Equinix Cites Rapid Growth in Direct Connections to Azure

Equinix cited rapid growth in the number of enterprise customers accessing Azure in Equinix’s International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers around the globe.

Specifically, over the past year as the availability of direct connections to Microsoft Azure has expanded to 16 market, Equinix has facilitated hundreds of connections to Azure via its Cloud Exchange. Recent Equinix customers taking advantage of private access to Azure include GE, HarperCollins, Hitachi Data Systems, and Red Lobster, among others.

Some notes:

• More than one hundred companies are currently on the Equinix Cloud Exchange, the company’s interconnection solution that brings cloud and network service providers together with enterprises through private, security-enhanced and high-performance connections. Since launching the service in 2014, Equinix has facilitated hundreds of connections to Azure taking place on Cloud Exchange. The company also offers a number of flexible interconnection offerings, including Cross Connects (dedicated fiber cables), Internet exchange (carrier grade switches connecting many providers) within the data center, and Metro Connect (dedicated Layer 1 and switch-based Layer 2 services) between data centers in the same metro.
• Equinix recently announced that it will be one of the first companies to offer private, managed connections to Microsoft Office 365, including Skype for Business, via ExpressRoute through the Equinix Cloud Exchange.
• Hybrid cloud deployment is on the rise among enterprise customers. In fact, according to Robert Mahowald, program vice president at IDC and head of the SaaS & Cloud Services practice, “More than 65% of enterprise IT organizations will commit to hybrid cloud technologies before 2016, vastly driving the rate and pace of change in IT organizations.”
• Azure is used by 57% of the Fortune 500, and according to a recent report by Synergy Research is experiencing 96% year-over-year growth, and is second in overall market share for cloud infrastructure services.
• Access to Azure via ExpressRoute on Equinix Cloud Exchange is currently available in 16 markets globally, including Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, Sao Paulo, Seattle, Silicon Valley, Washington DC, Amsterdam, London, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo, with Osaka being added later in 2015.

“By providing direct access to Azure via ExpressRoute inside Equinix data centers, we are enabling companies to bridge their cloud and data center strategies and fully realize the benefits of hybrid and multi-cloud. Since we began offering the Microsoft solution just over a year ago, we have witnessed significant growth in connections and companies increasingly benefit from the scale, flexibility and cost-effectiveness of the cloud—all without the complexities associated with traditional network connections,” stated Chris Sharp, vice president, Cloud Innovation, Equinix.

Equinix also noted that it is working with Datapipe, Unitas Global and ScienceLogic to develop custom solutions that further help enterprises create hybrid clouds, maximizing the public cloud through Azure and ExpressRoute, paired with dedicated on-premise infrastructure and services inside Equinix.

http://www.equinix.com/solutions/by-services/interconnection/exchanges/equinix-cloud-exchange

Read More

NetScout Acquires Danaher’s Communications Business

NetScout Systems completed its acquisition of Danaher Corporation’s Communications Business. The deal was valued at $2.3 billion and involved the issuance of 62.5 million shares of NetScout common stock at $36.89 per share to Danaher’s shareholders.

The acquisition includes Tektronix Communications, Arbor Networks and parts of the Fluke Networks businesses, all of which were owned by Danaher Corp.  The deal was first announced in October 2014.

Danaher’s Communications business generated revenue (unaudited) of approximately $836 million for the year ended December 31, 2013.

Danaher’s Communications business, which has over 2,000 employees worldwide, includes: 

Tektronix Communications, based in Plano, Texas, which provides a comprehensive set of assurance, intelligence and test solutions and services support for a range of architectures and applications such as LTE, HSPA, 3G, IMS, mobile broadband, VoIP, video and triple play. Also included are VSS Monitoring and Newfield Wireless.

Arbor Networks, based in Burlington, Massachusetts, which provides solutions that help secure the world’s largest enterprise and service provider networks from DDoS attacks and advanced threats.

Fluke Networks, based in Everett, Washington, which delivers network monitoring solutions that speed the deployment and improve the performance of networks and applications. The data cabling tools business and carrier service provider (CSP) tools business within Fluke Networks are not included this transaction.

“This acquisition represents an important milestone for NetScout that enhances our ability to drive value for customers, stockholders, employees and other stakeholders,” stated Anil Singhal, president and CEO.   “With a broader range of market-leading capabilities and technologies, as well as more extensive, global go-to-market and distribution resources, NetScout will be better positioned to capitalize on the many exciting opportunities we see to further expand our customer relationships around the world.  We welcome over 2,000 new colleagues to NetScout and collectively, we are looking forward to realizing the Company’s potential in the marketplace.”

NetScout also announced today that it has secured a new five-year, $800 million senior secured revolving credit facility that replaces its previous revolving credit facility of $250 million.

http://www.netscout.com

Danaher acquired Tektronix in 2007 for $1.1 billion.

Danaher acquired Arbor Networks in 2010.

Read More

Windows Server Now Available on Google Compute Engine

Google announced general availability of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012 R2 on its cloud compute service.

For Windows Server instances, Google Compute Engine promises "increased uptime due to transparent maintenance, cheap and predictable block storage, and best in class Google Cloud Storage Nearline backup. Sharepoint, SQL and Exchange Server, and other Microsoft applications are also available to Compute Engine customers via the Microsoft License Mobility program."

Other OSes supported by Google Compute Engine include CentOS, Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE, Ubuntu, CoreOS, FreeBSD, openSUSE, and SELinux.

http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2015/07/Bringing-Windows-to-Google-Cloud-Platform.html

Read More

Digital Realty to Acquire Telx for Data Centers and Internet Exchanges

Digital Realty Trust agreed to acquire Telx, a national provider of data center colocation, interconnection and cloud enablement solutions, for $1.886 billion from private equity firms ABRY Partners and Berkshire Partners.

The combination is expected to double Digital Realty's footprint in the rapidly-growing colocation business, as well as provide Digital Realty customers access to a leading interconnection platform.

As of March 31, 2015, Telx managed 1.3 million square feet of data center space operating out of 20 facilities across the country, of which two are Telx-owned, 11 are leased from Digital Realty, one is partially sub-leased from Digital Realty and an unrelated third party, and six are leased from third parties. Telx's flagship facilities include its NYC1 data center at 60 Hudson Street in Manhattan, which serves as a nerve center for international communications and offers access to physical connection points to the world’s telecommunications networks and Internet backbones. Telx occupies multiple floors at 60 Hudson with interconnectivity to more than 400 carriers, financial exchanges and application, media, content, and software-as-a-service providers with just a single connection. Telx operates other NYC data centers at 111 8th Ave. and 32 Avenue of the Americas (6th Ave).

As of March 31, 2015, Digital Realty's portfolio consisted of 130 properties, including 14 properties held as investments in unconsolidated joint ventures, comprised of approximately 22.1 million square feet, excluding approximately 1.2 million square feet of space under active development and 1.3 million square feet of space held for future development, located throughout North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

"This transformative transaction is consistent with our strategy of sourcing strategic and complementary assets to strengthen and diversify Digital Realty's data center portfolio and expand our product mix and presence in the attractive colocation and interconnection space," said A. William Stein, Digital Realty's Chief Executive Officer.  "Telx's well-established colocation and interconnection businesses provide access to two rapidly-growing segments with long-standing customer relationships in top-tier metropolitan areas such as New York and Silicon Valley.  The fact that more than half of Telx's 20 facilities are run out of Digital Realty properties further highlights the strategic fit as well as the potential incremental revenue opportunities we expect to be able to pursue as one company on a global basis.  This transaction advances our objective of ensuring that Digital Realty's suite of products and services is able to best serve our customers' current and future data center needs."

"We are excited to join Digital Realty and become part of a much larger global data center services platform," said Chris Downie, Chief Executive Officer of Telx.  "We look forward to working with the Digital Realty team to extend a broader, enhanced data center solution to our collective customers.  The combination of Telx's colocation and interconnection capabilities with Digital Realty's expansive wholesale platform provides greater flexibility and optionality for our customers and creates a global solutions provider covering wholesale customer applications and smaller performance-oriented deployments in select high-growth urban submarkets across the U.S.  As we open this new chapter, I am proud of our team who, with the support of our partners, ABRY and Berkshire, have significantly increased Telx's revenue and earnings since 2011 and have positioned the company for long-term growth."

In connection with the definitive agreement, Digital Realty received a commitment from a syndicate of lenders for a $1.850 billion unsecured term loan bridge facility, the proceeds of which will be available for use, if necessary, to fund a portion of the acquisition of Telx.  Borrowings, if any, under the bridge facility will bear interest at a rate based, at the borrower's option, on LIBOR or a Base Rate (as defined in the commitment papers), in each case plus an applicable margin based on Digital Realty 's credit rating, and the facility will mature 364 days after the closing date of the acquisition of Telx.

http://www.telx.com
https://blog.digitalrealty.com/2015/07/power-of-connection-bill-stein-telx-acquisition/

Read More

SK Telecom Deploys Accedian's Performance Monitoring

Accedian Networks announced the deployment of its performance monitoring solution across the SK Telecom mobile network -- encompassing 12,000 locations across the six largest cities in South Korea.

Accedian's virtualized solutions collect precise network performance indicators in real time from SK Telecom's existing network infrastructure, as well as from Accedian's NFV-based (network function virtualization) performance assurance modules. SK Telecom operates a multi-vendor network, ensuring each supports the RFC-5357 two way active measurement protocol (TWAMP), a vendor-independent, global performance monitoring standard. Accedian's centralized monitoring solution acts as a uniform instrumentation layer, centralizing a real-time view of network performance throughout the network. Where access equipment lacks TWAMP standards support, SK Telecom installs Accedian's Nano smart SFP modules to ensure ubiquitous network coverage from end-to-end.

Accedian said SK Telecom plans to extend coverage to all sites serving over 28 million subscribers nationwide. T

"At SK Telecom, best-possible quality of customer service and experience is at the heart of our reputation and our business," stated Choi, Seung-won, Senior Vice President and Head of Network Solution Office, SK Telecom. "Partnering with Accedian helps us ensure the highest levels of QoS and QoE, which is particularly important as we continue to extend our network towards 5G, and to expand coverage with small cells, making the need for 24x7 end to end network visibility critical. Accedian's performance monitoring solutions make this possible. SK Telecom selected Accedian's TWAMP performance assurance solution specifically as the quality indicator and standard for LTE business-to-business networks."

"SK Telecom is a premier example of a mobile service provider pushing network performance and technology to the limit," stated Accedian Founder, President, and CEO, Patrick Ostiguy. "They are early adopters and innovators, and their efforts result in the extremely high levels of service and experience quality their customers have come to expect. Accedian is honored to help support their performance assurance objectives through our comprehensive solutions, built with providers like SK Telecom in mind."

http://www.accedian.com
http://www.sktelecom.com

Blueprint: 5G and the Need For SDN Flow Optimization

Sunday, June 21, 2015  5G, Accedian, Blueprint, LTE, Testing  1 comment

by Scott Sumner, VP Solutions Development and Marketing, Accedian Networks As more subscribers run bandwidth-intensive applications from a variety of devices, mobile access networks are increasingly strained to maintain quality. According to Ericsson, annual mobile traffic throughput is predicted to increase from 58 exabytes in 2013 to roughly 335 exabytes by 2020. It’s clear that brute-force bandwidth over-provisioning is no longer an economically...

READ MORE

Read More

Sysdig Targets Container-Native Monitoring

Sysdig, a start-up based in San Francisco, announced the general availability of its “container-native” monitoring solution along with $10.7 million in Series A venture funding.

Sysdig, which describes itself as "the container visibility company," has developed the first monitoring, alerting, and troubleshooting platform specializing in container visibility. The Sysdig Cloud performance management solution uses patent-pending "ContainerVision" technology" to monitor the entire architecture using its own stand-alone container, with zero configuration.  This enables deep visibility into every other service running in the environment. In other words, Sysdig Cloud is monitoring as a microservice. It is available as software as a service.

“Containers are by their very nature dynamic, isolated, lightweight, and portable,” said Loris Degioanni, CEO and founder of Sysdig. “These characteristics have put containers at the heart of the current revolution from monolithic apps to microservices. But these same characteristics also make containers impractical to monitor with traditional, agent-based methods. What the market is demanding now is a new, ‘container-native’ performance management approach that both respects the core principles of containers and enables their core benefits.”

The recent funding round was led by Accel and Bain Capital Ventures (BCV).  This latest round of financing brings Sysdig’s total funding to date to $13 million, including a previously undisclosed $2.3 million seed funding round led by BCV in June 2013.

http://www.sysdig.com

• Sysdig is headed by Loris Degioanni (founder and CEO), who was instrumental in the creation of WinPcap and Wireshark.

Read More

MapR Reports Triple Digit Growth for its Apache Hadoop

MapR Technologies, a start-up based in San Jose, California, reported more than 100% growth in bookings and billings during Q2 2015 compared to the same quarter in the prior year for its Apache Hadoop solutions.

MapR processes big and fast data on a single platform, enabling real-time applications for enterprise deployments.

“New customer adoption and expanded deployments of the MapR Distribution for Hadoop have continued to accelerate as enterprise customers are realizing top-line revenue growth and operational efficiencies,” said John Schroeder, cofounder and CEO, MapR Technologies. “Our technology innovations with Apache Hadoop coupled by a proven, subscription-based licensing model, has enabled our business to grow with predictable success.”

https://www.mapr.com

MapR Raises $110 Million for Apache Hadoop

Monday, June 30, 2014  Funding, Hadoop, Mapr, Silicon Valley, Start-ups  No comments

MapR Technologies, a start-up based in San Jose, California, raised $110 million in venture funding for its distribution for Apache Hadoop software. MapR has significant production Hadoop environments in financial services, healthcare, media, retail, telecommunications, and Web 2.0 companies.  The financing will be used to continue growth in the big data and analytics segment, especially to fund additional engineering resources and support...

READ MORE

Read More