AT&T and ONOS to Show Central Office Re-architected as Data Center (CORD)

At next week's Open Networking Summit (ONS2015) in Santa Clara, California, AT&T, ONOS project, PMC-Sierra and Sckipio will showcase the first public demonstration of the Central Office Re-architected as Data Center (CORD) proof-of-concept (POC).

The idea behind CORD is to use SDN and NFV to transform carrier functions into workloads that are hosted on common, commodity infrastructure. The CORD solution POC spans the Telco Central Office, access including Gigabit-capable Passive Optical Networks (GPON) and G.fast as well as home/enterprise customer premises equipment (CPE). CORD enables service providers to build an underlying common infrastructure with white boxes using ONOS (carrier-grade open source SDN Control Plane), OpenStack (virtual infrastructure management), and XOS (an open source service orchestration/management platform built on OpenStack) with a diversity of organizations building the services and solutions that ride above.

Key capabilities demonstrated at ONS will include:

• Proof-of-concept Central Office: Highlights the open software and hardware building blocks for CORD - ONOS, XOS, OpenStack, white box switches, commodity servers, OpenFlow-enabled GPON OLT MAC from PMC, and OpenFlow-enabled G.fast distribution point unit (DPU) connected to a G.fast CPE bridge from Sckipio.
• Service Provider-focused capabilities
• SDN Control, orchestration and management with ONOS, OpenStack and XOS on commodity infrastructure
• An open high-performance leaf-spine fabric
• OpenFlow-enabled PON OLT MAC hardware enabling virtualization of the traditional OLT
• OpenFlow-enabled G.fast DPU
• Access-as-service, Subscriber-as-a-service, Internet-as-a-service Caching/Content delivery-as-a-service, Virtualized functions including Firewall, URL Filtering, Parental Control, BNG
• Service Provider portal for intuitive provisioning, management, monitoring of infrastructure and services
• Subscriber-focused capabilities
• A simple CPE that replaces existing complex CPEs and can be managed by ONOS
• Subscriber Services: Internet, Firewall, Parental Control
• Subscriber portal for signing up for and managing services
• Third-Party Provider-focused capabilities
• Third-party provider services: Content delivery (Caching) for its own content in the Service Provider network
• Third-party provider portal for signing up for and managing services
• CORD POC software used for the demo at ONS 2015 will be available publicly in the ONOS "Drake" release that is slated for the end of August, 2015. Beyond the ONS demo, the CORD solution will undergo the next phase of development and advance to lab trials. A CORD "Pod" bundling together the software and hardware building blocks into a ready-to-use system, will be made available for service provider lab trials by the end of 2015.

"SDN and NFV are speeding up innovation, as seen in projects like CORD," said Tom Anschutz, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at AT&T. "These technologies create systems that do not need new standards to function and enable new behaviors in software, which decreases development time. Faster development time leads to rapid innovation, something the industry needs to continue satisfying data-hungry customers."

"The first CORD proof-of-concept is a big step towards demonstrating AT&T and other providers' vision of reinventing the central office to bring data center economies of scale and cloud-style agility to their networks," said Guru Parulkar, Executive Director, ON.Lab and ONRC. "With CORD, service providers can architect their central offices using common, commodity infrastructure such as ONOS, OpenStack, XOS, white box switches and servers. CORD also represents an open and unique opportunity with AT&T as the leading service provider, ON.Lab and ONOS project as providers of open source software platforms, and merchant silicon vendors PMC-Sierra and Sckipio. This team plans to enhance the solution with new features and harden it, bring in new players and advance CORD from lab trials all the way to deployment."

http://onosproject.org
http://onlab.us

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Key Themes for this Year's Open Networking Summit

See video: https://youtu.be/eEqhbmAza90

Ram Appalaraju previews key themes at next week's #ONS2015 in Santa Clara, California.

The range of technologies on display will include OpenFlow, OpenStack, Open Daylight, OPNFV, ONOS, as well as vendor-specific offerings such as Cisco's ACI and VMware's NSX.

http://opennetsummit.org/

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AWS Offers 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2676 v3 Haswell processors

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced M4 instances, the next generation of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) General Purpose instances.

M4 instances get a performance boost using custom 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2676 v3 Haswell processors. M4 also offers dedicated bandwidth to Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), and provides Enhanced Networking for higher packet per second (PPS) performance, lower network jitter, and lower network latencies.

AWS said M4 with Enhanced Networking delivers up to 4 times the packet rate of instances without Enhanced Networking, while ensuring consistent latency, even when under high network IO. Within Placement Groups, Enhanced Networking reduces average latencies between instances by 50 percent or more. M4 instances are well-suited for a wide variety of applications including relational and in-memory databases, gaming servers, caching fleets, batch processing, and business applications like SAP and Microsoft SharePoint. To get started with M4 instances, visit http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

“Amazon EC2 provides a comprehensive selection of instances to support virtually any workload, and we continue to deliver new technologies and high performance in our current generation instances,” said Matt Garman, Vice President, Amazon EC2, AWS. “M4 instances bring new capabilities to the General Purpose family through the use of a custom Intel Haswell processor and larger instance sizes. We are also pleased to deliver even better network performance with dedicated bandwidth to Amazon EBS and Enhanced Networking, an Amazon EC2 feature that we are providing, for the first time, to General Purpose Instances. With these capabilities, M4 is one of our most powerful instance types and a terrific choice for workloads requiring a balance of compute, memory, and network resources.”

http://aws.amazon.com

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U.S. Court of Appeals Won't Block Open Internet Rules

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decided not to impose an injunction on the FCC's new Open Internet rules, allowing the new code to go into effect on June 12, 2015.  However, the court agreed to expedite the case.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler stated: “This is a huge victory for Internet consumers and innovators! Starting Friday, there will be a referee on the field to keep the Internet fast, fair and open. Blocking, throttling, pay-for-priority fast lanes and other efforts to come between consumers and the Internet are now things of the past. The rules also give broadband providers the certainty and economic incentive to build fast and competitive broadband networks.”

CTIA's President and CEO Meredith Attwell Baker stated: "While the stay decision is disappointing and a loss for consumers, securing a judicial stay is always a challenge given the extremely high standards. The case is just beginning and the stakes are high – the U.S. is the world's leader in the deployment and adoption of wireless broadband, due in large measure to decades of light-touch regulation. The wireless industry seeks to restore that approach so consumers can benefit from competition and innovation, rather than suffer the harmful consequences of the FCC's overreach that would imperil new services and inhibit investment. As we said from day one, CTIA and its member companies support an open Internet. We look forward to presenting our full case to the court."

http://www.fcc.gov
http://www.ctia.org/

In March, the FCC released its newly adopted Open Internet rules, which were approved by a 3-to-2 vote last month. The new rules aim to establish a legal standard for broadband provider practices to ensure that they do not unreasonably interfere with or disadvantage consumers' access to the Internet. At the time of the vote, FCC Commissioner Tom Wheeler said the order would establish three "bright line rules":

• No Blocking: broadband providers may not block access to legal content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices.
• No Throttling: broadband providers may not impair or degrade lawful Internet traffic on the basis of content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices.
• No Paid Prioritization: broadband providers may not favor some lawful Internet traffic over other lawful traffic in exchange for consideration of any kind—in other words, no “fast lanes.”   This rule also bans ISPs from prioritizing content and services of their affiliates. It also prohibits practices that target specific applications or classes of applications.  

http://www.fcc.gov/openinternet

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Pluribus Ports Open Netvisor Linux OS onto Dell’s ONIE compatible 10G/40G Switches

Pluribus Networks announced an agreement to port its Open Netvisor Linux operating system onto Dell’s family of Open Networking (ONIE compatible) 10G/40G switches, including the S6000-ON and S4048-ON.

Pluribus Open Netvisor Linux combines the benefits of Linux with a plug-and-play, application-aware fabric, advanced network flow programming and embedded analytics and visibility capabilities. It offers interoperability with the Layer 2 and IP/BGP infrastructure already in place, including all standard management interfaces familiar to Network Operations (NetOps) professionals while also offering Linux-based Development Operations (DevOps) tools to empower the modern cloud.

“Dell wants to fundamentally change the nature of networking by focusing on openness and the disaggregation of hardware and software. With this announcement, we are expanding the Dell open networking ecosystem, showing how multiple operating systems can now offer our customers choices that complement our open hardware solutions and are flexible enough to adapt to our customers’ requirements,” said Tom Burns, vice president and general manager, Dell Networking and Converged Infrastructure.

“With this combination of Pluribus and Dell, we are demonstrating that the value of SDN goes far beyond disaggregation of hardware and software alone. Cloud providers need security, monitoring and virtualization built in at the architectural level to enable them to compete with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and other hyperscale cloud providers, and that is exactly what we are delivering with Pluribus Open Netvisor Linux running on Dell’s line of OCP-compliant open networking hardware. Together, we are changing the game!” said Kumar Srikantan, president and CEO of Pluribus Networks.

http://www.pluribusnetworks.com

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Hitachi Launches Private, Public, and Hybrid Cloud Platform.

Hitachi Consulting announced the launch of its private, public, and hybrid cloud platform.

The Hitachi Cloud Framework offers capabilities and services to support all levels of the data center -- from development and testing to operations and productionalized enterprise applications.

"We work to understand the security, data access and reliability pressures that today's CIO's face every day. We help companies extend private cloud environments to include a public, hosted platform for non-mission-critical workloads," said Jim Cole, Senior Vice President of Outsourcing Services, Hitachi Consulting. "Our new cloud service offers customers our proven expertise and capabilities while also extending the power of exceptional technology from Hitachi Data Systems. The combination gives our customers a wide range of choices to support the specific requirements of their business applications."

http://learn.hitachiconsulting.com/Cloud-Outsource

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ViaSat Acquires Start-up Focused on Virtualization

ViaSat has acquired Engreen, a privately-held company based in San Jose, California that is focused on network virtualization.

Engreen's flagship virtualization product provides a path to enhance network management, lower capital expenses, energy and real estate, and minimize overall network complexity.

ViaSat said the technology will benefit its satellite broadband netwokr

"Our investment in Engreen reinforces our commitment to the global Ka-band satellite market," said Kevin Harkenrider, senior vice president, Commercial Networks, ViaSat. "This transaction will enhance our ability to rapidly create, deploy and manage services in our Flexible Broadband System."

Pawan Uberoy, Engreen CEO, commented, "There are multiple synergies in how ViaSat and Engreen approach network management leveraging enhanced virtualization capabilities. We are looking forward to joining ViaSat and adding value to its global customer base."

http://www.viasat.com

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Sckipio G.fast Supports NETCONF and YANG

Sckipio Technologies' G.fast Distribution Point Unit (DPU) can now be SDN-controlled via the Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF), using the standard G.fast YANG data model, and with traffic managed via OpenFlow. The support for NETCONF YANG and OpenFlow is part of Sckipio’s new G.fast Management Stack, the first management stack designed from scratch to enable software-defined network (SDN) control on G.fast devices.

“G.fast is the ultra-broadband access technology for the 21st century and demands a modern approach to device management,” said David Baum, co-founder and CEO of Sckipio. “Instead of simply supporting outdated, proprietary management approaches, Sckipio is giving OEMs and ultimately operators, complete control and management of G.fast equipment using open solutions.”

Sckipio state-of-the-art management platform and networking stack includes NETCONF YANG, CLI, SNMP, IGMP, DHCP, MSTP, Y.1731 and CFM support, and is designed to comply with all relevant Broadband Forum G.fast management specifications (WT-301, WT-318/355 drafts) as they are released.

The Sckipio G.fast Management Stack is available now and runs on the PMC-Sierra WinPath family of network processors.

http://www.sckipio.com

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ABI Research: 1.37 Billion LTE Users by Year-end 2015

There will be nearly 1.37 billion 4G LTE subscribers worldwide by year-end 2015, up from nearly 650 million in 2014, according to a new forecast from ABI Research.

ABI Research predicts that the LTE subscriber base will exceed 3.5 billion by 2020, demonstrating a 5 year CAGR of 20.8%. The exponential rise in LTE points-of-presence covered justifies the need for sustained investment in LTE infrastructure, which is expected to grow nearly 10% year-on-year.

The report cites ongoing LTE infrastructure deployments in the United States, Asia and China, including plans for small cell rollouts and LTE-U.

https://www.abiresearch.com/

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Viptela Signs Macnica and Nissho Electronic for SD-WAN in Japan

Viptela, which offers a software-defined WAN solution, announced partnerships with Macnica Networks and Nissho Electronics for the Japanese market.

These two leading solution providers will deploy Software-Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WAN) for large enterprises using the Viptela Secure Extensible Network (SEN) platform. Viptela enables enterprises to combine multiple transports into a single, cloud-adaptable WAN that is centrally managed. The solution provides robust security and makes it possible to construct highly flexible and agile WAN environments with significantly lower operating costs.

Viptela disaggregates voice, video and data services from the physical network using a single overlay WAN that supports any number of different transport connections, and provides end-to-end encryption and device authentication. Viptela enables granular network segmentation for separation across different lines of business, partner networks, etc. with centrally managed policies to optimize application performance, meet enterprise security requirements and slash operational costs.

“Large enterprises in every market, including Japan, face the same WAN challenges caused by cloud computing, the rapid growth of data and video traffic, and the need to mix and match separate transport networks,” said Amir Khan, CEO of Viptela. “We are pleased to be working with Macnica Networks and Nissho Electronics to bring the business benefits of Viptela’s SD-WAN technology to enterprises in Japan.”

http://www.viptela.com

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OIF Approves Thermal Interface Spec for Pluggable Optics Modules

The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) has approved a thermal interface implementation agreement (IA) for pluggable optics modules. The aim is to help optical module suppliers and system designers reduce heat and thermal management issues.

“When optical modules are mated with heatsinks, the goal is to remove over 90% of the heat through the interface area into the airflow stream via the heatsink,” said Torsten Wuth, of Coriant and the OIF Physical Layer User Group Working Group chair. “Nominal ranges of heat flux are defined as Power Density classes. The OIF agreement defines acceptable thermal impedances for the contact area for various pluggable module types and a method of measuring the impedance.”

The agreement summarizes the information to be provided by module suppliers to facilitate thermal integration of the module within the host system. It also defines the requirements and methods for testing a thermal interface between a pluggable optical module and the host-system heatsink.

http://www.oiforum.com/documents/implementation-agreements/

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