Thursday, September 24, 2015

ARIN Issues Last IPv4 Address from Free Pool -- All Gone

The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the nonprofit association that manages the distribution of Internet number resources for its region, has issued the final IPv4 addresses in its free pool.

“The exhaustion of the free IPv4 pool was inevitable given the Internet’s exponential growth,” said John Curran, ARIN’s President and CEO. “Luckily, we prepared for this eventuality with IPv6, which contains enough address space to sustain the Internet for generations. While ARIN will continue to process IPv4 requests through its wait list and the existing transfer market, organizations should be prepared to help usher in the next phase of the Internet by deploying IPv6 as soon as possible.”

“When we designed the Internet 40 years ago, we did some calculations and estimated that 4.3 billion terminations ought to be enough for an experiment. Well, the experiment escaped the lab,” said Vint Cerf, ARIN’s Board Chairman and renowned Internet pioneer. “The Internet is no longer an experiment; it is the lifeblood of commerce, communication and innovation. It needs room to grow and that can only be achieved through the deployment of IPv6 address space.”

ARIN has established a Waiting List for Unmet IPv4 Requests and will process these if it receives any IPv4 addresses from IANA, or when any are recovers from revocations or returns from organizations.  ARIN also noted that organizations looking to add or transfer IPv4 space should be aware that the exhaustion of the ARIN free pool does trigger important changes in ARIN’s Specified Transfer Policy and Inter-RIR Transfer Policy. This change specifically impacts those organizations that have been the source entity in a specific IP address space transfer within the last twelve months. Effective today, because exhaustion of the ARIN IPv4 free pool has occurred for the first time, there is no longer a restriction on how often organizations may request transfers to specified recipients.

The attention now shifts to IPv4’s successor, IPv6.

https://www.arin.net/announcements/2015/20150924.html

NIST Researchers Teleport Quantum State over 100km of Fiber

Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and NTT have transferred quantum information carried in light particles over 100 km of optical fiber, four times farther than the previous record. The breakthrough could lead to quantum repeaters, opening the door to quantum communications over long distances of fiber.

Previously, quantum state has been teleported over free space, but transfers over optical have been limited because fewer than 1% of photons could be detected through 100km of fiber.

http://www.nist.gov/pml/how-to-teleport-quantum-information.cfm





Researchers at NTT Envision Quantum Repeaters in Future Photonic Networks


Researchers at Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) and the University of Toronto are proposing all-photonic quantum repeaters for long-distance quantum communication.  If achieved, such devices would disprove the necessity of matter quantum memories in long distance quantum communications, which is seen by many as the ultimate future of optical communications.

In a paper published this week by the journal Nature Communications, the researchers said their all-photonic scheme paves a completely new route towards long-distance quantum communication based only on optical devices. Compared to matter quantum memories, this approach eliminates the quantum interface between matter and photons.  The design is based on existing optical technology, such as linear optical elements, single-photon sources, photon detectors and an active feed-forward technique.

http://www.ntt.co.jp/news2015/1504e/150415a.html

Dell Updates its Switching Portfolio

Dell rolled out a number of big expansions to its networking portfolio.  For the campus, Dell introduced a new unified-campus architecture powered by the new Dell Networking C9010 Network Director switch and companion C1048P Rapid Access Node. In the data center, Dell debuted the Dell Networking S6100-ON, combining multi-rate connectivity, modularity and open networking.

"At Dell, we’re taking a holistic, end-to-end approach to networking from connecting server storage and workloads together in the data center to connecting desktops and mobile devices in the campus," said Tom Burns, vice president and general manager, Dell Networking and Enterprise Infrastructure. "We’re excited about these new products and capabilities and the new levels of simplicity and flexibility to help our customers become future ready."

Some highlights:

  • Dell Networking C9010 Network Director and C1048P Rapid Access Nodes -- Dell's new unified-campus architecture provides a single management view for the entire campus from access to core, enabling a single point of control for quality of service, policy provisioning and software upgrades, as well as for programming software-defined attributes. The new Dell Networking C9010 Network Director is a next-generation multi-rate capable modular switch and is the first platform based on the new Dell campus network architecture. It delivers optimum scalability for up to 4,000 virtual ports managed centrally, a lifetime of flexibility with support for 10 and 40 gigabit Ethernet (GbE) today, and a tool-free upgrade to 100GbE in the future to meet the growing bandwidth requirements of a diverse campus of end-users and end-points. For initial deployments, the C9010 can be deployed as a traditional campus switching platform without the Dell Networking C1048P Rapid Access Node, serving to aggregate legacy switching platforms in wiring closets.

    The new Dell C1048P Rapid Access Node extends the capabilities of the C9010 Network Director by providing enhanced power over Ethernet well as user access and connectivity back to the C9010. The C1048P can be deployed either stand-alone or in a stacked configuration.
  • Dell Networking S6100-ON Multi-Rate Modular In-Rack Switch -- this data center switch combines multi-rate connectivity with chassis-level modularity and open networking. Multiple expansion modules support port speeds ranging from 10 – 100GbE with both QSFP28 and CXP port choices.


http://www.dell.com


New Hibernia Express Cable Timed at Record 58.95ms Latency for NY-London

The new Hibernia Express transatlantic cable is delivering an actual tested latency of better than 58.95ms (milliseconds) from New York to London, which is faster by more than half a millisecond off the original projected speed.

Hibernia Networks said its new undersea cable has undergone rigorous testing over the past two weeks. Testing parameters included power stability, spectral efficiency and latency. The results confirmed the latency on Hibernia Express from LD4 in Slough, England to NY4 in Secaucus, New Jersey to be under 58.95ms.

“Hibernia Networks is excited to announce that we not only have built the lowest latency transatlantic link connecting New York to London, but have also exceeded our original design goals with a tested latency of sub-58.95 milliseconds,” states Bjarni Thorvardarson, CEO of Hibernia Networks. ”Our team, along with our key partner, TE SubCom, has worked tirelessly to ensure the Hibernia Express cable system provides our customers with unmatched capabilities. The test results confirm that we are able to provide the lowest latency, highest capacity solutions to support the business objectives of our customers.”

http://www.hibernianetworks.com/hibernia_express


  • Hibernia Express utilizes a 6-fiber-pair submarine cable, with a portion of the fibers optimized for lowest latency and a portion optimized for 100X100 Gpbs design capacity. The total cross-sectional design capacity of the cable will be over 53 Tbps. Hibernia Express will initially launch with 100 Gbps transmission capacity using TE SubCom’s C100 SLTE platform. Hibernia Express follows the most direct route between the UK and North America, promising to reduce latency by at least 5 milliseconds over existing cables.

California's CENIC Wins Grant to Expand Pacific Wave Research Net

The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC), along with the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP) as a sub awardee and coauthor of the proposal, has been awarded a grant of nearly $3.5 million from the National Science Foundation’s International Research Network Connections (IRNC) program to expand the Pacific Wave Software Defined Exchange (SDX) over a five-year period.

The grant enables the expansion of U.S.-Asia scientific research network collaboration.

The Pacific Wave SDX, which will be deployed in Seattle, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, is an integral component of the international effort to interconnect research and education networks using Software Defined Networking (SDN). The Pacific Wave SDX joins several other IRNC awardees to support research, development and experimental deployment of multi-domain SDXs and will serve as an innovation platform for next generation networking, including enhancing connectivity to campus and wide-area “Science DMZ” infrastructures like the Pacific Research Platform (PRP), which enables researchers to move data between labs and scientific instruments to collaborators’ sites, supercomputer centers, and data-repositories without performance degradation.

“California’s research universities, along with more than 200 other research institutions across the U.S., will benefit from these enhanced capacities, enabling them to access scientific instruments and exchange data with their research collaborators in the Asia-Pacific Region,” said CENIC President & CEO Louis Fox, who is also principal investigator on this IRNC grant. “We look forward to working with other IRNC awardees, the NSF, and our Asia-Pacific colleagues as we continue to develop this critical infrastructure for international scientific research.”

http://www.cenic.org

Pacific Wave Adds 40G TransPacific Capacity

Pacific Wave has upgraded its U.S. West Coast peering exchange by adding a second 40 Gbps connection to Australia and New Zealand. The link goes from Los Angeles through the Big Island of Hawaii and on to Australia. It complements an exisitng 40 Gbps link from Seattle through Oahu to Australia.

Pacific Wave is a state-of-the-art international peering exchange designed to serve research and education networks throughout the Pacific Rim and beyond and features connection points at three US West Coast locations: the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Seattle. It is a joint project between the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) and the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP) with support from the University of Southern California and the University of Washington.

http://www.pacificwave.net

IBM Opens APIs for Extending Watson's Cognitive Capabilities

IBM is releasing a wide set of APIs for extending the language recognition, speech and vision capabilities of Watson. The cognitive APIs will help third-party developers in creating products, services and applications embedded with Watson.

New capabilities, offered through the Watson Developer Cloud, include advanced language, speech, and vision services, and developer tools. The company said Watson has evolved from one API and a limited set of application-specific deep Q&A capabilities two years ago, to more than 25 APIs powered by over 50 technologies now. New speech capabilities include Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.

IBM also announced the opening a new Watson development hub in San Francisco, expanding on its NYC headquarters.

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/47715.wss

Internap Teams with Akamai for Cloud Security

Internap and Akamai Technologies announced an alliance to provide customers with Internap’s performance-optimized cloud, data center and network services combined with Akamai’s cloud security and data center protection services.

Internap will offer Akamai Cloud Security solutions to organizations in security-conscious industries – including financial services, healthcare and automotive – that require the infrastructure reliability, availability and scalability that Internap and Akamai jointly deliver. The alliance is expected to result in advanced web security solutions for organizations with performance-reliant applications and workloads, as well as more efficient access to both companies’ technologies.

“Organizations that demand optimal web and application performance simply can’t afford the potentially business-impacting outages and downtime associated with DDoS attacks,” said Michael Ruffolo, Internap’s president and CEO. “We believe this alliance is a logical and powerful combination that uniquely addresses this problem for our joint customers. Akamai will be our sole DDoS mitigation provider, bringing market-leading security capabilities to Internap’s state-of-the-art data center facilities and to our expertise in delivering high-performance cloud, colocation and networking services.”

http://www.internap.com
https://www.akamai.com/

Interoute Expands Fiber Routes in the Netherlands

Interoute has expanded its network in the Netherlands. Thea carrier is adding 43 route km of fiber to its Amsterdam city network, increasing network capacity by 21% in its Amsterdam city network. Part of this expansion includes the addition of 22 route km of cable between the Amsterdam Science Park and Amsterdam South-East areas of the city.  The current city network spans 230km of duct routes, and more than 275 route km of fibre optic cables, and is continuing to grow.

http://www.interoute.com