Third MUOS Satellite Successfully Launched

The third Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) satellite was successfully launched on January 20 from the Naval Satellite Operations Center (Point Mugu, California) aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.

MUOS is a next-generation narrowband tactical satellite communications system designed to significantly improve beyond-line-of-sight communications for U.S. forces on the move. MUOS will provide military users 10 times more communications capacity over the existing system by leveraging 3G mobile communications technology, and will provide simultaneous voice and data capability. Lockheed Martin, which the prime contractor and integrator for MUOS, said the satellite-based, smart-phone cell network will enable IP-based terminals to transmit and receive clear voice calls and data from almost anywhere in the world.

“Thanks to the Atlas team for the safe delivery of MUOS-3 into our Geosynchronous Transfer orbit,” said Iris Bombelyn, vice president of Narrowband Communications at Lockheed Martin. “We look forward to completing our on-orbit health checks and delivering this important asset to the U.S. Navy. The addition of this satellite will give the MUOS constellation coverage over more than three-quarters of the globe, further extending the reach of the advanced communications capabilities MUOS will provide our mobile warfighters.”

http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/news/press-releases/2015/january/Muos-3-Launch.html

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Equinix Acquires Nimbo for Hybrid Cloud Professional Services

Equinix has acquired Nimbo, a professional services company focused primarily on helping enterprises develop and implement hybrid cloud IT architectures. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Nimbo, which is a certified AWS and Microsoft Azure partner, specializes in migrating business applications to the cloud.  The company has extensive experience moving legacy applications into a hybrid cloud architecture, and connecting legacy data centers to the cloud.

Equinix said the acquisition represents an important step in its larger initiative to build its professional services capabilities to support data center migrations,WAN optimization and the creation of scalable, high performing hybrid cloud solutions.

The company had revenue of less than $10 million in 2014, and recently earned position #480 on the 2014 Inc. 500 list of the Fastest Growing Private Companies in America. Nimbo has offices in NYC, Houston and Seattle.

"Nimbo has a thriving practice, advising many of the Fortune 100 on their cloud strategies, winning awards for growth and innovation in this space. With our acquisition of Nimbo, we have expanded our ability to help customers leverage our unique cloud-density and Cloud Exchange value propositions and assist with the design and deployment of hybrid cloud solutions," stated Pete Hayes, chief sales officer, Equinix.

http://www.equinix.com

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Tropo Launches on Apcera for Real-Time Telco APIs

Apcera, a start-up backed by Ericsson that offers a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that deploys, orchestrates and governs workloads on premise and in the cloud, announced a partnership with Tropo to provide telcos and developers a platform for building and delivering mission-critical communications apps.  Tropo specializes in real-time telco APIs.  These will now be offered running on Apcera's Continuum policy-driven platform-as-a-service (PaaS).  The planned joint solution will be deployed by a Tier 1 carrier in 2015.

Tropo's APIs allow telcos, developers and enterprises to quickly create and deploy real-time voice, video and messaging apps.

“Apcera is a young, agile company that is leveraging its innovative technology to reinvent the PaaS market, much like Tropo has done in the communications-as-a-service space,” said Jason Goecke, CEO and president of Tropo. “Our solutions are perfect complements to each other, and bringing them together will give our customers a great opportunity to leverage a leading-edge PaaS to speed new cloud-based communications apps to market, while ensuring a high level of security.”

Apcera's Continuum PaaS++ ensures reserved capacity and more fine-grained control over resources, including network and service access.

“Tropo shares our vision for delivering the platform and solutions telcos require to develop new offerings to differentiate themselves in a competitive market,” said Derek Collison, founder and CEO of Apcera. “We look forward to working with Tropo to showcase the ease with which new, high-performance communications apps can be quickly developed and securely deployed with our respective offerings.”

http://www.tropo.com
http://www.apcera.com

• In September 2014, Ericsson announced its acquisition of a majority stake in Apcera, a San Francisco-based start-up developing an IT platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that enables enterprises to securely and transparently control the allocation and consumption of IT resources on premise and in the cloud. Financial terms were not disclosed.  Apcera's Continuum PaaS works across cloud, on premise and hybrid environments. Ericsson said the addition of Apcera's technology enables it to provide cloud automation to run all workloads and use cases, while providing complete control for infrastructure.
  
• Apcera was founded in 2012 with investment from True Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Rakuten, Andreessen Horowitz and Data Collective. The cinoabt was started by former Google and VMware executive Derek Collison with the intent of bridging the divide between developers and ops organizations with an enterprise-class platform that integrates policy and security from the start.

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VMware Adds Advanced Networking Capabilities

VMware introduced enhanced disaster recovery and advanced networking services for VMware vCloud Air and announced the general availability of vCloud Air Virtual Private Cloud OnDemand, which provides customers a quick online sign-up to pay for only those resources that are used.

The new capabilities for VMware vCloud Air include:

• Native failback support - an easier way to resume normal data center operations in a primary data center following a failover to vCloud Air. Customers will be able to replicate workloads back from vCloud Air to the primary customer environment over the network to resume normal operations.
• Multiple recovery points - Customers will have the option to roll back to multiple earlier snapshots of their data center environment. This is vital to recover from outages caused by data corruption, viruses or hacking attacks that compromise the most recent recovery point.
• Self-service automation - Customers will be able to define and deploy recovery playbooks to streamline failover operations using a new vRealize Orchestrator DR plug-in, open source DR Command Line Interface (CLI) and an expanded REST API.

Highlights of VMware vCloud Air advanced networking services, powered by the VMware NSX network virtualization platform, include:

• Fine-grained network security groups and isolation - Customers can define security groups that provide stateful network traffic isolation without requiring multiple virtual networks. Unique to the public cloud market, this enables a "zero trust" security model designed to prevent insiders and intruders from gaining full network access if an application or virtual machine is compromised. It also dramatically simplifies network configuration and is implemented as a distributed firewall, so there is no network traffic bottleneck.
• Dynamic Routing - VMware vCloud Air will support both Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) based routing to simplify network integration between on-premises and cloud-based environments, allowing for redundancy and continuity in cloud-hosted application deployment. It drives down networking and administration costs.
• Additional vCloud Advanced Networking Services - Expanded network scalability up to 200 endpoints, enhanced VPN support for point to site connectivity and enhanced load balancing with support for HTTPS.

http://www.vmware.com/

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Brocade Offers SDN Controller Trial License

To help enterprises and service providers explore and vet their SDN use cases, Brocade has begun by offering a free one-year license for its recently released Brocade Vyatta Controller. The free license provides management of up to five physical or virtual network nodes in a non-production environment and includes 60 days of free 24x7 worldwide access to the Brocade Technical Assistance Center. A production license for the Brocade Vyatta Controller is priced at $100 per attached node per year including support.

Brocade said its SDN controller is a fully tested, documented and quality-assured edition of the OpenDaylight platform. The company plans to contribute any enhancements made to the Brocade Vyatta Controller back to the community to ensure interoperability with other OpenDaylight-based controllers on an ongoing basis.

The company is also announcing the Brocade Vyatta Controller Developer Edition, which provides templates, libraries, and testing environments -- to help developers quickly write and test SDN applications and easily deploy them into service. The Brocade Vyatta Controller is free of proprietary extensions, so developers can be assured that their applications will run on any other OpenDaylight-based controller. In addition, developers retain full intellectual property rights to the applications they build.

"Today's announcement further distinguishes Brocade in our deep commitment to helping customers accelerate their transition to the New IP by delivering a truly open SDN solution based on the Brocade Vyatta Controller," said Kelly Herrell, senior vice president and general manager, Software Networking, Brocade. "Our free license model, new services that cater to both users and developers, as well as ongoing allegiance to OpenDaylight, not only remove significant barriers to implementing SDN solutions but also accelerate the time from proof-of-concept to production."

http://www.brocade.com/products/all/software-defined-networking/brocade-vyatta-controller/index.page?cid=lp_vyatta_controller_pr_00001

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A10 Networks Outlines Harmony Application Architecture

A10 Networks introduced its "Harmony" service integration architecture for enterprise, cloud, and service provider networks.  The idea is to integrate intelligent application networking services more easily with its A10 Thunder Series Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs). A10 said its Harmony framework will accelerate service integration and manageability through open and standards-based programmability.

A10 also released its latest ACOS 4.0 software, bringing brings new features and capabilities such as Secure Interconnect IPsec VPNs, SSL Insight, Application Access Management (AAM) and Web Application Firewall (WAF).

The company is also releasing a new A10 Harmony Policy Engine and an expanded aXAPI SDK and RESTful APIs. The ACOS 4.0 policy engine enable A10 to swiftly create consistent API, CLI and web management interfaces supported by advanced telemetry. A10 customers and partners will be able to take advantage of ACOS 4.0 and A10 Harmony architecture to integrate their own advanced networking, security, and management services.

"ACOS 4.0 is our most significant release since the launch of the 64-bit version of ACOS," said Lee Chen, CEO of A10 Networks. "ACOS 4.0 with A10 Harmony ushers in a new era of SDN and cloud computing; it lays the foundation for next-generation SDN ADC and paves the way for programmable intelligent application and security services."

"Integration with leading SDN and Cloud Orchestration vendors is important as we address emerging cloud frameworks," said Raj Jalan, CTO of A10 Networks. "A10 Harmony provides L4-L7 policy enforcement in Cisco ACI and VMware NSX networks."

http://www.a10networks.com

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Procera Confirms Orders from Tier 1s for Mobile Analytics

Procera Networks confirmed that it has received two orders that total several million dollars from two Tier 1 mobile operators to deliver Mobile Subscriber Experience Assurance.

The operators will use PacketLogic products solely for the mobile network and for the subscriber analytics that are visualized via its multiple mobile-centric Perspectives solutions. The revenue from these orders is expected to be recognized in the fourth quarter of 2014 and the first quarter of 2015.

Procera's Subscriber Experience analytics solutions offer operators both real-time and historical visibility into the metrics that can have the greatest impact on their customers' experience such as insight into the cause of video stalls, slow page load times, social networking feeds not loading, or slow sync times for cloud services. The intelligence gathered from Procera's Perspectives (RAN, Video, Subscriber, Device, Routing, Traffic, Content, and Topology) is displayed in real-time using Dynamic LiveView or streamed using IPFix, and then stored in the PacketLogic Intelligence Center for visualization in the Insights Product family (Engineering Customer Care, and Marketing) or in an external Big Data solution.

"Mobile operators are desperate to collect meaningful subscriber experience metrics so that they can deliver a superior broadband service for their customers," said Andy Lovit, senior vice president of global sales and services at Procera. "Procera's unique ability to correlate subscriber-based intelligence coupled with our extensive broadband experience delivers significant value to engineering, marketing, and customer care teams at mobile operators."

http://www.proceranetworks.com

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Hitachi Data Systems Adds Cloud Capabilities to Content Platform

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS) announced major enhancements to its Content Platform portfolio, featuring integrated solutions for private and hybrid cloud, Openstack, elastic scale backup-free cloud gateways, file sync and share, and mobile access to enterprise NAS file shares from a single architecture.

HDS said its new Content Platform capabilities support cost-optimized cloud services for elastic scalability across onsite and offsite storage environments. Organizations will be able to integrate the Hitachi Content Platform into their OpenStack environment.

The company also updated Hitachi Data Ingestor and HCP Anywhere to enable secure – and unified – mobile access to both cloud and enterprise data.

HDS also is enhancing mobile access to its content platform, so users have secure access to cloud and enterprise data from anywhere, on any device, at any time.


“With Hitachi Content Platform cloud storage solution from Hitachi Data Systems, Xinhua News Agency will become the first news agency to adopt disks for streaming media asset storage in China,” said, Jiao Lu, leader of cloud media asset project team, audio-visual data division, technology department, Xinhua News Agency. “The object storage technology and customized metadata function of HCP provides self-description capabilities that are independent of the database and application system for streaming media files. At the same time, the standard HTTP-based access protocol offered by HCP can not only eliminate the waiting time of tape export, but also provide service for users from external networks. This can improve the read and write response speed of streaming files significantly. Upon the completion of the system implementation, HCP cloud storage will become the core data platform for TV service of Xinhua News Agency.”

http://www.hds.com/

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Anuta Enhances Its Orchestration System for OpenStack, NFV, YANG

Anuta Networks, a start-up developing network orchestration systems, announced support for OpenStack, NFV and YANG modeling.

Anuta Networks NCX is an industry leading software solution designed to deliver complete network service orchestration for campus, branch, and data center networks by leveraging both physical and virtual devices across multi-vendor network infrastructures.

NCX 4.0 enhancements include:

• OpenStack Support - Anuta NCX provides the ability to provision end-to-end L2-L7 network services on multi-vendor physical, virtual and software defined network devices. NCX ML2 plugin makes these network services available to OpenStack users by converting OpenStack Neutron requests into NCX network service APIs. Anuta ML2 plug-in allows customers to integrate their legacy as well as new infrastructures with OpenStack self-service frameworks.
  
• NFV Support - NCX 4.0 introduces support for ETSI NFV (Network Function Virtualization) use-cases such as Virtual CPE, Virtual MPLS backbone and Edge networks, Virtual Data Center etc. NCX delivers the MANO functionality in the ETSI NFV architecture and supports on-demand service chaining of L4-L7 VNFs including Brocade, Vyatta, Cisco CSR1000V, Cisco Nexus 1000V, VMware DVS, Citrix NetScaler VPX, F5 BIG-IP, Juniper vSRX, Juniper Firefly, Radware ADC-VX and Riverbed Steelhead WAN Optimization. NCX also includes VNF Manager to customize the VNF configuration, scale on-demand and monitor the VNF performance and availability.
  
• YANG Modeling Support - NCX 4.0 supports IETF YANG based data models. IETF standard YANG specified by RFC 6020 is a data modeling language used to model configuration and state data manipulated by the network configuration protocol (NETCONF). Customers and partners can extend the YANG based device and service models to rapidly customize the NCX deployments.
  
• New Device Support - NCX 4.0 introduces support for Brocade, Vyatta 5400, 5600 series, Cisco XRV, Ericsson SSR 8000 series, Fortigate 3140, 3140B, Juniper MX-80 series, Alaxala AX-3650, AX1240, AX2530 and Apresia 15000 series.

http://www.anutanetworks.com/

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IEEE Addresses Coexistence in Unlicensed Frequency Bands

IEEE has formed a new Study Group to explore radio technology independent methods for enabling wireless networks operating in unlicensed frequency bands to coexist.

The IEEE 802.19 Coexistence in Unlicensed frequency Bands (CUB) Study Group was established to address the growing demand for mitigating interference over unlicensed frequency bands stems from various types of wireless systems including IEEE 802 and non IEEE 802 systems, and aims to:

• Develop coexistence scenarios and use cases
• Define necessary information to be exchanged between different systems to mitigate coexistence problems
• Study how to exchange messages among entities
• Study methods for improving coexistence among dissimilar wireless systems in unlicensed bands
• Demonstrate potential coexistence improvements from shared information
• Investigate other issues related to enhance coexistence in unlicensed bands.

http://www.ieee802.org/19

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Trans Pacific Express Selects Ciena for 100G

The Trans Pacific Express cable network (TPE) consortium has selected Ciena to upgrade capacity on its 17,968 km international submarine cable system.

Ciena is providing TPE with a multi-terabit upgrade using its GeoMesh submarine solution, including its new WaveLogic coherent optical processors’ capabilities, to more than triple the capacity of TPE, as compared to the original design capacity when it first went into service in 2008.

TPE is a submarine telecommunications cable linking Mainland of China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and the United States. The system is a joint venture originated between multiple telecommunications companies—China Telecom, China Unicom, Chunghwa Telecom, Korea Telecom, NTT Communications and Verizon.

http://www.ciena.com

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SpaceX Raises $1Billion from Google and Fidelity

Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) raised $1 billion in funding from new investors, Google and Fidelity.  The funding will support SpaceX's continued innovation in the areas of space transport, reusability, and satellite manufacturing.

Existing investors include Founders Fund, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Valor Equity Partners and Capricorn. Google and Fidelity will collectively own just under 10% of the company.

http://www.spacex.com/news/2015/01/20/financing-round

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Tata to Take Significant Capacity on Seaborn's US-Brazil Cable

Tata Communications will purchase of significant capacity in Seaborn Networks' cable system between Brazil and U.S.

Larry Schwartz, Chief Executive Office, Seaborn Networks says, "With bandwidth and connectivity growth demand in Latin America at unprecedented levels, we are delighted to have Tata Communications as a strategic partner on Seabras-1. Tata Communications' investment for significant capacity purchase in Seabras-1 is a clear indication of high demand in the market for an express submarine cable route between the US and São Paulo and seamless extension to other geographies in the world."

http://www.tatacommunications.com/

• In September 2014, Alcatel-Lucent kicked off construction of US-Brazil subsea cable for Seaborn Networks.  A turnkey installation agreement is in force for the six-fiber pair Seabras-1 system, which will boast an initial maximum design capacity of 60 Terabits per second. The Alcatel-Lucent solution to be deployed for this project includes an integrated 100G wet plant of cable and high bandwidth repeaters, power feed equipment, and its 1620 Light Manager (LM) submarine line terminal equipped with advanced coherent technology and offering unique flexibility to increase direct connectivity between countries.

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