Microsoft Annouces Azure Data Center Migration Tool

Microsoft announced an Azure Data Center Migration Solution (ADCMS) to help migrate cloud assets from one Azure data center to another.

The software was developed by Persistent Systems in collaboration with the Microsoft Azure CAT team in Bangalore and released under Apache v2.0.

Microsoft said the tool could be used to move assets to adds a new data center with lower latency, or to duplicate a current cloud deployment to a test deployment, and vice versa.

http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/01/12/azure-data-center-migration-just-got-easier/

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Cisco Adds Check Point to ACI Partner List

Cisco has added the Check Point Next Generation Security Gateway to its ACI partner ecosystem.

Essentially, this means that Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) controller, APIC, can configure the application network to include the insertion and provisioning of Check Point virtual and physical security gateways as it does other Layer 4-7 application services and security appliances.

Cisco said the integration with Check Point Next Generation Security Gateway provides automated security provisioning and a full range of security protections and threat-prevention capabilities in a highly dynamic and agile Cisco ACI environment. Check Point Security Gateways can be deployed as physical or virtual solutions, providing advanced protection, including intrusion prevention system (IPS), application control, URL filtering, data protection, antivirus, anti-bot, and threat prevention capabilities.

 http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/aci-checkpoint

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Germany's Tele Columbus Readies 400 Mbps DOCSIS

Tele Columbus Group, the third largest German cable network operator, is preparing to launch a consumer broadband service with a top downlink speed of 400 Mbps.

The company said its service will be launched in April 2015, starting in the region of Potsdam – in Brandenburg’s state capital, where a total of 40,000 households are connected to its city network.

Tele Columbus features a hybrid glass-fiber coaxial structure with a FTTB (fiber-to-the-building) approach and operates on DOCSIS 3.0 technology. Tele Columbus Group’s multimedia networks are also distinguished by a relatively high number of fiber nodes for provision of the connected households. The company also offers a Wi-Fi cable box designed to accommodate data rates of up to 1.3 Gbps inside the home.

To increase Internet speeds to the new high of 400 Mbps in Potsdam, Tele Columbus is investing in further network infrastructure improvements, including new active components in the local head-end facility.

https://www.telecolumbus.com/tele-columbus-offer-internet-speeds-400-mbits/#more-1831

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BroadSoft Acquires Leonid Systems for UC Portal

BroadSoft has acquired Leonid Systems, hosted VoIP OSS provider based in Falls Church, Virginia.  Financial terms were not disclosed.

Leonid has developed a purpose-built, intuitive web portal for BroadWorks service provider customers that allows enterprise IT administrators and end-users to simplify the configuration and management of their BroadWorks-based hosted Unified Communications services. Leonid’s web portal improves the overall navigation, accessibility, presentation and performance of BroadSoft’s UC-One application, enhancing business collaboration and productivity by making real-time communications services such as instant messaging, presence, voice calling and video calling accessible through a single interface from any Internet-supported desktop, laptop, smartphone or tablet.

“BroadSoft recently unveiled a new corporate identity built around enhancing the user experience at each phase of the Unified Communications customer lifecycle – from upfront service messaging, to the sales and service implementation process, to service adoption and usage,” said Michael Tessler, chief executive officer, BroadSoft. “As service providers increasingly demand a superior front-end UC services experience that is intuitive and modern, we recognized that Leonid had the expertise and experience to help BroadSoft better meet the evolving service delivery needs of our customers.”  

http://www.leonidsystems.com/
http://www.broadsoft.com/

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Citrix Acquires Sanbolic for Scale-out Storage Virtualization

Citrix has acquired Sanbolic, a start-up specializing in workload-oriented storage virtualization technologies. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Sanbolic, which is based in Waltham, Mass., developed a scale-out software architecture for optimizing the delivery of application-specific workloads, from any media type – SSD, Flash and hard drives in NAS, SAN, server-side and cloud deployments. Sanbolic allows customer deployments to be geo-distributed across multiple locations and clouds; to scale in a linear and predictable manner; to have simplified provisioning and management; and to gain overall efficiency.

Citrix said the acquisition of the Sanbolic workload-oriented infrastructure technologies, combined with its own XenDesktop, XenApp and XenMobile products, enables Citrix to develop a range of differentiated solutions. Thes solutions promise to dramatically improve the economics and reduce the complexity of Windows application delivery and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments.

More than 200 Citrix customers already use Sanbolic to guarantee non-stop availability and geo-clustering of their XenApp and XenDesktop solutions.

http://sanbolic.com/
http://www.citrix.com

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Mellanox Supplies Open Ethernet to Monash University

Mellanox will supply its CloudX platform to Monash University in Melbourne, Australia

The deployment, which is on Mellanox’s SwitchX-2 SX1036 Open Ethernet switches, ConnectX-3 NICs and LinkX cables will provide the fabric for Monash's new cloud data center. The cloud utilizes Mellanox end-to-end 10, 40, and 56Gb/s Ethernet solutions as part of a nationwide initiative to create an open and global cloud infrastructure.

Mellanox said the university selected its RDMA-capable Ethernet technology due to its performance scalability and cloud efficiency improvements. The university’s cloud node, R@CMon, is part of The National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) Project. The fabric tightly integrates Ceph and Lustre storage with the cloud, meeting the needs of block, object and applications workloads as one converged fabric.

“The Mellanox CloudX platform enables application defined back-planning, where researchers orchestrate all the various components – cloud, HPC and software – into their own 21st century microscope within our data center,” said Steve Quenette, deputy director of the Monash eResearch Centre. “Mellanox Open Ethernet solutions give us the flexibility and the freedom to optimize the interconnect infrastructure for our needs and to ensure that we will be able to cope with the increase in data, compute and storage requirements of our users.”

http://www.mellanox.com/solutions/cloud/index.php

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C Spire Picks Centina for Service Assurance

C Spire, which maintains over 4,500 route miles of fiber optic cable infrastructure throughout Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana and Florida, will deploy Centina Systems' service assurance analytics and network performance management solution. C Spire will use Centina's NetOmnia suite for real-time, end-to-end network visibility for improved troubleshooting and problem resolution.

C Spire's infrastructure includes 43 DWDM Spans, 95 OC-48 SONET Rings, 18 OC-192 SONET Rings, two regional MPLS networks and five Ethernet backbone rings, all of which will be monitored by NetOmnia.

http://www.centinasystems.com/

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MongoDB Raises $80M for Next-gen Database

MongoDB, a start-up with headquarters in New York City and Palo Alto, has secured an additional $80 million in funding for its next-gen database.

MongoDB stores data using a flexible document data model that is similar to JSON. Compared to most NoSQL databases, MongoDB provides comprehensive secondary indexes, including geospatial and text search, as well as extensive security and aggregation capabilities. MongoDB makes extensive use of RAM, providing in-memory speed and on-disk capacity. It features auto-sharding for horizontal scale out and native replication enables high availability across racks and data centers. The company says MongoDB is already deployed in applications running across 1,000+ servers.

MongoDB is now used by over 2,000 customers, including 34 of the Fortune 100 and many other companies such as Adobe, ADP, Amazon, AT&T, Bosch Software Innovations, Buzzfeed, Cisco, Craigslist, Dropbox, eBay, eHarmony, Expedia, Foursquare, Facebook’s Parse, Forbes, The Gap, Gilt Groupe, Goldman Sachs, Gov.UK, Intuit, McAfee, MetLife, MTV, O2, Salesforce, Shutterfly and Under Armour.

“The market has reached a tipping point where most developers and IT organizations realize that modern applications cannot continue to be built on relational database technologies. They are shifting to MongoDB in a big way. MongoDB was designed to make it easy to develop applications that require rapid change, massive scale, always-on operation, and support for a large variety of unstructured and semi-structured data, all at significantly lower costs,” said Dev Ittycheria, President and CEO of MongoDB.

The latest funding round was led by a sovereign wealth fund with participation from Goldman Sachs and from existing investors Altimeter Capital, NEA, Sequoia and funds managed by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. MongoDB has attracted a total of $311 million from investors, positioning it as the best capitalized next- generation DBMS company in the world.

http://www.mongodb.com/press/mongodb-raises-80-million-accelerate-growth

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Next Gen ViaSat to Launch on SpaceX in 2016

SpaceX has been selected to launch ViaSat's next generation, high-capacity broadband satellite (ViaSat-2) in late summer 2016 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

ViaSat-2, which is currently under construction by Boeing, will cover seven times the geographic area and offer twice the bandwidth economics advantage of ViaSat-1. Planned coverage includes North America, Central America, and the Caribbean basin. The satellite will also provide a bridge of coverage across the North Atlantic, connecting North America with high-capacity coverage in the UK and Europe for high-speed in-flight internet and other mobile services.

Falcon Heavy will be the world's most powerful rocket, with the ability to lift more than twice the payload of the next closest launch vehicle at one-third the cost.

http://www.viasat.com

In May 2013, ViaSat awarded a contract to Boeing to build the world's highest capacity satellite for launch in mid-2016. ViaSat-2, which is based on ViaSat's next generation, Ka-band satellite technology and architecture, will double the bandwidth economics of ViaSat-1 while simultaneously increasing its coverage footprint by seven-fold. ViaSat said improvements to its SurfBeam networking technology will yield performance "commensurate with high-speed fiber-to-the-node networks (FTTN)."  

• ViaSat-2 will be based on the Boeing 702HP satellite bus.  ViaSat and Boeing also signed a strategic agreement to jointly market and sell satellites systems based on ViaSat-2 technology.  

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Radisys Supplies MRF for Nokia Networks' VoLTE/VoWiFi

Radisys is supplying its Media Resource Function (MRF) product family as the media processing foundation for Nokia Networks' Voice over LTE (VoLTE) and Voice over Wi-Fi (VoWiFi) solution portfolio for standards-based IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) deployments.

Specifically, Nokia Networks will utilize Radisys’ Virtualized MRF and high-capacity MPX-12000 Broadband MRF, built on Radisys’ T-Series Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) platform, to provide the media processing solution for VoLTE/VoWiFi service in mobile networks.

“Nokia Networks is a long-standing customer, already utilizing our technology and products and we are very pleased to extend our strategic relationship with Nokia Networks to include our MRF solutions to better serve its mobile network customers,’ stated  Grant Henderson, vice president, marketing and product management, Radisys.

http://www.radisys.com

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ADVA Announces Nikos Theodosopoulos as Chairman

Nikos Theodosopoulos was elected as Chairman ADVA Optical Networking, succeeding Anthony Maher, following Mr. Maher's unexpected passing in November of the prior year.

Nikos Theodosopoulos runs his own firm, NT Advisors LLC, serving clients in the technology, private equity and venture capital industries as an independent board director and consultant in the areas of corporate strategy, mergers & acquisitions, and investor positioning. Nikos Theodosopoulos is also an active angel investor for start-ups in the technology sector. His extensive experience encompasses 30 years in the technology and finance industries including 18 years as a leading Wall Street equity research analyst and strategist in the technology sector and 10 years as an engineer and sales executive at Bell Laboratories and AT&T.

"Anthony Maher had served as a member of the Supervisory Board since 2002 and assumed the role of chairman at the beginning of 2009. His intellect, combined with industry experience and passion gave him a unique skill set which allowed him to be a mentor, a partner and a friend. Anthony helped ADVA Optical Networking be a stable company within a very challenging industry. He built the necessary strength in the corporate governance procedures with a strong focus on delivering the highest value to ADVA Optical Networking's stakeholders. He is genuinely missed," stated Brian Protiva, Chief Executive Officer of ADVA Optical Networking.

http://www.advaoptical.com/en/newsroom/press-releases-english/20150109

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BTI Systems Cites Strong 2014 Sales

Privately-held BTI Systems, which supplies cloud and metro networking software and systems, reported its strongest annual revenue to date for 2014.  Some highlights:

• Metro cloud revenue approaching half of all revenue.
• 28% bookings growth in Q4 2014 vs. Q4 2013.
• 18% increase in annual revenue.
• 18 new strategic customer wins, including CyrusOne, Interxion, Pacnet (acquired by Telstra) and IPC.
• BTI cloud networking solutions are now deployed in every major international data center hub, including Tokyo, London, Frankfurt, Sydney, Singapore, Paris, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Chicago, Toronto, San Jose, Dallas, Denver, and the metropolitan New York and Washington, D.C. regions.

“Businesses and consumers want anytime, anywhere access to their applications and services – cost effectively and with no delay,” said BTI President and CEO Colin Doherty, who joined the company in April to guide its next stage of worldwide growth. “To address these requirements, content is being pushed closer to the users – and to accommodate this, content, colocation and service providers are re-architecting their metro networks to handle the added capacity between data centers, access networks and cloud providers. BTI’s software, systems and support services lie at the heart of this tectonic shift.”

http://www.btisystems.com/

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