VMware's Photon Containers Promise "Just Enough" Virtualization

VMware introduced two new concepts for the cloud-native applications:  VMware vSphere Integrated Containers and VMware Photon Platform. The technologies enable containers in production on-premises and on VMware's public cloud, VMware vCloud Air.

"Today, VMware is announcing foundational infrastructure that will enable customers to deploy cloud-native applications in production with confidence," said Ray O'Farrell, chief technology officer and chief development officer, VMware. "It's all about choice. Customers will be able to jumpstart their container initiatives on top of their existing VMware vSphere environments or consume new infrastructure designed specifically for cloud-native applications."

VMware vSphere Integrated Containers: uses VMware vSphere at its foundation and enables IT teams to take advantage of their existing investments in VMware infrastructure, people, processes and management tools. The solution integrates with other container ecosystem solutions, including CoreOS Tectonic, Docker, Kubernetes, Mesosphere's Data Center Operating System and Cloud Foundry. VMware says vSphere Integrated Containers assures the integrity and authenticity of containers and their underlying infrastructure. VMware vSphere Integrated Containers will enable provisioning of persistent data volumes for containers in VMware vSphere environments. In addition, with VMware NSX, containers can be integrated with the rest of the data center, and can be connected to quarantine, forensics and/or monitoring networks for additional monitoring and troubleshooting.


The Photon Platform: a new, container-optimized platform developed for high churn workloads and an API-first model, promising "just the right level of functionality" to run cloud-native applications at scale.  The VMware Photon Platform is designed for DevOps teams planning to build out large pools of commodity computing capacity that solely run cloud-native applications. DevOps teams will have a choice of open container orchestration frameworks including Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Mesos and Cloud Foundry to run on the platform. The technology -- components of which will be open sourced -- will also support dynamic continuous integration environments, platform as a service (PaaS) or SaaS deployments, and sizable data analytics clusters running Hadoop or Spark.

The VMware Photon Platform, which will include future integrations with VMware NSX, VMware Virtual SAN and VMware vRealize Suite, features the following technologies:

• VMware Photon Controller - A multi-tenant, API-driven control plane optimized for scale, churn and high-availability. Automation-savvy DevOps teams will be able to speed the creation of thousands of new containers per minute and support hundreds of thousands of total simultaneous workloads. The controller will be released as an open source project to help encourage broad input, testing and adoption from customers, partners and the community at large. The technology will also incorporate Project Lightwave, which provides enterprise-grade trust and security for containers.
• VMware Photon Machine - This technology will include a new ESX Microvisor based on the proven core of VMware ESXi. It also includes Project Photon OS, a lightweight Linux operating system for containerized applications and optimized for VMware environments.

http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-newsfeed/VMware-Previews-vSphere-Integrated-Containers-and-Photon-Platform-to-Accelerate-Cloud-Native-Apps-in-the-Enterprise/1984726#sthash.SkYqjpM5.dpuf

Read More

Federal Aviation Administration to Migrate to Hybrid Cloud on AWS and Azure

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) awarded a contract valued at $108 million to CSC to consolidate data centers and migrate FAA data and systems to a hybrid cloud environment. The CSC team includes Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, as well as other strategic business partners.

Under the contract, the team will use the CSC Agility Platform cloud management tool to orchestrate efficient cloud deployment while leveraging alliance partners for data and cloud services.

The contract could be extended, with the potential to reach $1 billion in value over 10 years.

“CSC and our alliance partners are demonstrating the unique value that we as a team can bring to deliver an innovative, next-gen IT cloud solution that drives the FAA’s mission forward,” said Mike Lawrie, CSC’s president and chief executive officer. “By coming together as we have, we are in a unique position to help meet the agency’s operational and budgetary challenges over the life of the program.”

“Government adoption of cloud computing for mission applications is accelerating rapidly, and we are pleased to help FAA’s transition to the cloud,” said Teresa Carlson, vice president of Worldwide Public Sector, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “With AWS’s security and compliance standards – like FedRAMP, ITAR and SRG – CSC will be able to rapidly enable FAA to realize the benefits of agility, cost savings, and flexibility.”

“Microsoft is excited to continue working under the leadership of the FAA and CSC to deliver a secure, cost-effective and intelligent cloud with our FedRAMP JAB-approved Microsoft Azure,” said Greg Myers, vice president of Microsoft Federal. “This builds nicely on our collective success in moving the FAA to the cloud on the productivity side with Office 365. As the agency now moves to a hybrid cloud environment and consolidates its data centers, Microsoft’s Azure will work across applications, software, operating systems, and data to ensure success in support of the FAA’s mission of providing the safest, most efficient aerospace system in the world.”

http://www.csc.com/newsroom/press_releases/133565-csc_team_wins_federal_aviation_administration_cloud_services_contract_valued_at_more_than_108_million

Read More

Avi Enhances its Software Load-balancer with Security Features

Avi Networks, which offers a software-defined application delivery controller (ADC), introduced a new Continuous Security Insights (CSI) Module that help enterprises evaluate their security posture and quickly mitigate application threats and attacks – in real-time.

Avi said its CSI module is able to collect and analyze hundreds of telemetry data points at its strategic point-of-entry into the network.  This intelligence enables the ADC to make changes in traffic delivery. The recent POODLE SSL attack is an example of how this capability could be implemented. The POODLE SSL attack exploited vulnerabilities in the many Internet-based systems still running SSL 3.0 encryption protocol. While the solution was relatively simple – reconfigure all systems to turn off SSL 3.0 – network admins had no way of understanding the full impact of this network-wide reconfiguration, including possibly damaging end-user experiences on websites and other public-facing apps.

Key functionality of the Avi Continuous Security Insights (CSI) solution:

• Inspect: Constantly analyzes security configurations and user-to-application traffic to detect vulnerabilities, attacks and anomalies. 
• Inform: Notifies admins about the real-time security posture via alerts, logs and simple to understand metrics such as a SSL Score, DDoS Score, Security Insight and overall application health score.
• Mitigate: Takes proactive measures against anomalous behavior ranging from simple penalties for spurious transactions to traffic rate-limiting or blocking users for more serious threats.  

The Avi ADC v15.2 software is currently in pilot trials at several large financial services and e-commerce companies as well as a number of cloud service providers.

“Network administrators who cannot understand the current state of their systems cannot secure them,” said Dhritiman Dasgupta, VP of Marketing, Avi Networks. “For most enterprises today, we believe that a healthy security profile is not just a nice-to-have but is mandatory for guaranteeing the health of the overall application experience for today’s end users.”

http://www.avinetworks.com

Read More

ZTE's Revenue of Profits Rise in First Half of 2015

ZTE reported operating revenue of RMB 45.9 billion for the first six months of 2015, up 22% over the first half of 2014, primarily reflecting growth in operating revenue for 3G system equipment in the domestic market, FDD-LTE system equipment in the domestic and international markets, TD-LTE system equipment in the international market, wireline switch and access systems in the domestic market and optical communication systems in the domestic market.

Operating profit was RMB 76 million for the period compared to a loss of RMB 210 million for the same period last year.

ZTE said China's domestic telecommunications industry is undergoing a stage of transition in both network and business model. During the first half of 2015, domestic carriers’ investment in equipment remained stable given the progress of 4G network deployment and expedited broadband development as a matter of national policy.  During the reporting period, the Group reported operating revenue of RMB 24.361 billion from the domestic market, accounting for 53.08% of the Group’s operating revenue.

http://wwwen.zte.com.cn/en/about/investor_relations/announcement/201508/P020150826636431955004.pdf

Read More

Cisco to Optimize for iOS Enterprise Users

Apple and Cisco announced a partnership to optimize Cisco networks for iOS devices and apps, integrating iPhone with Cisco enterprise environments and providing unique collaboration on iPhone and iPad.  Specifically, Cisco will deliver experiences specially optimized for iOS across mobile, cloud, and premises-based collaboration tools such as Cisco Spark, Cisco Telepresence and Cisco WebEx in order to deliver seamless team collaboration and reinvent the meeting experience.

“Ninety-five percent of companies in the Fortune 500 count on Cisco Collaboration and Cisco networks to help their teams be more productive,” said Cisco Executive Chairman John Chambers. “Through this engineering and go-to-market partnership, we’re offering our joint customers the ability to seamlessly extend that awesome Cisco environment to their favorite iOS devices. Together, we’re going to help teams achieve higher levels of productivity and effectiveness.”

http://www.cisco.com
http://www.apple.com

Read More

ZTE Signs Partnership Deal with Telefonica

ZTE announced a global partnership with Telefonica.

ZTE supplies a range of solutions to Telefonica, including gigabit passive optical network (GPON) technology, optical mesh network / large-capacity transmission solutions, Voice over Long Term Evolution (VoLTE), microwave transmission, etc..

http://www.zte.com.cn

Read More

T-Mobile US Stops Unlimited LTE Tethering

T-Mobile is taking action to stop users who signed up for an unlimited 4G LTE plan for their smartphones and then use it heavily with tethering.  Although T-Mobile says it supports a limited amount of data usage for tethering use, the company says some users have abused the plan by consuming up to 2 TB of data per month.

In online posting, John Legere, CEO of T-Mobile, describes these users as "hackers" intent on stealing data from T-Mobile.

http://newsroom.t-mobile.com/issues-insights-blog/stopping-network-abusers.htm

Read More

NETGEAR Unveils 28-port 10-Gigabit Switch

NETGEAR unveiled its ProSAFE 28-port 10-Gigabit Smart Managed Switch - the industry's first 28-port (24 copper, 4 SFP+) 10-Gigabit Smart Managed Switch purposely designed for small to mid-sized organizations (SMBs) with 10GBASE-T connectivity and Advanced L2+/Layer 3 Lite features.

Key Features:

• Advanced VLAN features such as Protocol-based VLAN, MAC-based VLAN and 802.1x Guest VLAN
• Advanced QoS (Quality of Service) with L2/L3/L4 awareness and 8 priority queues including Q-in-Q
• Static Routing (both IPv4 and IPv6)
• Private VLAN
• Dynamic VLAN assignment
• IGMP and MLD snooping
• Advanced Security
• IPv6 support for management, QoS and ACL
• Easy-to-use web-based management GUI or PC-based Smart Control Center application for multi-switch deployment

It has an MSRP in the U.S. of $4,624.00, although final pricing for end customers may vary depending on the reseller and bundled offerings.

http://www.netgear.com

Read More