Cisco and Microsoft Integrate Azure with Application Centric Infrastructure

Cisco and Microsoft are expanding their cloud and data center relationship to include a new platform to accelerate service delivery and streamline the journey to the Intercloud for cloud providers. The goal is to provide the building blocks for cloud providers to evolve beyond traditional infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings to create combined IaaS, platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS) solutions that deliver more value to their customers.

Specifically, the companies are launching the Cisco Cloud Architecture for the Microsoft Cloud Platform—an integrated solution that combines Windows Azure Pack and Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) to help cloud providers deliver hybrid cloud services. This collaboration will deliver pre-packaged policy management libraries that allow cloud providers to implement applications more quickly with consistent policy management. In addition, Microsoft System Center 2012 R2is integrated with the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Manager to provide the operational simplicity and control that cloud providers need to manage their growing business.

The companies said the combination of Windows Azure Pack and Cisco ACI allows partners to deliver services—from network services and disaster recovery, to big data, and enterprise application services—at DevOps speed, drastically reducing total cost of ownership and accelerating time-to-revenue.

Cisco also added 14 cloud providers to its list of participants in the Intercloud partner ecosystem, bringing the number of Intercloud providers to more than 60 with a footprint of more than 350 data centers across 50 countries. The new Intercloud providers include Bezeq International (Israel), City Cloud Technology (China), CTC - Itochu Techno Solution (Japan), Freudenberg IT (Germany), iland (United States), Proximus (Belgium), QSS (Bosnia) QTS (United States), Skyscape Cloud Services (United Kingdom), Telecom Italia (Italy), Telefonica (Spain), Troila Technology Development (China), ViaWest (United States) and Yunan Nantian Electronic Information (China).

“We want our service providers partners to move up-market with us and offer higher-end cloud services. By partnering with Microsoft we’re able to deliver a tightly integrated, application centric cloud architecture. This unique new platform will help our partners dramatically accelerate the delivery of new and innovative hybrid cloud services for their customers,” stated Nick Earle, senior vice president, Cloud and Managed Services, Cisco.

"Cisco and Microsoft already have a strong relationship in the cloud and data center markets.  Today, we’re expanding that collaboration with a solution that will allow our mutual partners to deliver services quickly and grow revenue faster with a cloud-enabled platform. The work we’ve done to integrate Cisco ACI with Windows Azure Pack will allow cloud providers to dramatically accelerate time-to-market, while decreasing costs.  Together, Cisco and Microsoft are helping our partners evolve with current market demand and rapidly shifting customer needs,” said Aziz Benmalek, general manager, Hosting Service Providers, Microsoft.

http://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=1608152

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Juniper Boosts its Supercore Router with New Silicon, Density, SDN

Aiming to 'Revolutionize Routing Again,' Juniper Networks rolled out a series of enhancements to its Converged Supercore PTX Series router based on new custom silicon and expanded software-defined networking (SDN) capabilities. The PTX routers combine full IP and MPLS functionality, transport integration and SDN programmability.

Juniper said its new ExpressPlus custom ASIC is capable of performing more than 1.5 billion filtered operations per second and scaling up to 500 Gbps (1 Tbps half-duplex), making it the world’s most advanced routing silicon.  It delivers four times the performance and three times the efficiency gains over Juniper’s previous-generation Express chipset. The 28 nanometer chip can drive 5x100G interfaces and leverages 3D memory architecture, reducing its physical footprint by 20 times compared with previous solutions, which optimizes power consumption and space requirements.

The new silicon enables the PTX5000 routers to deliver 3 Tbps per slot (30x100GE interfaces) for a total capacity of 24 Tbps (48 Tbps half-duplex).  Energy efficiency is estimated at 1/2 watt per gigabit. In terms of size, the PTX3000 is designed for space-constrained environments and can scale up to 8 Tbps or (16 Tbps half-duplex) in a form factor 91 percent smaller than its nearest competitor. Juniper will also introducing new line cards for the PTX Series core routers.

In addition, Juniper has extended the capabilities of its NorthStar Controller to provide visibility and control into additional layers of the network and fully support and handle dynamic traffic, such as that driven by mobile and cloud applications. Juniper said these capabilities enable the NorthStar Controller to increase utilization by dynamically adjusting to changing network conditions in real-time.

"Today, we build on the Converged Supercore architecture we announced in 2011 with the addition of new silicon, systems and software designed specifically to help our customers achieve unparalleled levels of scale in our platforms and a level of performance, automation and optimization never before seen in the industry with NorthStar SDN control. This holistic approach to networking gives our customers the power to innovate and bring new concepts to life through connecting ideas to people and people to solutions," stated Jonathan Davidson, executive vice president and general manager, Juniper Development and Innovation.

http://newsroom.juniper.net/press-release/juniper-networks-unveils-industrys-most-powerful-core-routing-platform

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Juniper Debuts Spine Switches for Cloud Scalability

Juniper Networks is introducing a new line of spine switches for bringing physical and logical scale, performance and port density to cloud data centers.

The new QFX10000 line, which builds on the company's MetaFabric architecture, is powered by Juniper’s latest, Q5 custom ASIC. The new chip offers deep buffers and an architecture that supports virtualization for SDN with the logical scale for applications such as big data, video and IP storage.

Some highlights:

• The new Juniper QFX10002 is a fixed configuration, 2-rack unit form-factor unit designed for from 40GE and 100GE within the same switch. 
• The QFX10008 is a modular, eight slot chassis that delivers ground breaking 100GE port
• density and up to 48Tbps of total system capacity.
• The QFX10016 will deliver unprecedented system capacity of up to 96Tbps, combined with leading port density in a powerful 16-slot chassis. 
• The QFX10000 line supports orchestration, automation and management solutions from market leaders like VMware, as well as open source solutions, like OpenStack and OpenContrail, will simplify and automate network management and provisioning.

Juniper is also introducing its Junos Fusion automation-enabled software architecture for data centers.  It enables coherency through automation and manages the entire data center as a single network rather than individual network elements. The company said Junos Fusion will make it easy to automate the turn-up and configuration of new networks while reducing the risk of configuration errors. In conjunction with EVPN/VxLAN, it simplifies application placement across multiple layers of the network.

"With the introduction of the QFX10000 line based on the new Q5 chip, Juniper Networks has significantly raised the industry bar in terms of network scale, density and performance. The addition of this new switch line further enhances our existing QFX Series portfolio by providing our customers with complete choice through our open, flexible and highly scalable solutions that serve traditional enterprise data centers to the largest cloud environments,” statd Jonathan Davidson, executive vice president and general manager, Juniper Development and Innovation at Juniper Networks.

http://www.juniper.net

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Juniper Brings 1 Tbps Throughput to SRX5000 Firewalls

Juniper Networks announced the availability of Express Path, an optimization capability for its SRX5000 Series Services Gateways.
Specifically, Juniper is introducing new Express Path software for its latest I/O cards (IOCII) that allows organizations to deploy the SRX5000 Series for securing both normal and latency sensitive traffic on a per policy basis within the same line card. The Express Path software and hardware optimization enables the SRX to identify and prioritize specific types of traffic to be fast-pathed to IOCII hardware.  The solution identifies and prioritizes active session flows to receive appropriate security treatment based on the type of traffic. Juniper said it is able to deliver latency as low as 7 microseconds..

The Express Path for the SRX5000 Series Services Gateway can support single, high bandwidth flows of up to 100 Gbps and firewall throughput capacity of up to 1 Tbps.

Juniper is also announcing new application security capabilities with AppSecure 2.0 for its virtual firewall vSRX, formally known as Firefly Perimeter, to deliver enhanced protection for cloud and hybrid data centers.

http://www.juniper.net

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Google Cloud Storage Nearline Priced at $0.01 per GB

Google introduced a Cloud Storage Nearline service with a 3-second response time SLA.

Google Cloud Storage Nearline is priced at $0.01 per GB per month for data at rest.  Google offers redundant storage at multiple physical locations and granular access controls integrated with its other Cloud Storage services.

http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2015/03/introducing-Google-Cloud-Storage-Nearline-near-online-data-at-an-offline-price.html

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Blue Coat to be Acquired by Bain Capital from Thoma Bravo

Bain Capital, one of the world’s foremost private investment firms, will acquire Blue Coat Systems from Thoma Bravo for approximately $2.4 billion in cash.

Blue Coat, which is based in Sunnyvale, California, provides on-premise, hybrid and cloud-based solutions for protecting web connectivity, combating advanced threats and responding to security breaches.

Bain Capital indicated a possible return to the public market for Blue Coat.

“We are excited by the opportunity to work with Blue Coat's world-class management team to grow the business organically and through acquisitions, and to ultimately return the company to the public markets,” said David Humphrey, a managing director at Bain Capital. “We are very impressed with the profitable growth the company has demonstrated and believe strongly in the future growth of the cyber security market and Blue Coat’s position in this important sector.”

“Blue Coat has differentiated products for protecting enterprises from even the most sophisticated threats, and we are proud to be a foundational part of the security architecture for the world’s largest enterprises. The world’s most trusted brands use Blue Coat, and the acquisition by Bain Capital sets us on the trajectory to further grow our portfolio, better serve our customers and help us prepare to return to the public markets,” said Gregory S. Clark, chief executive officer, Blue Coat Systems, Inc. “Bain Capital has a long history of accelerating growth, and I look forward to partnering with them in our journey to be one of the top performing security companies in the world.”

https://www.bluecoat.com/company/press-releases/blue-coat-be-acquired-bain-capital

• In early 2013, an investor group led by San Francisco-based private equity investment firm Thoma Bravo acquired Blue Coat Systems in a deal valued at $1.3 billion. 

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IBM and Semtech Develop Long Range Wide-area Network for IoT

IBM Research and Semtech announced a new technology called LoRaWAN (Long Range wide-area networks) that promises significant advantages over cellular networks and Wi-Fi for providing machine-to-machine (M2M) communications.

IBM said LoRaWAN sensors can communicate over distances of more than 100 km (62 miles) in favorable environments, 15 km (9 miles) in typical semi-rural environments and more than 2 km (1.2 miles) in dense urban environments at data rates from 300 bit/s up to 100 Kbps. This makes them well suited for sending small amounts of data, such as GPS coordinates and climate readings, where broadband can't reach. The sensors also require very little energy to operate; most can run for 10 years or more on a single AA battery, and AES128 keys make communication tampering and eavesdropping virtually impossible.

In support of LPWAN technology, IBM, Semtech, and other companies also announced the LoRa™ Alliance, a new association to support and develop the standardization LoRaWAN. The alliance aims to combine hardware and software based on the LoRaWAN standard for telecom operators and network operators, enabling them to offer IoT services to both businesses and consumers.

"The Internet of Things is already changing our world – from better traffic control on our highways, to greater energy efficiency in buildings and manufacturing operations, to reduced crime on our city streets," said Thorsten Kramp, Master Inventor, IBM Research. "Technology advancements like the one we're announcing today will help significantly advance that vision by extending the range and longevity of sensors that make up an intelligent world."

http://www.lora-alliance.org/

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Elastica Raises $30M for Cloud App Security

Elastica, a start-up based in San Jose, California, raised $30 million in series B funding for its "Data Science Powered" Cloud Application Security solutions.

Elastica continuously protects organizations’ sensitive data as they adopt cloud applications and services by revealing Shadow IT and shadow data, and by providing data governance, compliance risk mitigation and powerful tools for incident response and post-incident analysis. The Elastica CloudSOC platform harnesses advanced data science and machine learning to deliver granular visibility of real-time traffic, advanced anomaly detection to identify threats and real-time content classification. Granular policies can be created and enforced in real time to prevent data breaches, compliance violations and exposure of sensitive data. The SaaS-based delivery model allows organizations to easily deploy the solution with no on-site software or hardware required.

“While cloud apps are increasingly essential for business agility and IT cost effectiveness, they have inherent information exchange and collaboration capabilities that require a new kind of security,” said Rehan Jalil, CEO of Elastica. “Our unique data science technology that delivers effective security across cloud application and services has positioned us to lead the cloud app security category. New financing will further fuel our growth.”

Third Point Ventures led the round, with participation from Mayfield Fund and Pelion Venture Partners. Robert Schwartz from Third Point Ventures joined the Elastica board.

http://www.elastica.net

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