5G Novel Radio Multiservice Adaptive Network Project Gets Underway

to develop a novel, adaptive and future-proof mobile network architecture for the 5G era.

As part of the 5GPPP initiative, vendors, operators, IT companies, enterprises and academia in Europe are joining forces to launch the 5G NORMA (5G Novel Radio Multiservice adaptive network Architecture) project.

The 5G NORMA project, which is expected to run for 30 months, will propose an end-to-end architecture that takes into consideration both Radio Access Network (RAN) and Core Network aspects. The consortium envisions the architecture will enable unprecedented levels of network customizability to ensure that stringent performance, security, cost and energy requirements are met. It will also provide an API-driven architectural openness, fueling economic growth through over-the-top innovation.

Consortium members
Vendors and IT: Alcatel-Lucent, NEC, Nokia Networks, ATOS
Operators: Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefonica
Small and Medium-sized Enterprises: Azcom Technology, Nomor Research, Real Wireless
Academia: University Kaiserslautern in Germany, Kings College London, University Carlos III Madrid

The technical approach is based on the innovative concept of adaptive (de)composition and allocation of network functions, which flexibly decomposes the network functions and places the resulting functions in the most appropriate location. By doing so, access and core functions may no longer reside in different locations, which is exploited to jointly optimize their operation whenever possible. The adaptability of the architecture is further strengthened by the innovative software-defined mobile network control and mobile multi-tenancy concepts and underpinned by corroborating demonstrations.

"5G is not only about new radio access technology, network architecture will play an important role as well. 5G networks will have to be programmable, software driven and managed holistically to enable a diverse range of services in a profitable way. With 5G NORMA, the consortium aims to ensure economic sustainability of the network operation and open opportunities for new players, while leveraging a future-proof architecture in a cost- and energy-effective way," stated Dr. Werner Mohr, Chairman of the 5GPPP Association.

https://5g-ppp.eu/
https://5g-ppp.eu/5g-norma/
http://company.nokia.com/en

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Level 3 Acquires Black Lotus for DDoS Mitigation

Level 3 Communications has acquired Black Lotus, a start-up offering global Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) mitigation services. Details on the all-cash deal were not disclosed.

Black Lotus, which is based in San Francisco, operates a global DDoS mitigation network which monitors traffic on edge routers to generate sample data called flows which are then sent to an analysis platform. The traffic sample is then evaluated to determine if there is a DDoS attack against the destination IP, and if so traffic to that IP is diverted into one or more scrubbing centers. Once traffic is in the scrubbing center it can be filtered based on signatures which are predefined traffic patterns which are known to be DDoS attacks, or heuristics which are abnormalities in traffic patterns which may be indicative of a DDoS attack.

Level 3 said the acquisition of Black Lotus will add additional capabilities to the existing Level 3 DDoS service, which launched earlier in the year, including adding extra scrubbing centers. The Level 3 DDoS Mitigation service provides an enhanced network-based detection and mitigation scrubbing solution alongside network routing, rate limiting and IP filtering abilities. Black Lotus adds proxy-based DDoS mitigation services to the portfolio providing additional capabilities for application layer attacks, along with advanced behavioral analytics technology. The application layer is a prime target for DDoS attacks that often impact Web servers and Web hosting providers.

"At Level 3, we value security and are committed to protecting our customers and our network," said Chris Richter, senior vice president of managed security services at Level 3. "Black Lotus' proxy and behavioral technologies, combined with their experienced team of DDoS experts, perfectly complements Level 3's DDoS mitigation and threat intelligence capabilities. With this acquisition, Level 3 continues its commitment of investing in a comprehensive portfolio of services that enhance the growth, efficiency and security of our customers' operations, helping enterprises combat the cybersecurity challenges they face every day."

http://www.level3.com
https://www.blacklotus.net

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Interoute Claims Fastest Transatlantic Cloud

Interoute claims that its global cloud platform, Interoute Virtual Data Centre (VDC), delivers nearly double the throughput across the Atlantic than the next best cloud provider, as evidenced by research conducted by Cloud Spectator.

The research from March 2015 compared Interoute VDC with three leading cloud providers (Amazon AWS, Rackspace and Microsoft Azure), testing network throughput and latency between Europe and USA and between providers' European data centres. In all of the comparisons, Interoute VDC demonstrated the highest throughputs and lowest latencies.

Key research findings:

Transatlantic:

• Interoute VDC delivered 1.1 Gbps throughput, which was 96% better than Amazon AWS, 141% better than Rackspace, and 195% better than Microsoft Azure.
• Interoute VDC had the lowest latency, between its London and New York data centres. Interoute was the only provider in the comparison with both of its transatlantic data centres located in key business cities, meaning that VDC users can access compute and storage resources, and deliver data to their customers, from two centres of European and US business activity. 

Within Europe:

• Interoute VDC achieved 1.3 Gbps throughput between its London and Amsterdam data centres. This was 52% better than Amazon AWS (Dublin – Frankfurt) and 73% better than Microsoft Azure (Dublin - Amsterdam)
• Interoute VDC achieved a latency of 6 milliseconds between London and Amsterdam, over three times better than the inter-data centre latency of the comparison providers.

“This independent report confirms and validates our networked cloud strategy. Building cloud into a world class network provides our customers with significantly better performance when compared with the traditional cloud models. Businesses looking to grow between Europe and US should definitely be looking at the importance of these network characteristics for their ability to shift workloads into the cloud. Interoute’s fourteen global zones are all built into high performance network with over 300 interconnects in Europe alone. So wherever you choose to put your data and connect to us, your services are typically going to perform faster on Interoute than on many other global providers,” stated Matthew Finnie, CTO of Interoute.

http://www.interoute.com/press-release/interoute-virtual-data-centre-fastest-transatlantic-cloud-service

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Ixia Ships its Private and Hybrid Cloud Visibility Solution

Ixia has enhanced its Net Tool Optimizer (NTO) platform with single-pane-of-glass visibility into hybrid cloud deployments, allowing a unified view of the entire network.

The new major capabilities delivered in this release include:

• Unified visibility for virtual and physical networks under a single management interface
• Intelligent routing of application traffic
• Double the available interconnects with existing hardware
• High speed visibility with the 4x40Gbps Advanced Feature Module (AFM) hardware
• Enabling visibility without borders - Insight into Hybrid Cloud Deployments

Ixia said its graphical user interface, patented dynamic filtering technology and "virtual tap" enable visibility into hybrid cloud deployments. Ixia’s NTO now controls a consolidated data flow from physical and virtual networks that can be then shared with existing security and application performance tools. This extends their life through the virtualization migration, leveraging existing infrastructure and reducing transition risk.

Ixia is also announcing the availability of a new advanced 160Gbps feature module, with 4x40Gbps interfaces. This module supports all existing packet grooming features such as de-duplication, slicing, stripping and tunnel termination.

http://www.ixiacom.com

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June was busy for Start-ups + Networking + Cloud + Security

Cisco to acquire OpenDNS for $635 Million

Tuesday, June 30, 2015  Cisco, Cyber Security, Mergers and Acquisitions, Start-ups  No comments

Cisco agreed to acquire OpenDNS, a privately held security company based in San Francisco, for approximately $635 million in cash and assumed equity awards. OpenDNS provides a secure DNS offering with advanced threat protection for "any device, across any port, protocol or app." Its predictive security model is designed to anticipate malicious activity, including botnets and phishing. Its DNSCrypt technology converts regular DNS traffic into encrypted...

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Distil Raises $21M for Bot Detection and Mitigation

Tuesday, June 30, 2015  Cyber, Distil, Funding, Start-ups  No comments

Distil Networks, a start-up with offices in Arlington, Virginia and San Francisco, raised $21 million in Series B funding for its bot detection and mitigation solution. Distil helps to defend websites against malicious bots used for web scraping, brute force attacks, competitive data mining, account hijacking, unauthorized vulnerability scans, spam, man-in-the-middle attacks and click fraud. Its unique approach monitors every single Web request...

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HackerOne Raises $25 Million for Vulnerability Tracking

Wednesday, June 24, 2015  Cyber Security, Funding, Silicon Valley, Start-ups  No comments

HackerOne, a start-up based in San Francisco with offices in the Netherlands, raised $25 million in Series B funding for its vulnerability management and bug bounty platform. HackerOne, which was created by people who scaled a new security approach at Facebook, Microsoft and Google, relies on the worldwide hacker community to find and disclose software security holes. The company said it can identify security vulnerabilities on a continuous basis,...

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AtScale Raises Funding for Business Intelligence Interface for Hadoop

Tuesday, June 23, 2015  AtScale, Big Data, Funding, Silicon Valley, Start-ups  No comments

AtScale, a start-up based in San Mateo, California, announced $7 million in series A funding for its business intelligence solution for Hadoop. AtScale aims to is the glue between two fast-growing but currently disconnected markets: Big Data, estimated at $50B by Wikibon, and the Business Analytics industry, a space IDC predicts will reach $59.2B in 2018. AtScale requires no data movement and no new visualization interface to act as the business...

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Enigma Raises $28 Million for its Analytics Engine

Tuesday, June 23, 2015  Big Data, Enigma, Funding, NY/NJ, Start-ups  No comments

Enigma, a start-up based in New York City, announced a $28.2 million Series B funding round to support its work in data discovery and analytics. Enigma has developed an analytics engine that can search, discover and connect billions of previously unlinked public records from thousands of governments and organizations across the world. Enigma is now focusing these capabilities on the enterprise market, bringing its unique corpus of public data...

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Portworx Targets Container-Aware Storage

Monday, June 22, 2015  Containers, Docker, Portworx, Silicon Valley, Start-ups  No comments

Portworx, a start-up based in Redwood City, California, unveiled its solution for providing elastic, scale-out block storage natively to Docker containers. Portworx PWX Converged Infrastructure for Containers allows Dockerized applications to execute directly on the storage infrastructure. It also enables Dockerized applications to be scheduled across machines and clouds, making possible the deployment of stateful, distributed applications. Key...

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Rancher Labs Launches its Container Infrastructure Platform

Monday, June 22, 2015  Containers, Docker, Silicon Valley, Start-ups  No comments

Rancher Labs, a start-up based in Cupertino, California, announced the beta release of its platform for running Docker in production. It includes a fully-integrated set of infrastructure services purpose built for containers, including networking, storage management, load balancing, service discovery, monitoring, and resource management. Rancher connects these infrastructure services with standard Docker plugins and application management tools,...

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Datawise.io Targets Network/Storage for Linux Containers

Monday, June 22, 2015  Dataio, Start-ups  No comments

Datawise.io, a start-up based in San Jose, previewed its solution for delivering network and storage solutions for Linux containers. Project 6 is software for deploying and managing Docker containers across a cluster of hosts, with a focus on simplifying on-premises environments. Datawise.io is making it easy to pack stateless and stateful applications onto the same environment by integrating Docker and Google’s Kubernetes with additional capabilities...

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Corsa Introduces SDN Metering and QoS for Big Data

Tuesday, June 16, 2015  #SDN, Big Data, Canada, Corsa, Start-ups, Switching  No comments

Corsa Technology, a start-up based in Ottawa, unveiled new SDN metering and QoS (Quality of Service) capability for its line of performance SDN hardware. Bandwidth reservation is seen as especially interesting for organizations running Big Data workloads. The traffic engineering function, which is based on OpenFlow 1.3, allows network architects to better manage bandwidth across their network with dynamic, policy-aware metering and QoS. Metering...

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PLUMgrid Names Larry Lang as CEO

Tuesday, June 09, 2015  #SDN, OpenStack, People, Plumgrid, Silicon Valley, Start-ups  No comments

PLUMgrid, a start-up offering an Open Networking Suite (ONS) for clouds based on OpenStack, named Larry Lang as chief executive officer. Founder Awais Nemat has been appointed chairman of the board of directors. Lang has held executive positions including president and CEO of Quorum Labs, vice president and general manager of the mobile internet business unit at Cisco Systems, and vice president of product management at Ipsilon Networks, now part...

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AppFormix Promises Better Orchestration of VMs and Docker Containers

Tuesday, June 09, 2015  Appformix, Containers, Start-ups  No comments

AppFormix, a start-up based in San Jose, California emerged from stealth mode to unveil its platform for managing the physical infrastructure and orchestrating virtual machines and Docker containers by leverating OpenStack, Kubernetes and Mesos. The company said its goal is to create a fully optimized software-defined data center by bridging the gap between application requirements and the underlying resources. The AppFormix software solution provides...

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Menlo Security Raises $25 million for Isolation Platform

Monday, June 08, 2015  #cloud, Cyber Security, Silicon Valley, Start-ups  No comments

Menlo Security emerged from stealth to unveil its Isolation Platform, a new technology that eliminates the threat of malware from key attack vectors, including Web and email. The solution does not use endpoint software. Instead, the Menlo Security Isolation Platform isolates and executes all Web content in the cloud and away from the endpoint. It uses patent-pending, clientless rendering technology, Adaptive Clientless Rendering (ACR), to deliver...

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Avi Networks Integrates Cloud ADC with Cisco ACI

Thursday, June 04, 2015  ACI, ADC, Avi, Cisco, Load Balancer, Silicon Valley, Start-ups  1 comment

Avi Networks, a start-up based in Sunnyvale, California, has integrated its Cloud Application Delivery Controller with Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). Avi Networks, which was founded by key engineers behind Cisco's Nexus data center platforms, offers a software-only load balancer that adopts the same approach taken by large cloud service providers, such as Amazon, Facebook and Google, in that it runs entirely on x86.  The...

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Cisco to Acquire Piston Cloud for OpenStack

Wednesday, June 03, 2015  Cisco, Mergers and Acquisitions, OpenStack, Silicon Valley, Start-ups  No comments

Cisco agreed to acquire Piston Cloud Computing, a start-up based in San Francisco, for its enterprise OpenStack solutions. Financial terms were not disclosed. Piston Enterprise OpenStack is designed for building, scaling and managing a private Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud on bare-metal, converged commodity hardware.  Piston Cloud enables Cloud Foundry's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering to run on OpenStack. It also supports...

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IBM Acquires Blue Box for OpenStack Cloud Migration

Wednesday, June 03, 2015  #cloud, IBM, Mergers and Acquisitions, OpenStack, Start-ups  No comments

IBM has acquired Blue Box Group, a managed private cloud provider built on OpenStack. Financial terms were not disclosed. Blue Box, which is based in Seattle, provides a private cloud as a service platform designed to enable easier deployment of workloads across hybrid cloud environments. IBM said the acquisition reinforces its commitment to deliver flexible cloud computing models that make it easier for customers to move to data and applications...

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AccelOps Builds Threat Intelligence into its Actionable Security Platform

Tuesday, June 02, 2015  AccelOps, Cyber Security, Silicon Valley, Start-ups  No comments

AccelOps, a start-up based in Santa Clara, California, introduced threat intelligence capabilities for its integrated IT and operational visibility platform. The existing AccelOps virtual appliance software monitors security, performance and compliance in cloud and virtualized infrastructures on a single screen. It automatically discovers, analyzes and automates IT issues in machine and big data across organizations’ data centers and cloud resources,...

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Hedvig Raises $18 Million for Distributed, Software-Defined Storage

Monday, June 01, 2015  Funding, Hedvig, Silicon Valley, Start-ups, Storage  No comments

Hedvig, a start-up based in Santa Clara, California, announced $18 million in Series B funding for its software-defined storage solution designed to bring "the power of Amazon and Facebook-like infrastructure to any enterprise data center.". Hedvig has developed a Distributed Storage Platform combines cloud and commodity infrastructure.  The system creates a virtualized pool that provisions storage with a few clicks, scales to petabytes and...

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