj Patel, executive vice president and chief development officer, Cisco. “By combining Cisco’s industry-leading portfolio of over 100 virtualized network functions with AT&T’s vision and industry leadership, together we are working to capture new business opportunities that deliver on the promise of virtualization.”

“As a leader in network innovation, Juniper understands the benefits of automation and virtualization to deliver the agility that global communications providers like AT&T need in order to bring new, value-added services to their customers,” said Rami Rahim, chief executive officer, Juniper Networks. “We believe that Juniper’s long-standing collaboration with AT&T will continue to yield new and exciting offerings that utilize the power and intelligence of a software-centric network.”

http://about.att.com/story/expands_network_demand_platform.html

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AT&T Sees Cloud Adoption Driving Net Bond Direct Connects

AT&T reports significant growth with NetBond cloud connectivity service during the course of 2015.

AT&T NetBond now provides direct connections to an ecosystem of 13 leading cloud providers. In the last year, AT&T has launched 9 new leading cloud services: Salesforce, Box, HP, VMware, Amazon Web Services, SoftLayer, Blue Jeans Network, Sungard Availability Services and Equinix. The carrier has just announced 3 new members being announced today: Microsoft GovCloud, Amazon Web Services GovCloud and Cisco.

“Businesses are embracing the economics and flexibility of cloud solutions,” said Jon Summers, senior vice president, AT&T Mobile & Business Solutions. “NetBond is a large part of our strategy to deliver highly-secure cloud connections to leading providers. We provide our customers access from anywhere, at any time and on any device.”

http://about.att.com/story/cloud_adoption_advancing_netbond.html

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Google Acquires Jibe to Bring Rich Communications Service to Android

Google has acquired Jibe, a start-up based in Mountain View, California, that offers a Communications Cloud for carrier interoperability that uses WebRTC, RCS, joyn.

Jibe enables carriers to deliver rich IP-based communications services — high quality video calling, group chat and large media-file sharing.  Its customers include U.S.-based Sprint and leading European carriers Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, KPN, and SFR. The company was founded in 2006.

Google said the acquisition will help it bring RCS to a global audience with a better messaging experience on Android.

http://officialandroid.blogspot.com/2015/09/committing-to-rcs-latest-standard-in.html
http://www.jibemobile.com/

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Mellanox to Acquire EZchip

Mellanox Technologies agreed to acquire EZchip, a supplier of network processors and embedded CPUs for carrier and data center networks, for a cash purchase price of $25.5 per share, implying a transaction value of approximately $811 million (approximately $620 million net of cash).

EZchip’s silicon portfolio of solutions includes network processors, multi-core processors, intelligent network adapters, and high-performance appliances with a comprehensive software ecosystem, that scale to terabit performance levels. The company has expertise in security, deep packet inspection, video, and storage processing. EZChip is based in Yokneam, Israel. Eli Fruchter has served as CEO since the company's inception in May 1999

Mellanox said the EZchip acquisition is a step in its strategy to become the leading broad-line supplier of intelligent interconnect solutions for the software-defined data centers.

“The synergies between EZchip and Mellanox create attractive opportunities. We expect our combined technologies, and product portfolios to deliver leading end-to-end intelligent interconnect and processing solutions to data centers and wide area networks,” said Eyal Waldman, president and CEO of Mellanox Technologies.

“Joining forces with Mellanox represents numerous synergies that create a true powerhouse for connectivity and processing. With Mellanox's leading layer 1 - 3 connectivity solutions for data centers and EZchip's leading layer 3 – 7 processing solutions for carrier networks, the two companies complement each other in technology, products, markets served and customers. Together, we enable a multitude of layer 1 through 7 solutions for data centers and carriers,” said Eli Fruchter, CEO of EZchip.

The combined businesses currently have approximately 2,400 employees, and have generated combined revenues of $668 million for the twelve months ended June 30, 2015.

http://ir.mellanox.com
http://www.ezchip.com

EZchip to Acquire Tilera for its Multi-Core Processors

Tuesday, July 01, 2014  EZchip, Israel, Mergers and Acquisitions, Silicon, Silicon Valley, Start-ups, Tilera  No comments

EZchip Semiconductor will 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...

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Teridion Launches Next Gen Content Delivery Network

Teridion, a start-up based in San Francisco,announced the launch of its Global Cloud Network, boasting up to 20x performance improvement for end-user generated bi-directional Internet content.

Teridion is using IBM's SoftLayer infrastructure to optimize bi-directional, user-generated Internet content, Teridion features:

• The Teridion Global Cloud Network - Bringing intelligent routing to the cloud. Proprietary algorithms and the Teridion Management System, in conjunction with Teridion Measurement Agents, provide a real-time congestion map of the Internet to find the best possible path, taking into account bandwidth, latency and geography.
• High performance, low latency - Up to 20x Internet performance improvements, enabling users to rethink what's possible online.
• Flexibility - Teridion Cloud Routers are created on demand, providing scalability and enabling users to only pay for the resources consumed. The solution works with the largest cloud providers in the world to ensure the speed and reliability of traffic, without requiring customers to leave their cloud provider.
• Bolstered security - Teridion does not cache users' data, and end-to-end SSL encryption with no termination secures data across the network.
• Simple onboarding - With no hardware or software to install, and quick and easy provisioning, a typical cloud customer can be connected to the network in under an hour.

The company said its solution is currently being used by more than 15 companies spanning some of the most bandwidth-demanding applications and services, such as hosting and file sharing, rich media and advertising.

Teridion also announced a total of $20 million in funding, having closed a $15 million Series B round of financing led by Singtel Innov8. Existing investors JVP and Magma also participated in the round.

"The Internet is an incredibly powerful tool, but until now, we have struggled to take full advantage of its capabilities. It's still common for us to fall victim to slow response times and volatile connections," said Elad Rave, founder and CEO of Teridion. "We are breaking down these boundaries and providing users with a seamless Internet experience -- no matter their location, device or application. It's our goal for our SaaS customers to be able to generate additional customer loyalty, and the funding and general availability of our product are major steps in this direction."

http://www.teridion.com

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Google Cloud Extends its Load Balancing to 32 Cities

Google has extended its cloud load balancing locations to 20 additional cities, reaching a total of 32 distinct points globally. Additional locations bring better performance for Google Cloud Platform.

Here's the list of cities with local Google Cloud load balancing: Berlin, Budapest, Chennai, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Dublin, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, Kuala Lumpur, Lisbon, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Marseille, Miami, Milan, Mumbai, Munich, New York City, Osaka, Paris, São Paulo, San Francisco, Seattle, Singapore, Sofia, Stockholm, Sydney, Tokyo, Warsaw, and Washington D.C..

Google also announced the addition of Orange Business Services to its Carrier Interconnect service provider ecosystem.

http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2015/09/Announcing-new-global-load-balancing-locations-and-new-Carrier-Interconnect-partner-Orange-Business-Services.html

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Mirantis OpenStack 7.0 Focuses on Scalability and Resilience

A newly released Mirantis OpenStack 7.0 distribution focuses on enhanced scalability, resilience, and support in mission-critical enterprise environments.

“Early OpenStack releases were all about more features fast, as it was important to gain minimum feature parity to VMware, Microsoft and other cloud solution providers,” said Boris Renski, Mirantis CMO and co-founder. “Today the feature parity gap is largely closed with enterprises such as  AT&T, Symantec, Walmart and many other Global 2000 enterprises running OpenStack at massive scale. The development priorities for OpenStack in both the community and at Mirantis have shifted from feature racing to stability at scale and day two operations.”

Mirantis OpenStack 7.0, which is  based on OpenStack Kilo,  enables richer OpenStack environments through a number of new features for Cinder, Glance, Horizon, Keystone, Neutron and Sahara. It features out-of-the box integration with VMware vCenter while offering choice in networking, including, but not limited to, Cisco ACI, Juniper Contrail and VMware NSX fabrics.

The company said this release is able to specify flexible underlay network topology in a simple manner using network templates;

·         Tune control-plane architecture by moving services onto separate controller nodes;

·         Deploy controllers on virtual machines for small footprint deployment;

·         Build hybrid clouds with hierarchical multi-tenancy;

·         Secure integration of control-plane various IT systems with SSL endpoint encryption;

·         Scale North-South traffic with Distributed Virtual Router (DVR);

·         Integrate with container platforms, including Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes;

·         Simplify bringing VMware environments to the cloud with new functions such as NSX-v  and vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS);

·         Deploy multiple Hadoop or Spark big data clusters in parallel through new Sahara features and gain additional flexibility via an updated plug-in for HDP v2.2.

In addition, Mirantis is extending the support period of the distribution from two years to three.

http://www.mirantis.com

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Etisalat UAE Tests Virtual CPE with NEC/NetCracker

Etisalat UAE completed a series of virtual customer-premises equipment (vCPE) trials in partnership with NEC and NetCracker.

The proof of concept (PoC) validated the NEC/NetCracker vCPE solution’s ability to move highly complex IP and connectivity functionality from end-user gateways to Etisalat’s data center, which will reduce complexity for residential customers and provide them with more control over services. Etisalat’s deployment of the vCPE solution will enable it to experience a number of critical advantages, including the ability to provide next-generation connectivity without deploying highly complicated equipment at customer locations, resulting in reduced costs and fewer truck rolls.

NEC and NetCracker demonstrated several highly sophisticated use cases for Etisalat, including the ability to let customers personalize device- and subscriber-specific usage controls through an easy-to-use self-service portal. NEC and NetCracker also showed how customers can extend their LAN to enable cloud-based L2 services and content, as well as the vCPE solution’s ability to deploy virtual firewalls.

“By implementing the NEC/NetCracker vCPE solution, Etisalat can provide customers with access to a diverse set of services and capabilities through a self-care portal. The vCPE solution will also help Etisalat enable IPv6-based Internet connectivity without the need for any complex on-site processes,” said Noboru Takahashi, President & CEO at NEC in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).

http://www.nec.com/en/global/about/solutionsforsociety/message.html
http://www.netcracker.com/

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euNetworks adds Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute

euNetworks will begin offering direct access to Microsoft Azure for clients via Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute via its owned and operated fiber network across Europe.

“We are a bandwidth infrastructure company, owning and operating our own fibre networks that connect more than 260 data centres and 1,000 buildings across Europe as well as offering direct access to cloud platforms,” said Kevin Dean, Chief Marketing Officer of euNetworks. “Our relationship with Microsoft Azure means we offer unmatched direct access to this platform across our pan European footprint, offering significant benefit to companies as they move more of their IT infrastructure into the cloud.”

http://www.eunetworks.com/

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Microsoft Azure Takes Big Steps Forward

At its AzureCon 2015 event, Microsoft rolled out a number of big improvements to its Azure cloud platform centered around containers, security, infrastructure and the Internet of Things (IoT). The company also announced the availability of Microsoft Azure services in India from three regional data centers:  Central India in Pune, South India in Chennai, and West India in Mumbai

"We live in a connected world, and the intelligent cloud is powering it all,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud + Enterprise Division. “As data and devices continue to proliferate, there is vast opportunity for businesses to tap into their data to make their applications more intelligent

Highlights include:

General availability of Azure File Storage, featuring support of SMB 3.0 and the ability to mount file shares from anywhere (Azure or on-premises).

• More that 40% of revenue on Azure comes from start-ups
• 80% of Fortune 500 are using the Microsoft cloud.
• New Azure Container Service -- building on work with Docker and Mesosphere to create and manage scalable clusters of host machines onto which containerized applications can be deployed, orchestrated, and managed. Azure Container Service makes it easier to create and manage clusters of hosts pre-configured with Docker, Apache Mesos, Marathon and Docker Swarm. This work couples Azure's hyper-scale and enterprise-grade cloud with proven open source technologies to deliver the foundation for the container deployment, orchestration, and management service any team building container apps will need.
• New N-series, a new family of Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) powered by NVIDIA GPUs. Microsoft is the first hyper-scale provider to announce VMs featuring NVIDIA Grid 2.0 technology and the industry-leading Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform for professional graphics applications, deep learning, high-performance computing and more. A preview will be available in a few months.
• New Azure Mobile Engagement -- a new SaaS-delivered, data-driven user engagement platform that enables real-time fine-grain user segmentation, app user analytics, contextually-aware smart push notifications and in-app messaging across all connected devices.
• New Linux for Azure Data Lake -- aiming to make big data technology simpler and more accessible. Azure Data Lake makes HDInsight, which is Microsoft's Apache Hadoop-based service. Customers logging into the Azure Portal will now have a choice to select either Windows or Linux when deploying HDInsight. 
• New Azure IoT Suite -- brings together preconfigured offerings to enable companies to leverage Azure Stream Analytics for IoT. The latest Stream Analytics updates include support for IoT Hub input the ability to output stream analytics to Azure DocumentDB.
• New Azure CDN using the Akamai network -- integrating Akamai’s  CDN capabilities directly into the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. 
• New Shared Access Signatures, delivering full parity with storage account keys and providing a more secure alternative to delegating access to storage users than storage account keys provide.
• New Azure Storage client library for iOS.
• The Azure Storage client library for Java will soon support client-side encryption complementing the existing capability in the Azure Storage client library for .Net.
• New Azure support for the Financial Services Industry, including a detailed set of Payment Card Industry (PCI) and Data Security Standard (DSS) guidance describing Azure and customer shared responsibilities.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/

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XO Launches Managed Security Service over AWS Direct Connect

XO Communications (XO), in collaboration with BAE Systems and Fortinet, announced a Managed Security Bundle for businesses using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Direct Connect service.

The new AWS Direct Connect-enabled managed security bundle enables XO customers to procure high-speed connectivity to the AWS Cloud with firewall technology and managed security from a single provider.

XO integrates firewall technology from Fortinet and highly-respected managed security services from BAE Systems into the XO MPLS network for customers accessing AWS Direct Connect that sign up for the managed security bundle.

“Our new managed security bundle for AWS Direct Connect is an integral element of our network-enabled cloud strategy helping businesses to effectively and efficiently leverage both public and private cloud services to maximize their business productivity,” said Jake Heinz, senior vice president of marketing and product at XO Communications.  “In today’s environment where data security is a top priority, businesses can effortlessly leverage services designed for a higher level of security for their AWS Cloud data accessed through the XO network.”

XO expanded its AWS Direct Connect capabilities in 2014 and currently offers secure network connectivity for enterprises at speeds ranging from 50 Mbps to 10 Gbps.

http://www.xo.com/baesystems-fortinet/

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Juniper Unveils Unite Architecture for Bring Cloud to Enterprise Networks

Juniper Networks unveiled its Unite reference architecture for modernizing enterprise campus and branch networks into cloud-enabled service platforms. The goal is to deliver an agile and secure network architecture for enterprises looking to quickly deploy cloud applications and services through a single, easy-to-manage network management platform.

Juniper Networks Unite is comprised of enterprise switching, security, and routing products and software technologies, as well as third-party solutions through the Open Convergence Framework (OCF). Key innovations in the architecture include Junos Fusion Enterprise, enhancements to Junos Space Network Director as well as advancements to the Juniper Networks EX9200 line of programmable Ethernet switches. Juniper Networks Unite also includes the company's Sky Advanced Threat Prevention, new SRX Series Services Gateways and significant modernization of Junos Space Security Director.

"Amid increasingly connected business environments, Juniper understands our enterprise customers’ complex challenges across the network. The introduction of our Juniper Networks Unite architecture gives our customers the building blocks required to modernize their enterprise campus and branch environments with simple, automated and secure solutions that can harness the power of the cloud - transforming IT from a business necessity into a powerful business asset,” stated Jonathan Davidson, executive vice president and general manager, Juniper Development and Innovation, Juniper Networks.

http://www.juniper.net/us/en/solutions/cloud-enabled-enterprise/

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PLUMgrid Supports Load Balancing as a Service with F5

PLUMgrid released a new version of its Open Networking Suite (ONS) for OpenStack with support for multiple OpenStack distributions, Load Balancing as a Service (LBaaS) plugins, high availability, and dynamic Tunnel Heatmap.

PLUMgrid ONS supports multiple OpenStack distros and installers including Huawei Compass, Mirantis OpenStack, Rackspace Private Cloud, RDO, Red Hat OpenStack Platform, and Ubuntu OpenStack. The newest release, PLUMgrid ONS 4.0, has also achieved Red Hat certification with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7.

PLUMgrid ONS is adding support for OpenStack LBaaS (load balancing as a service) for Microservices. The company said that with the growth of microservices in data centers, LBaaS demand is increasing to provide seamless application and workload performance to all tenants. Utilizing LBaaS extensions in the Neutron API, PLUMgrid and F5 Networks have validated interoperability between F5 BIG-IP Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) and ONS 4.0 to verify deployment scenarios for high availability with scale-out, scalable IP addressing, and real-time overlay tunnel status.

http://www.plumgrid.com/

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Tata Communications Builds ExpressRoute for Office 365

Tata Communications has teamed up with Microsoft to connect businesses to Office 365 via the Tata IZO network platform and ExpressRoute private connections.

The IZO Private cloud enablement service is part of Tata Communications’ IZO, a global network platform for enhanced hybrid cloud enablement. IZO is uniquely engineered for predictable routing, together with enterprise private and public cloud connectivity and interconnected data centers.

"By offering Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365 through its IZO Private platform, Tata Communications is providing customers the enhanced security and reliability that come with a private connection, ultimately taking cloud-based communication and collaboration to the next level," stated Ross Ortega, Principal Product Manager, Networking, Microsoft Azure.

http://www.tatacommunications.com/

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HP Offers an SDN "Brite Box" with Pica8

HP will begin selling a "brite box" SDN solution solution that combines its Altoline family of Open Networking switches and HP VAN SDN Controller with Pica8's PicOS network operating system (NOS).  Pica8's PicOS has been certified and integrated to work with HP’s Altoline switches.

Pica8’s PicOS provides Layer 2 switching and Layer 3 routing and supports OpenFlow 1.4, enabling advanced integration with HP’s Virtual Application Networks (VAN) SDN Controller.  HP Altoline switches are available in 10- and 40-Gigabit configurations. The integration enables PicOS customers to leverage over 40 applications and tools from the HP SDN App Store.  Additionally, every instance of PicOS resold by HP includes HP Foundation Care for PicOS. HP Foundation Care for PicOS provides software support for PicOS direct from HP giving customers 24x7x365 access to thousands of trained and certified HP experts with skills that span multi-vendor networking, Linux and PicOS and the experience that comes with decades of global service delivery excellence.

“This agreement gives Pica8 customers a “brite box” option for network switching combined with the vast expertise of HP’s Technology Services organization,” said Niraj Jain, vice president of business development at Pica8. “HP is a leader in open networking solutions, and by integrating PicOS into an overall HP solution, customers gain a Linux-based operating system and access to the entire HP SDN App Store ecosystem, leveraging key SDN technologies like OpenFlow, Open-vSwitch, and others.”

“The PicOS networking operating system enables users to integrate Layer 2/3 networking with SDN in the same switch,” said Dominic Wilde, vice president, Global Product Line Management at HP. “By offering PicOS as part of HP’s Open Networking portfolio, we provide customers a powerful new option when integrating the HP VAN SDN Controller with our Altoline switches.”

http://www.pica8.com
http://www8.hp.com/us/en/networking/

Video: SDN Shifts Margins from Legacy Vendors to Channel

Wednesday, July 08, 2015  #SDN, Enterprise, Open, Pica8, Switching, Video  No comments

A market disruption caused by SDN is shifting margins from the legacy networking vendors to the channel, says Steve Garrison, VP of Marketing at Pica8.  By tearing apart the stack and letting customers pick the applications, OS, and bare metal hardware, you end up with a customized solution where the channel has a key role to play. Many customers might not have that expertise to pull that together, but this is where the margin shifts from...

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Pica8 Powers France’s TOUIX Internet Exchange with SDN

Monday, June 29, 2015  #SDN, France, Internet Exchange, Pica8  No comments

TOUIX, one of France’s leading Internet exchanges, is leveraging Pica8’s network operating system and white box switches to program and optimize its exchange fabric. TouIX is providing an interconnected network infrastructure in 4 PoPs around Toulouse city and is interconnected with the Paris FranceIX and LyonIX IXPs. Pica8 said its software enables TOUIX to avoid network outages and congestion caused by broadcast storms. The deployment is leveraging...

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Pica8 Leverages Open-vSwitch Database Protocol for Overlays

Thursday, May 28, 2015  #SDN, Pica8  No comments

Pica8 announced that it is leveraging the Open-vSwitch (OVS) database protocol (OVSDB) to control hardware VTEPs (VXLAN Endpoints) as part of an overlay architecture and integrate with leading network virtualization systems such as MidoNet and NSX for VTEP provisioning.  This helps simplify VXLAN and Network Virtualization deployments. “The adoption of open source software in the enterprise has become mainstream. Open networking is following...

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Pica8 Runs on White Box Switches Powered by Broadcom's Tomahawk

Monday, May 11, 2015  #SDN, Broadcom, Pica8  No comments

Pica8 announced support for white box switches powered by Broadcom’s latest chipset, Tomahawk, which enables line rate 100G Ethernet, as well as support for 25G and 50G Ethernet. To support Tomahawk, Pica8 has ported its network operating system, PicOS, to Inventec’s DCS Series 1-RU top of rack switch, which comes with 32x100G QSFP28 ports. Pica8 said it has limited samples of Inventec’s Tomahawk plat

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ODPi Project Envisions Open Ecosystem for Big Data

ODPi, which is a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project aimed at fostering an open ecosystem of Big Data, announced that membership in the organization has double since it got underway in February.  Members to date represent a diverse group of Big Data solution providers and end users such as Altiscale, Ampool, Capgemini, CenturyLink, DataTorrent, EMC, GE, Hortonworks, IBM, Infosys, Linaro, NEC, Pivotal, PLDT, SAS Institute Inc, Splunk, Squid Solutions, SyncSort, Telstra, Teradata, Toshiba, UNIFi, VMware, WANdisco, Xiilab, zData and Zettaset.

"ODPi is a useful downstream project for the community to work on a common reference platform and set of technologies around Hadoop," said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. "We've seen this model work with open source technologies experiencing rapid growth and know it can increase adoption and open up opportunities for innovation on top of an already strong Hadoop community."

Technical milestones include the release of an initial ODPi core specification and reference implementation that simplifies upstream and downstream qualification efforts and has been created by developers from across the Big Data landscape. More than 35 maintainers from 25 companies are dedicated to this ongoing work to start. The planned ODPi Certification Program is also underway. The goal of ODPi Certification Programs will be to ensure consistency and compatibility across the Big Data ecosystem.


http://www.ODPi.org
http://collabprojects.linuxfoundation.org/

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Latest version of Altiscale Data Cloud has Spark as a Service, ODPi support

Altiscale is updating its Big Data-as-a-Service with an expanded Spark-as-a-Service offering that supports all major versions of Apache Spark.  The new Altiscale Data Cloud 4.0 also features major upgrades to core Hadoop components, such as HDFS and YARN.

"Altiscale is dedicated to providing its customers with a full breadth of production-ready big data analytical options. That’s why we’ve been active in the Spark community from the very beginning,” said Raymie Stata, CEO and founder, Altiscale. “It’s also why Altiscale is ensuring that we support all major recent versions of Spark. Spark is evolving so rapidly that we want to ensure anything our customers rely on for Big Data analytics continues to be there for them.”

The latest version of the Altiscale Data Cloud also features the following updated capabilities:

• Apache Spark 1.5.0, which provides improved performance and stability. It offers enhanced support for Data Science APIs, especially with advances in DataFrames features and improved support for the R Language, making it a compelling release for data scientists.
• Apache Hadoop 2.7.1, so that customers can utilize YARN’s resource manager to deploy and manage long-running data access applications in Hadoop.
• Apache Hive 1.2.0, for access to enhanced SLQ Semantics and major performance improvements.
• Apache Pig 0.15.0, which now provides the capability to run Hive UDFs inside Pig as well as improved stability for Pig on Tez.

There are also improvements to the workflow manager, Apache Oozie (4.2.0) and to Apache Tez (0.7.0).

https://www.altiscale.com/

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Coriant Names Kheradpir as CEO

Coriant has appointed Shaygan Kheradpir as its new Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board, replacing President and CEO Pat DiPietro, who will transition to the position of Coriant’s Vice Chairman, as well as return to his role as Operating Partner at Marlin after successfully guiding the company through integration and portfolio development initiatives.

Kheradpir joins Coriant after having worked closely with the senior management team since earlier this year in the role of Operating Partner at Marlin Equity Partners, which owns Coriant.

He began his career at GTE Corporation, and subsequently was appointed Verizon's EVP & Chief Information Officer and member of the executive leadership team driving the systems modernization, efficiency, innovation and pioneering product initiatives, including FiOS, one of the largest infrastructure programs in the U.S. with a capital investment of over $20 billion. Shaygan next joined Barclays as Chief Operations and Technology Officer and also served as a member of the bank’s Executive Committee. Following this role, he became CEO of Juniper Networks, where he developed an Integrated Operating Plan for the company and focused execution on the strategic growth markets of Cloud Builder & High IQ Networking.

http://www.coriant.com

• In November 2014, Juniper Networks appointed Rami Rahim as chief executive officer effective immediately following the sudden resignation of Shaygan Kheradpir as CEO and director of the company. 

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NeoPhotonics Debuts 400G Waveguides and Lasers

NeoPhotonics introduced a high speed Indium Phosphide based waveguide photodetectors for coherent receivers with higher baud rate transmission, ultra-narrow linewidth lasers for higher order constellations such as 16QAM and 64QAM, dual output lasers for dual carrier architectures, and small form factor coherent components for high density line cards and pluggable coherent optics. The products are designed to support 400G and beyond optical transport across multiple network segments, including long haul, metro and data center interconnects (DCI).

“Just as our hybrid photonic integration technology is a mainstay in 100G coherent transport implementations, we are pleased to see our products and technologies enabling our customers as they move to 400G systems,” said Tim Jenks, Chairman and CEO of NeoPhotonics. “Moving from 100G to 400G coherent transport systems requires increased performance coupled with smaller size and lower power, which clearly demonstrates the power of our hybrid photonic integration,” continued Mr. Jenks.

Separately, for 400G datacenter and client applications, NeoPhotonics is presenting its very high bandwidth electro-absorptive modulated laser (EML) generating superior performance in use with High Order Modulation (HOM) systems. A joint demo with Inphi Corporation in Inphi’s stand 400 will demonstrate a full dual lambda 100G PAM4 solution based on Inphi’s PAM4 PHY IC and NeoPhotonics EML based Q-TOSA.

http://www.neophotonics.com

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Finisar Demos 100G QSFP28 SWCM4 Module for Duplex Fiber

Finisar introduced the world's first 100G QSFP28 SWDM4 module, which operates over standard, duplex multimode fiber.

SWDM is an important technology that enables data center operators to upgrade from 10G to 40G and 100G using their existing duplex multimode fiber (MMF) infrastructure. SWDM allows of continued use of existing duplex MMF infrastructure and extends its usable lifetime. SWDM multiplexes different wavelengths onto duplex MMF utilizing WDM VCSEL technology.

The new module, which leverages Finisar's shortwave Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL) technology, follows on the successful demonstration of a 40G SWDM4 QSFP+ module previously demonstrated at the Optical Fiber Communications conference in March 2015.

"As the first to demonstrate and market SWDM modules, Finisar is committed to driving widespread adoption of this technology," said Steffen Koehler, Director of Marketing at Finisar. "With the 100G SWDM4 module, Finisar helps to ensure that duplex MMF continues to be the most cost-effective interconnect for all but the very largest data centers."

http://www.swdm.org
http://www.finisar.com

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Inphi Demos 400G PAM4 IC Solutions With NeoPhotonics

At this week's ECOC 2015 in Spain, Inphi is demonstrating interoperability of the industry's first 4-level Pulse Amplitude Modulation (PAM4) PHY IC chipset solution for service provider interconnects.

The demonstration showcases 100G dual lambda optical link performance with 2-10km SMF fiber loopback featuring Inphi's PAM4 IC solutions and NeoPhotonics' Q-TOSA 100G EML-based modules. This demonstration shows that transferring the complexity from optics into CMOS electronics with PAM encoding, DSP and FEC technologies, one can attain four times as much bandwidth improvement compared to existing solutions, at a lower cost.

The companies said PAM4 modulation is the modulation scheme that will take the industry over the next wave of Ethernet deployments for optical and copper interconnects by doubling the bits per symbol at the same baud rate.

"Our interoperability demo with ecosystem partners, such as NeoPhotonics, achieves excellent bit-error-rate and optical link budget, and proves that the PAM4 technology is ready and available today to help designers build IEEE P802.3bs 400G LR8 line cards and modules for next generation service provider platforms," said Siddharth Sheth, vice president, Networking Interconnect, Inphi.
NeoPhotonics Corporation is a leading designer and manufacturer of photonic integrated circuit, or PIC, based modules and subsystems for bandwidth-intensive, high-speed communications networks. As part of this demo NeoPhotonics will showcase its new 4x28G Q-TOSA module, that incorporates four channels of PIC integrated transmitters utilizing proven high performance electro-absorptive modulated lasers (EML), which meets the stringent ITU-T standard required by Telecom service providers and also satisfies the datacom requirement.

"This joint demo with Inphi PAM4 chip demonstrates the ability of our very high bandwidth EML to generate superior performance in High Order of Modulation (HOM) based platforms. It has been proven at both 28GBaud and 56GBaud, which will enable future systems with higher link capacity to serve the continuous market demand for increased bandwidth," said Tim Jenks, CEO of NeoPhotonics.

http://www.inphi.com

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Qualcomm to Invest up to $150 Million in Indian Start-ups

Qualcomm plans to invest up to $150 million in Indian startup companies.

Qualcomm Ventures has been investing in promising Indian startups since 2007 and currently has more than 20 Indian companies in its portfolio. Sectors of investment vary across the mobile ecosystem and include hardware, software platforms, e-commerce, healthcare, location based services and retail technology.

“We share Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision to transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy. India is at the cusp of a technology revolution and mobile technologies will lay the foundation for Digital India,” said Dr. Paul E. Jacobs, executive chairman, Qualcomm Incorporated. “We are committed to providing local innovative start-ups with the support needed to help India’s IOE ecosystem grow, increasing consumer choice and availability.”

https://qualcommventures.com/

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NTT Electronics Adds 200G DSP for DWDM

NTT Electronics (NEL) announced has begun sampling a 20nm 200G High Performance DSP for use in metro, regional and long haul DWDM systems.

The new 200G High Performance DSP (NLD0660) improves OSNR performance with a brand-new DSP core whose Soft-Decision Forward-Error-Correction (SD-FEC) achieves 12dB Net-Coding-Gain (NCG), allowing either less optical repeaters or longer fiber reach between optical transceivers. It supports a variety of Dual Polarization (DP) modulation formats, 16QAM, 8QAM, and QPSK. 200 Gb/s DP 16QAM doubles Metro Access (MA) link capacity, 150 Gbps DP 8QAM upgrades Metro Regional’s (MR’s) capacity, whereas 100 Gbps DP QPSK expands Long Haul (LH) reach through OSNR improvement. If configured with two DSP chips for Nyquist super-channel dual-carrier solution, then dense WDM transmission of 400 Gbps, 300 Gbps, and 200 Gbps all per 100 GHz spacing or denser are made possible in MA, MR, and LH fiber links respectively.

This is the second 20nm CMOS coherent DSP in NEL’s lineup which is enabled by its ongoing collaboration with Broadcom.

“We are committed to pioneering innovation in the coherent PHY market through our partnership with Broadcom,” said Haruhiko Ichino, NEL Executive Vice President and General Manager of Broadband System & Device Business Group. “We are proud to see our 20nm CMOS products contributing to fiber links being deployed world-wide. Our commitment continues with the development of additional DSP products including a next-generation DSP using the most-advanced 16nm CMOS process.”

http://www.ntt-electronics.com/en/news/2015/9/200g-high-performance-dsp.html

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UNIFi Raises $10 Million for Big Data Integration Software

UNIFi Software, a start-up based in San Mateo, California, raised $10 million in Series A funding for its enterprise data integration solution.

The company's mission is to build an application that enables the business to acquire data, integrate it, enrich it, and load it into a flexible environment where agile and iterative analytics can occur. UNIFi is building a business application that combines Big Data integration processing layered with an elegant and simple user experience .

The company will use the new round of funding to scale customer acquisition by ramping up its sales and marketing team; to execute on UNIFi's product vision by growing the engineering team; and to accelerate market capture through the introduction of a cloud-based free trial version of the product. UNIFi provides an elegant and simple user experience that enables line of business users to search and discover data assets of interest across the entire enterprise landscape; acquire, enrich and integrate those data assets; and then seamlessly derive insight within their analytics tool of choice. Customers include the likes of Disney, A.T. Kearney and Havas Media Group.

"This layer of the enterprise software stack is primed for disruption," said Rob Carlson, CEO and co-founder at UNIFi. "There's a groundswell movement of self-service access to data, and UNIFi is uniquely positioned to lead this charge. Now we can do even more to enable our customers to become data-driven enterprises, and provide a truly innovative experience around analytics."
Pelion is an early-stage venture capital firm that works closely with visionary entrepreneurs to build innovative and disruptive businesses. Pelion has been an early investor in technology companies such as Riverbed Technologies, CloudFlare, Fusion-io and Soasta.

http://unifisoftware.com/

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The Connectivity Declaration Seeks Universal Internet Access

On Friday, the leaders of 193 nations meeting at the United Nations formally adopted the Global Goals for Sustainable Development, which sets 2030 targets for fighting inequality, protecting our planet, and ending extreme poverty. The agreement includes a Connectivity Declaration demanding Internet access for all in the Least-Developed Countries by 2020.

The Connectivity Declaration:

"I believe: Internet access is essential for achieving humanity's #globalgoals When people have access to the tools and knowledge of the internet, they have access to opportunities that make life better for all of us. The internet is critical to fighting injustice, sharing new ideas and helping entrepreneurs create more jobs. But right now half the people on this planet don't have access, especially women and girls. The internet belongs to everyone. It should be accessible by everyone. I call on leaders and innovators from all countries, industries and communities to work together as one to make universal internet access a reality by 2020, as promised in the new Global Goals. Lets #CONNECTTHEWORLD to achieve our #GLOBALGOALS
"

The Connectivity Declaration has already been signed by: the Action/2015 coalition, Charlize Theron for Africa Outreach Project, Judith Owigar for AkiraChix, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bill and Melinda Gates for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Richard Branson, Erik Hersman for BRCK, Niall Dunne for BT, Danny Sriskandarajah for Civicus, Denis O'Brien for Digicel, Jeff Sachs for Earth Institute, Hans Vestberg for Ericsson, Mark Zuckerberg for Facebook, Hugh Evans for Global Citizen, Arianna Huffington, Josiah Mugambi for iHub, Ashish Thakkar for Mara Group, Mo Ibrahim for the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, Bono for ONE, David Soloff for Premise, Project Everyone, Nik Hartley for Restless Development, Carolyn Miles for Save the Children, Shakira, George Takei, Chris Anderson for TED, Daudi Were for Ushahidi, Jimmy Wales, Omoyele Sowore for Sahara Reporters, Cobus de Swardt for Transparency International, Kathy Calvin for the UN Foundation, and Oluseun Onigbinde for BudgiT.

http://connecttheworld.one.org/

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Ericsson: IT is Key to UN Sustainable Development Goals

Information technology and universal access to the Internet are key to achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, according to a study by Ericsson and the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

The U.N.'s new agreed Sustainable Development Goals call for several breakthroughs by the year 2030, including an end to extreme poverty and hunger, while improving access to health care and education, protecting the environment and building peaceful and inclusive societies.

"We believe the new goals need to leverage existing and widely deployed technologies, but also that future developments in ICT - including next-generation mobile broadband, the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, 3D printing and others - will provide the tools for unprecedented advances in health care, education, energy services, agriculture, and environmental monitoring and protection," said Hans Vestberg, President and CEO of Ericsson.

"We have seen that a 10 percent increase in broadband penetration leads on average to one percent sustainable GDP growth. However, in some countries, the increase is even higher: up to 5 or 10 percent. That can make a real difference to people's lives," stated Vestberg.

The 21-page report is here:

http://www.ericsson.com/res/docs/2015/ict-and-sdg-interim-report.pdf

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Sprint to Sit Out 600 MHz Incentive Auction

Sprint has decided not to participate in the FCC's 600 MHz incentive auction next year.  In a blog posting, the company said its current spectrum holdings "are sufficient to provide its current and future customers great network coverage and be able to provide the consistent reliability, capacity, and speed that its customers demand."

“Sprint’s focus and overarching imperative must be on improving its network and market position in the immediate term so we can remain a powerful force in fostering competition, consumer benefits and innovation in the wireless broadband world,” stated Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure.  “Sprint has the spectrum it needs to deploy its network architecture of the future.”

The company also noted its efforts to increase coverage and capacity by densifying its network and increasing the number of cell sites using its existing spectrum.  Sprint is already deploying new technologies, such as carrier aggregation, that unlock the potential of its strong 2.5 GHz spectrum position.

http://newsroom.sprint.com/news-releases/sprint-statement-on-the-incentive-auction.htm

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Databricks: Apache Spark Outgrowing Hadoop

The number of standalone deployments of Spark eclipses those on YARN as more users run Spark independent of Hadoop, according to a newly published survey of Spark users conducted by Databricks, the company founded by the creators of Apache Spark.

Databricks said that users that are running Spark in standalone (48 percent of respondents) exceeds those running Spark on YARN (40 percent of respondents), alongside a majority of users running Spark in the public cloud. The survey also found that 51 percent of respondents run Spark on a public cloud.

Key findings from the survey include:

• Spark is outgrowing Hadoop: The most common Spark deployments according to the community are: 48 percent standalone, 40 percent YARN within Hadoop and 11 percent Apache Mesos. Spark users who do not use any Hadoop components have more than doubled in 2015 (from 2014). 
• Streaming and advanced analytics uses rising: Spark is being used for an increasingly diverse set of applications, particularly data scientists for machine learning, streaming and graph analysis use cases. In 2015, there are 56 percent more Spark streaming users than in 2014. The production use of advanced analytics, like MLib for machine learning and GraphX for graph processing, increased from 11 percent in 2014 to 15 percent in 2015. 75 percent of Spark users are also using two or more Spark components (51 percent of Spark users are using three or more Spark components).
• Spark users are becoming more diverse:  Of those surveyed, 41 percent identified themselves as Data Engineers, while 22 percent of respondents identified themselves as Data Scientists. Spark users are solving a variety of problems in different languages -- Scala (71 percent), Python (58 percent), SQL (36 percent), Java (31 percent) and R (18 percent) -- and all within the same framework.
• Spark's most popular use cases come to light: Fifty-two percent use Spark for data warehousing, 68 percent use it for business intelligence, 40 percent for processing application and system logs, 48 percent to build recommendation engines, 36 percent for user-facing services and 29 percent for fraud detection and security.
• Spark is increasing access to big data:  Ninety one percent of those surveyed claim performance as their reason for adoption, while 77 percent cite ease of programming, 71 percent cite ease of deployment, 64 percent cite advanced analytics capabilities and 52 percent cite real-time streaming capabilities.

"The continued growth of Spark has been highly encouraging, as companies are going into production to obtain real business value, and they are doing so in a wide range of environments beyond Hadoop clusters," said Matei Zaharia, creator of Apache Spark and CTO of Databricks. "Databricks and our partners are 100 percent committed to the long-term growth of Spark and we'll continue to make improvements based on this survey data and our ongoing community feedback, to make the most complete big data analytics toolkit accessible to all businesses."

https://databricks.com

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NTT Com's Global IP Net Exceeds 1 Tbps on Japan-US Route

The Japan-U.S. capacity of NTT Communications' Tier-1 Global IP Network has been expanded past 1 Tbps for the first time.

NTT Communications said the expanded capacity will allow the network to support demand that is expected to double over the next two years, driven by the rapidly growing number of Internet users on smartphones and tablets and the growing adoption of broadband. Increasing use of music and video streaming, high-resolution images and 4K data are also boosting capacity needs.

http://www.ntt.com/aboutus_e/news/data/20150924_2.html

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Eurotunnel Installs ALU's 1830 Photonic Service Switch

Eurotunnel will converge all of its operational communications services and applications onto a single data network powered by Alcatel-Lucent's optical transport technology.

Alcatel-Lucent will deploy a new optical network in the 50km North and South tunnels of the Channel Tunnel using its 1830 Photonic Service Switch (1830 PSS) platform with network management provided by the 5620 Service Aware Manger.  The new network will connect the existing synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) optical network across both sides of the Channel Tunnel as well as new ‘mission-critical’ operational services. Communications traffic will include CCTV, Voice over IP (VoIP), back-office applications, billing, reporting, scheduling, traffic management and signalling functions.  Alcatel-Lucent has previously worked with Eurotunnel, including the deployment of mobile technology allowing passengers to connect to the Internet over their mobile devices while travelling through the tunnel beneath the English Channel.

https://www.alcatel-lucent.com

• The Channel Tunnel has the longest undersea portion of any tunnel in the world, which is used by Eurostar passenger train services and the Le Shuttle car and freight trains which transport nearly 2.6 million cars and 1.5 million trucks between the UK and France each year. In 2014 more than 21 million passengers, on all services, traveled through the Channel Tunnel.

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Optus Extends 100G from Cairns to Perth

Alcatel-Lucent has upgraded Optus’ Australian optical network between Cairns and Perth using its 1830 Photonic Service Switch and Photonic Service Engine (PSE)-based coherent technology with soft-decision forward error correction (SD-FEC). The network now delivers 100G wavelengths, ten times the previous capacity.

"Optus is committed to building reliable network capacity for retail, government and enterprise customers based on the world’s best long-haul transmission technology. This upgrade supports the changing needs of our customers including increasing capacity demands across Optus’ Wholesale and branded business lines alike," said Rob Parcell, Managing Director Optus Wholesale, Satellite and SMB.

https://media.optus.com.au

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Zscaler Lands Investment from Google Capital

Zscaler announced a continuation of its oversubscribed Series D round from Google Capital. This latest round of financing brings the company's total funding raised in the Series D to $110 million.

"We are joining forces with Google Capital to help millions of organizations around the world securely adopt cloud computing, mobility and the Internet of Things," said Jay Chaudhry, CEO of Zscaler. "Our new partnerships will further empower Zscaler to invest in our technology platform and grow our worldwide operations to meet ever increasing demand."

http://www.zscalar.com

Zscaler Raises $100 Million for Security-as-a-Service

Monday, August 03, 2015  Funding, Silicon Valley, Start-ups, Zscalar  No comments

Zscaler, a start-up based in San Jose, California, raised $100 million in new venture funding for its Internet security-as-a-service offering.

Zscaler currently protects more than 5,000 enterprise and government organizations worldwide with a total of 13 million employees against cyber attacks and data breaches. The cloud-based Zscaler Security-as-a-Service platform is operating in more than 100 data centers around the world, delivering carrier-grade Internet security, advanced persistent threat (APT) protection, data loss prevention, SSL decryption, traffic shaping, policy management and threat intelligence without the need for on-premise hardware, appliances or software.

TPG invested in Zscaler, alongside existing investors EMC and Lightspeed Ventures, who also contributed to the round.

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