AT&T Extends its Switched Ethernet via U-verse

AT&T is extending the reach of its Switched Ethernet service via its U-verse access network. This effectively doubles the reachable footprint of AT&T's local Ethernet service.

“We’re delivering advanced and efficient Ethernet services to our customers,” said Rick Hubbard, senior vice president, Business Product Management, AT&T Mobile and Business Solutions. “In 2015, we expanded our Ethernet services significantly. We added major markets, gave customers more flexibility and introduced new lightning-fast speeds. This new feature is a large part of our strategy to move to an all Ethernet and Internet protocol (IP) network.  We’re giving our customers the benefits of Ethernet they’ve been asking for.”

The new Ethernet capability will support almost any network topology — from basic site-to-site connections to a fully meshed any-to-any configuration.  It also supports VLANs (Virtual Local Area Networks) so that customers can control how their data flows between sites.

An automated Ethernet Qualification Tool (EQT) is available online.

https://www.att.com/ebiz/ebizqual/#/
http://www.business.att.com/enterprise/Family/network-services/ethernet/

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Puppet Labs Automates Application Orchestration

Puppet Labs introduced a new tool to help organizations orchestrate the deployment and management of business-critical infrastructure and applications.

The new Puppet Application Orchestration enables customers to model distributed applications and application stacks as Puppet code so they can quickly and reliably roll out new infrastructure and applications.  The tool, which uses the core Puppet platform, accounts for the dependencies between different services and systems that make up an application or application stack.

“Over the past several years, Puppet’s model-based approach has become the standard for modern infrastructure management. Puppet Application Orchestration is a direct extension of our existing strengths and technologies, adding new tools and capabilities that give our customers a full management stack, from bare metal all the way up to modern distributed applications,” said Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of Puppet Labs.

https://puppetlabs.com/introducing-puppet-application-orchestration

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NETGEAR Nighthawk X8 Wi-Fi Home Router Hits 5.3 Gbps

NETGEAR introduced its latests Nighthawk X8 AC5300 Smart WiFi Router (R8500) delivers a blistering combined speed of 5.3Gbps (1000 Mbps + 2166 Mbps +2166 Mbps) using Wave 2 803.11ac technology-- a new record for a home router.

The unit is powered by a 1.4GHz dual core processor, patent-pending Active Antennas to boost range, and three Wi-Fi bands with quad-streams.  It also uses 1024 QAM modulation and and MU-MIMO technology. It boasts a total of eight antennas, four internal and four patent-pending external Active Antennas. Unlike typical antennas that simply relay the Wi-Fi signal received from your devices to the router, Active Antennas amplify the Wi-Fi signal within the external antenna itself. This compensates for the low power of Wi-Fi devices to provide a more symmetrical connection for both receiving and sending wireless signals, which contributes to improving overall range and speed at long range.

In addition, the Nighthawk X8 offers a unique Dynamic QoS prioritization capability that recognizes each individual application and the device it is running on, and prioritizes their network traffic accordingly. The unit also provides a port aggregation capability (also known as “port trunking”). The router has six Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports, the largest number available on a mainstream home router. Two of these ports can be aggregated to double the gigabit connection to a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device — such as all current NETGEAR ReadyNAS models with two Ethernet ports — to support 4K HD streaming, faster backups, and faster file transfers.

It has an MSRP of $400.

http://www.netgear.com/R8500

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Google Cloud Platform Adds South Carolina Data Center

Google activated a new us-east1 region in South Carolina for Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage, and Google Cloud SQL.  Google App Engine will be coming soon.

Google said the addition of the South Carolina location gives customers across North America the capability to build multi-region disaster recovery plans for their applications running on Google Cloud Platform.

http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2015/10/Bringing-Google-Cloud-Platform-closer-to-more-people-and-businesses.html

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Verizon Launches Go90 - a Mobile First, Social Entertainment Platform

Verizon launched Go90 - a mobile first, social entertainment platform featuring a variety of fresh video content and available to anyone with the app in the U.S., regardless of wireless carrier.

Go90 features content across comedy, music, gaming, lifestyle, sports, news and entertainment including 15 of the 30 most-viewed network shows and 9 of the 15 most-viewed shows on the web.

At launch, there are over 8,000 titles available to go90 users as well as over 35 exclusive original series, which will nearly double by year’s end. The app is available from the App Store and Google Play.

http://www.verizon.com/about/news/your-entertainment-pleasure-we-present-go90

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T-Mobile Data Breach Impacts 15 Million People

T-Mobile US confirmed that a data breach suffered by Experian, which processes credit applications, has exposed the financial records of approximately 15 million people.

The hackers apparently were able to steal names, addresses, birthdates and credit worthiness assessments for anyone applying for T-Mobile service or device financing between 01-September-2013 and 16-September-2015.

http://www.t-mobile.com/landing/experian-data-breach

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6WIND Announces Benchmark Results

6WIND announced benchmark results by SDxCentral, which investigated the performance of 6WIND’s Speed Series family on x86 commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) server platforms.

The Speed Series products include Turbo Appliances with 6WIND Turbo Router and 6WIND Turbo IPsec, which are software appliances deployed in bare metal environments and as virtual machines (VMs), and 6WIND Virtual Accelerator, which provides packet processing acceleration for virtual network infrastructures including Open vSwitch (OVS) and Linux bridging.

Highlights of the benchmarks include:

6WIND Turbo Router

Bare Metal:

• 12×10 Gbps wire speed L3 forwarding performance is achieved in both packets per second with small packet sizes and gigabits 
• More than 50 times Linux performance in the same conditions 

Virtual Machine:

• More than 80 Gbps IMIX performance Linux remains below 10 Gbps

6WIND Turbo IPsec

Bare Metal:

• 70 Gbps of IPsec data plane processing, which is the maximum capacity of the traffic generator and more than 5x Linux
• 240,000 concurrent tunnels, which is 8x Linux
• Tunnel setup rate of 12,000 tunnels/second, which is 48x Linux

Virtual Machine:

• More than 50 Gbps IMIX performance
• Linux is barely above 1 Gbps

http://www.6wind.com/

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