Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Cisco: Global Cloud Traffic to Quadruple by 2019

Global cloud traffic will more than quadruple by the end of 2019, from 2.1 to 8.6 zettabytes (ZB), outpacing the growth of total global data center traffic, which is forecast to triple during the same time frame (from 3.4 to 10.4 ZB), according to the newly released Cisco Global Cloud Index.

Total global data center traffic, which is forecast to triple during the same time frame (from 3.4 to 10.4 ZB).

“The Global Cloud Index highlights the fact that cloud is moving well beyond a regional trend to becoming a mainstream solution globally, with cloud traffic expected to grow more than 30 percent in every worldwide region over the next five years,” said Doug Webster, vice president of service provider marketing, Cisco. “Enterprise and government organizations are moving from test cloud environments to trusting clouds with their mission-critical workloads. At the same time, consumers continue to expect on-demand, anytime access to their content and services nearly everywhere. This creates a tremendous opportunity for cloud operators, which will play an increasingly relevant role in the communications industry ecosystem.”

The report, which serves as a complement to the widely-cited Cisco Visual Networking Index, is generated by modeling and analysis of various primary and secondary sources.

Some key take-aways:

  • By 2019, 55 percent of the residential Internet population will use personal cloud storage (up from 42 percent in 2014). 
  • Annual global data center IP traffic is projected to reach 10.4 ZB by the end of 2019, up from 3.4 ZB
  • per year in 2014.
  • Annual global cloud traffic is projected to quadruple, reaching 8.6 ZB (719 EB per month) by the end of 2019, up from 2.1 ZB per year (176 EB per month) in 2014, and is expected to account for more than four-fifths (83 percent) of total data center traffic by 2019.
  • New technologies such as SDN and NFV are expected to streamline data center traffic flows such that the traffic volumes reaching the highest tier (core) of the data center may fall below 10.4 ZB per year and lower data center tiers could carry over 40 ZB of traffic per year.
  • By region, North America will have the highest cloud traffic volume (3.6 ZB) by 2019; followed by Asia Pacific (2.3 ZB) and Western Europe (1.5 ZB).
  • By region, North America will also have the highest data center traffic volume (4.5 ZB) by 2019; followed by Asia Pacific (2.7 ZB) and Western Europe (1.8 ZB). 
  • By 2019, 55 percent (more than 2 billion users) of the consumer Internet population will use personal cloud storage up from 42 percent (1.1 billion users) in 2014.
  • Globally, consumer cloud storage traffic per user will be 1.6 gigabytes per month by 2019, compared to 992 megabytes per month in 2014.
Data center virtualization
  • Overall data center workloads will more than double from 2014 to 2019; however, cloud workloads will more than triple over the same period.
  • The workload density (that is, workloads per physical server) for cloud data centers was 5.1 in 2014 and will grow to 8.4 by 2019. Comparatively, for traditional data centers, workload density was 2.0 in 2014 and will grow to 3.2 by 2019.
IoE-Generated Data
  • Globally, the data created by IoE connections will reach 507.5 zettabytes per year (42.3 zettabytes per month) by 2019, up from 134.5 zettabytes per year (11.2 ZB per month) in 2014.
  • A smart city of 1 million will generate 180 million gigabytes of data per day by 2019.
Private vs. Public Cloud Growth
Public cloud, in which services are rendered over a network that is open for public use, is growing faster than private cloud, which includes cloud infrastructure operated for a single organization, in terms of workloads. However, throughout the five-year forecast, private cloud will continue to outpace public cloud in its degree of virtualization.

The Cisco Cloud Index projects:
  • Public cloud workloads are going to grow at a 44-percent Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) from 2014 to 2019 and private cloud workloads will grow at a slower pace (16-percent CAGR) from
  • 2014 to 2019.
  • By 2019, 56 percent of the cloud workloads will be in public cloud data centers, up from 30 percent in 2014. (CAGR of 44 percent from 2014 to 2019.)
  • By 2019, 44 percent of the cloud workloads will be in private cloud data centers, down from 70 percent in 2014. (CAGR of 16 percent from 2014 to 2019.)

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/service-provider/global-cloud-index-gci/index.html

Verizon's ThingSpace Ties IoT with Data Analytics and Cloud

Verizon launched ThingSpace, a new IoT platform allowing developers to create applications, customers to manage devices, partners to market their services, and Verizon to launch integrated vertical solutions in an open environment.

Thingspace, which will leverage an existing ecosystem of more than 1,000 channel partners and revenue from the company's IoT and telematics business, promises to accelerate innovation and adoption of IoT devices.  At a press event in San Francisco, Verizon's executives said the industry is poised to move from millions to billions of connected devices and sensors in the coming years. To achieve this, Verizon is creating a new dedicated network core and new connectivity options for the next-generation of IoT use cases in verticals such as agriculture, healthcare, the consumer electronics evolution and the sharing economy.

Verizon has created a core IoT network within its LTE architecture optimized for Cat1 devices.  The company is also working with partners to embed LTE chipsets in a wide-range of connected machines to automate the provisioning process and make it faster to deploy IoT devices on its wide-area network

Significantly, Verizon will offer a big data analytics engine tied into its IoT deployments. ThingSpace will provide end-to-end management of IoT environments and related data, from device to network to application. The goal is to offer hundreds of APIs via the Thingspace environment. The data and analytics engine is being developed at the Verizon labs in Palo Alto, California.

“Continued innovation in smart cities, connected cars and wearables demonstrates that IoT is the future for how we will live and work,” said Mike Lanman, senior vice president Enterprise Products at Verizon. “Despite the exciting potential, IoT is still too complex, too fragmented, too expensive to connect and too hard to scale. Success in that future relies on a leader that can cut through the complexity and change the IoT model. That’s where Verizon comes in. With our experience in networks, devices, platforms and applications, we are taking a holistic approach to simplifying adoption to expand the IoT market from millions to billions of connections.”

http://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-simplifies-internet-things-accelerate-adoption

LTE IoT Chipset Targets 10 years of Battery Life

Ericsson, in partnership with AT&T and Altair Semiconductor, plan to demonstrate ultralow power consumption for IoT devices with a target battery operational life of ten years.

The demonstration of LTE Power Saving Mode on a commercial LTE Internet of Things (IoT) chipset is showcased at this week's GSMA Mobile 360 Series - North America event in Atlanta, Georgia.

The IoT device Altair's FourGee-1160 Cat 1 chipset featuring ultra-low power consumption. Power Saving Mode is an Ericsson Evolved Packet Core feature based on 3GPP (Release 12) for both GSM and LTE networks. The feature is able to dramatically extend IoT device battery life up to ten years or more for common use cases and traffic profiles.

Cameron Coursey, Vice President, Product Development, AT&T's IoT Organization, says: "IoT connectivity is essential to helping businesses stay tethered to their assets around the world. Whether a trucking company hauls expensive cargo across the country or a restaurant transports fresh food overseas, a long battery life on their connected devices can help them provide continuous service.  Businesses can save money and become more efficient with battery replacements every few years rather than very few months.

"Power Saving Mode running on a Cat 1 device enables new use cases and services so far impractical for LTE based IoT networks. We are very pleased to cooperate with ecosystem partners such as Ericsson and AT&T to demonstrate how these use cases are made possible today, based on existing and commercial device and infrastructure technology," stated Eran Eshed, Co-Founder and VP of Marketing and Business Development, Altair.

http://www.ericsson.com/news/1962068

IBM to Acquire Weather Company's B2B, Mobile, Cloud Properties

IBM plans to acquire The Weather Company’s B2B, mobile and cloud-based web properties, including WSI, weather.com, Weather Underground and The Weather Company brand. The Weather Company is currently owned by a consortium comprising the private equity firms The Blackstone Group and Bain Capital, and NBCUniversal.

The deal does not include the TV segment – The Weather Channel, which will license weather forecast data and analytics from IBM under a long-term contract.

IBM is seeking to integrate weather expertise into a new Watson IoT Unit and Watson IoT Cloud platform. The idea is to bring together IBM’s cognitive and analytics platform and The Weather Company’s dynamic cloud data platform, which powers the fourth most-used mobile app daily in the United States and handles 26 billion inquiries to its cloud-based services each day.

“The Weather Company’s extremely high-volume data platform, coupled with IBM’s global cloud and the advanced cognitive computing capabilities of Watson, will be unsurpassed in the Internet of Things, providing our clients significant competitive advantage as they link their business and sensor data with weather and other pertinent information in real time,” said John Kelly, senior vice president, IBM Solutions Portfolio and Research. “This powerful cloud platform will position IBM to arm entire industries with deep multimodal insights that will help enterprises gain clarity and take action from the oceans of data being generated around them.”

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/47952.wss

Telco Virtualized Network Function (VNF) Runs in Apcera's Containerized PaaS

Ericsson and AT&T demonstrated a Telco Virtualized Network Function (VNF) running in a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) environment that is integrated with OpenStack.

The demo at this week's OpenStack Summit in Tokyo showcased a fast and secure deployment of the virtualized Web Communication Gateway (vWCG) in Apcera's container-based, policy-driven PaaS environment that is fully integrated with OpenStack. The demo showed audio and video communications between multiple Web browsers utilizing the vWCG deployed in an OpenStack-integrated PaaS environment.

"AT&T and Ericsson have been working together on a prototype to demonstrate the deployment of a Telco VNF in an OpenStack-based PaaS environment. This specific prototype showcased a fast and secure deployment of the virtualized Web Communication Gateway (vWCG) - a Telco VNF - in Apcera's container-based policy-oriented PaaS environment that is fully integrated with OpenStack," stated Toby Ford, Assistant Vice President, IT Operations Strategic Realization, AT&T.

"Ericsson is leading the development of both Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and PaaS environments that are integrated with OpenStack for deploying VNFs on Telco networks. This demonstration showed how a complex VNF such as vWCG can be deployed using Apcera's PaaS technology with a few clicks of a mouse. This is an important step toward fast, secure and policy-integrated deployment of Telco VNFs on micro-services-based containers," stated Magnus Arildsson, Head of IaaS and PaaS, Ericsson.

"The partnership between Ericsson and Apcera has accelerated the development of a micro-services-based PaaS environment suitable for deploying Telco VNFs. This PoC paves the way for cost-effective, efficient deployment of VNFs and further collaboration with Telco operators to integrate carrier-grade requirements with Apcera's trusted cloud platform," stated Derek Collison, CEO and founder, Apcera.

http://www.ericsson.com/news/1962292

Google's Project Loon Announces Tests with Indonesian Operators

Three mobile network operators in Indonesia - Indosat, Telkomsel and XL Axiata - will begin testing Google's Project Loon for delivery balloon-powered Internet service.

Google estimates that about one in three of Indonesia's 250 million residents has Internet service.  Getting conventional service to Indonesia's 17,000 islands has proven difficult. Google said its Project Loon has the capability to transmit signal from areas that are connected to an Internet groundstation and bounce that signal across a constellation of balloons and back down to even the most remote islands.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+ProjectLoon/posts



SanDisk Software Delivers Flash Performance Boost for Virtualized Apps

SanDisk released a new version of its FlashSoft server-side, solid state caching software that delivers significant application performance acceleration gains, up to three to five times, especially in transactional and virtualized environments which often experience high I/O latency.

This newest version of its FlashSoft server-side is updated for Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Linux operating systems. It ensures that the most frequently accessed data (hot data) is serviced by server-side flash rather than slower back-end storage. This alleviates storage performance bottlenecks and accelerates applications by reducing response time, without mandating a large investment in hardware. Organizations running large database-driven applications on shared storage infrastructures typically experience high I/O latency as the primary constraint on application performance. FlashSoft software helps address the pain points of these enterprises by dramatically improving availability of hot data.

“This new offering exemplifies our dedication to transforming the data center through flash technology,” said Ravi Swaminathan, vice president and general manager, Systems and Software Solutions, SanDisk. “We recognize that efficient access to data for key applications is an essential requirement for our enterprise customers. The new version of FlashSoft software now offers customers even better application acceleration, regardless of the environment or scale.”

http://www.sandisk.com

Cisco to Acquire 1 Mainstream for Cloud Video

Cisco announced plans to acquire 1 Mainstream, a start-up offering a cloud-based video platform designed to quickly launch live and on-demand OTT video services to a variety of connected devices. Financial terms were not disclosed.

1 Mainstream, which is based in San Jose, California, helps service providers, broadcasters, media companies and emerging digital content companies deliver their media content to almost any connected media device, from Apple TV to Microsoft Xbox.  The company was founded in 2012 and is backed by DCM, Menlo Ventures, BskyB, and Luminari Capital.

Cisco said the acquisition complements its new ‘Infinite’ suite of cloud-powered video entertainment solutions designed to help service providers, broadcasters and media companies.

http://blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco-announces-intent-to-acquire-1mainstream


  • 1 Mainstream is headed by Rajeev Raman, CEO, who previously was Head of Product at Roku, CEO and Founder of mywaves, EIR at Menlo Ventures, as well as VP of Product and Engineering at Questra Corp.

F5 Posts Revenue of $501.3 Million, up 8% YoY

F5 Networks reported revenue of $501.3 million for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2015, up 4 percent from $483.6 million in the prior quarter and 8 percent from $465.3 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2014. For fiscal year 2015, revenue was $1.92 billion, up 11 percent from $1.73 billion last year.

GAAP net income for the fourth quarter was $97.0 million ($1.36 per diluted share) compared to $93.2 million ($1.29 per diluted share) in the third quarter of 2015 and $94.0 million ($1.26 per diluted share) in the fourth quarter a year ago.

For the first quarter of fiscal 2016, ending December 31, the company has set a revenue target of $480 million to $490 million with a GAAP earnings target of $1.13 to $1.16 per diluted share.

“Against the backdrop of a volatile macro-economy, F5 achieved a year of solid growth and profitability,” said Manny Rivelo, F5 president and chief executive officer. “With a Q4 revenue run-rate above two billion dollars, record annual revenue and gross margins contributed to a 17 percent increase in GAAP net income for the year. From a regional perspective, the United States and EMEA were the strongest performers, with solid year over year revenue growth in Q4, offset by weakness in Latin America, Canada and Japan.

“During the quarter, software sales continued to grow as a percentage of our product mix, reflecting incremental demand for our Virtual Editions and Good-Better-Best bundles and a steady ramp in sales of our Cloud-based Silverline SaaS offerings and our other subscription services. These trends validate our success in meeting the growing need for hybrid solutions that can be deployed and centrally managed on-premise and in the Cloud, and we expect to see them continue throughout fiscal 2016.

https://f5.com/about-us/investor-relations