Juniper Brings 3X Boost and New Automation to MX Edge Routers

Juniper Networks rolled out a major upgrade for its MX Series 3D Universal Edge Routing portfolio, including new line cards and software features that triple throughput and enable network automation.

Some highlights:

• Three new MX Series line cards (MPC7, MPC8 and MPC9) powered by a new iteration of Juniper's programmable Trio silicon.  At the high-end, the 400 GbE-ready MPC9 provides an industry-leading 1.6 Tbps of throughput, enabling a single MX2020 to scale to 32 Tbps of throughput, enough to stream more than 2 million 4K videos simultaneously. The MPC7 doubles the performance and density of all currently installed MX240, MX480 and MX960 routers, providing customers with investment protection.
  
• Juniper Extension Toolkit (JET), which uses open APIs, yields new automation capabilities in Junos software. JET provides a programmatic interface to develop highly customized third-party applications, such as provisioning and self-healing capabilities. These applications can reside on or off the MX2010 or MX2020 to seamlessly interact with the network layer. Not limited to the MX Series, JET is available on all Juniper platforms that run Junos software. In addition, JET includes support for OpenConfig, a standardized, vendor-independent configuration and management capability with customizable YANG data models for flexible vendor integration.
  
• Junos Telemetry Interface: a high-frequency telemetry export function for optimizing network performance and fault management. Junos Telemetry Interface facilitates SDN/NFV migrations by synchronizing operational states to external controllers. Advanced analytics and real-time data correlation to deliver real-time reporting at scale are made possible through advanced technologies from companies like SevOne, a leading global provider of digital infrastructure management solutions. Junos Telemetry Interface are expected to be available in 1H 2016.

“You know you’re onto something when you have a platform that has continually outpaced Moore’s Law since the first MX shipped in 2006. As Juniper’s flagship edge routing platform, the MX Series is the market leader in feature availability, use case support, performance, reliability, scale, and now, with the addition of advanced Junos software features, we are extending our automation capabilities. In an industry that’s constantly touting the ‘new,’ it’s important to remember that customers are making significant technology investments with the expectation that it will continue to deliver ROI for many years. With the MX Series, we believe customers can invest with the confidence that the platform will exceed requirements for future network demands,” stated Jonathan Davidson, executive vice president and general manager, Juniper Development and Innovation.

Juniper noted that its MX series, which was first introduced in 2006, has been deployed by more than 90 percent of the 50 largest telecom companies.

http://www.juniper.net

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Coriant Unveils 1 RU Data Center Interconnect Platform

Coriant unveiled a stackable data center interconnect (DCI) platform packaging 3.2 terabits of capacity in a compact 1RU form factor.

The Coriant Groove G30 DCI Platform boasts up to six times higher system density and up to 70% better power efficiency than comparable offerings.  Coriant said its platform simplifies provisioning of 10G, 40G, and 100G Wide Area Network (WAN) cloud connectivity services in metro, regional, and long haul DCI applications while offering a pay-as-you-grow approach that enables the lowest startup costs, cost-effective scalability, and reduced equipment sparing costs. It supports dynamically adjustable modulation formats (16QAM, 8QAM, QPSK) to deliver cost-optimized optical reach in both metro and long haul applications

"Coriant is changing the game in data center interconnect with a breakthrough solution that helps cloud and data center operators deliver highly competitive and profitable services," said Paul Smelters, Executive Vice President, Product Management and Marketing, Coriant. "The Coriant Groove™ G30 DCI Platform builds upon our leadership in high-speed optics and ensures the best end-user cloud experience at the lowest operational cost."

The Coriant Groove G30 DCI Platform is currently entering customer trials. The product is planned for availability in Q2 2016.

http://www.coriant.com

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Open Container Initiative Cites Progress and Growing Membership

The Open Container Initiative (OCI), which was launched earlier this year with a mission to host an open source, technical community and build a vendor-neutral, portable and open specification and runtime for container-based solutions, cited a number of milestones and a growing membership base.

Founding members, including nine new companies committed to the OCI include: Amazon Web Services, Apcera, Apprenda, AT&T, ClusterHQ, Cisco, CoreOS, Datera, Dell, Docker, EMC, Fujitsu Limited, Goldman Sachs, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei, IBM, Infoblox, Intel, Joyent, Kismatic, Kyup, Mesosphere, Microsoft, Midokura, Nutanix, Odin, Oracle, Pivotal, Polyverse, Portworx, Rancher Labs, Red Hat, Resin.io, Scalock, Sysdig, SUSE, Twistlock, Twitter, Univa, Verizon Labs, VMware and Weaveworks.

Key points:

• The OCI follows an open governance model that guides the project’s technical roadmap, currently available on GitHub. 
• A Technical Developer Community (TDC) has been formed for the project and includes independent maintainers as well as maintainers from founding members including Docker, CoreOS, Google and Huawei. The TDC is responsible for maintaining the project and handling the releases of both the runtime and specification. 
• A Technical Oversight Board (TOB) will be appointed by the members of the OCI and the TDC. The TOB will work closely with the TDC to ensure cross-project consistencies and workflows. The governance model also includes a Trademark Board to oversee the development and use of the OCI’s trademarks and certifications. 
• As part of the original formation of the OCI in June of this year, Docker has donated both a draft specification for the base format and runtime and the code associated with a reference implementation of that specification. 
• Since the OCI’s inception, there have been two releases of the specification and six releases of runc. Docker will be integrating the latest version of runc into future releases of Docker and Cloud Foundry has implemented runc as part of its Garden Project. 

“Collaborative development continues to prove its ability to transform markets and advance emerging technologies. The OCI is a welcome addition to The Linux Foundation Collaborative Project ecosystem,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director, The Linux Foundation. “This level of industry support illustrates the prevalence of container technologies across IT infrastructures, much in the way we saw with virtualization 10 years ago. I’m very excited to support the work of this community.”

https://www.opencontainers.org
http://www.linuxfoundation.org

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IBM Acquires Clearleap for Cloud Video Platform

IBM has acquired Clearleap, a privately-held provider of cloud based video services based in Duluth, Georgia. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The Clearleap video platform is optimized for massive scalability, which enables clients to ramp up and support millions of concurrent users within seconds to support special events. Clearleap offers an open API framework that enables organizations to easily build video into applications and to adapt to specific business needs such as custom workflows and advanced analytics. The framework also enables access to key third-party applications and includes subscription and monetization services, and data centers from which to host digital video assets.

Clearleap said it serves leading brands such as HBO, A+E Networks, the NFL, BBC America, Sony Movie Channel, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon Communications, among others. The company operates data centers in Atlanta; Las Vegas; Frankfurt, Germany; and Amsterdam.

Clearleap will be integrated into the IBM Cloud platform to provide enterprises with a fast and easy way to manage, monetize and grow user video experiences and deliver them securely over the Web and mobile devices.

IBM said the acquisition is part of its broader strategy to help clients unlock the value of video as it grows in importance in business. IBM is advancing its cloud strategy to improve the performance and management of this powerful tool, and help clients extract insight from it.

“Clearleap joins IBM at a tipping point in the industry when visual information and visual communication are not just important to consumers, but are exploding across every industry," said Robert LeBlanc, Senior Vice President, IBM Cloud. "This comes together for a client when any content can be delivered quickly and economically to any device in the most natural way."

http://www.ibm.com

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IBM Wins U.S. Research Grant for Quantum Computing

The U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) program has award a multiyear research grant to IBM to advance the building blocks for a universal quantum computer.

The award is funded under the Logical Qubits (LogiQ) program of IARPA led by Dr. David Moehring. The LogiQ Program seeks to overcome the limitations of current quantum systems by building a logical qubit from a number of imperfect physical qubits.

IBM said its research team will continue to pursue the leading approach for building a universal quantum computer by using superconducting qubits. By encoding the superconducting qubits into a logical qubit, one should then be able to perform true quantum computation. These logical qubit designs will be foundational to future, more complex quantum computing systems.

“We are at a turning point where quantum computing is moving beyond theory and experimentation to include engineering and applications,” said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president and director, IBM Research. “Quantum computing promises to deliver exponentially more speed and power not achievable by today’s most powerful computers with the potential to impact business needs on a global scale. Investments and collaboration by government, industry and academia such as this IARPA program are necessary to help overcome some of the challenges towards building a universal quantum computer.”

http://www.ibm.com

IBM Announces Two Breakthroughs for Quantum Computing

Wednesday, April 29, 2015  IBM, Quantum  No comments

Researchers at IBM have demonstrated for the first time the ability to detect and measure the two types of quantum errors (bit-flip and phase-flip) that will occur in any real quantum computer. The researchers have also shown a new, square quantum bit circuit design that could scale to larger dimensions.

“Quantum computing could be potentially transformative, enabling us to solve problems that are impossible or impractical to solve today," said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president and director of IBM Research. “While quantum computers have traditionally been explored for cryptography, one area we find very compelling is the potential for practical quantum systems to solve problems in physics and quantum chemistry that are unsolvable today. This could have enormous potential in materials or drug design, opening up a new realm of applications.”

The research is published in the April 29 issue of the journal Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/ncomms7979).

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/46725.wss

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Pluribus Develops Virtualization-Centric Fabric

Pluribus Networks introduced its Virtualization-Centric Fabric (VCF), its SDN architectural approach based on proven approaches to networking, clustering, management and resiliency.

Pluribus VCF, which is available now as part of the company's family of Netvisor operating systems for open switches, is a completely virtualized networking fabric with macro segmentation capabilities and flow-level visibility.

Key attributes of Pluribus VCF include:

Virtualized networking fabric - the creation of a virtualized networking fabric at the hardware layer in dedicated switches, rather than consuming server-level resources. Each switch participates in the switching fabric as an equal partner, with complete visibility into the entire network and its end-points and flows.

Virtual fabric automation - maintains virtualized connectivity across the entire fabric, regardless of the number of switches or intermediaries involved.

Virtual Port (vPort) and Virtual Network (vNet) segmentation - at the macro and micro levels, enabling any source and destinations, physical or virtual, to be combined into virtual networks.

Virtual TAP - provides visibility to information that flows between any source and destination, physical or virtual. Virtual flow (vFlow) management, enabling sessions to be copied, re-directed or terminated via user or programmatic command.

Virtual fabric API - allows advanced applications to take advantage of the fabric as a single entity, using common programming interfaces including REST, Java, JSON and C++.

Fabric-wide Command Line Interface (CLI) - allowing interaction from any point to the entire fabric, making simple changes that span the infrastructure. This ensures compatibility with existing tools, processes and associated management best practices.

Relies on industry-standard TCP/IP protocols - providing full compatibility with existing networking infrastructures, and the use of existing spines and backbones during the transition to a more agile topology.

“In the data center networking space, Pluribus’ advanced fabric technology was exactly the approach we were looking for as we developed our hyperscaled Cloud solutions, like our recently announced HDS8000. Pluribus shares our vision of elastic capacity, with deep visibility and control,” said Howard Wu, Head of Product Line, Hyper Cloud Solution, Business Unit Cloud & IP, Ericsson. “Ericsson has a long standing expertise in optical networking and when combined with Pluribus’ VCF fabric architecture, our customers will realize a level of on-demand and subscription capabilities not available anywhere else.”

http://www.pluribusnetworks.com

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Pluribus Ports Open Netvisor Linux OS onto Dell’s ONIE compatible 10G/40G Switches

Thursday, June 11, 2015  #SDN, Dell, Open, Pluribus  No comments

Pluribus Networks announced an agreement to port its Open Netvisor Linux operating system onto Dell’s family of Open Networking (ONIE compatible) 10G/40G switches, including the S6000-ON and S4048-ON. Pluribus Open Netvisor Linux combines the benefits of Linux with a plug-and-play, application-aware fabric, advanced network flow programming and embedded analytics and visibility capabilities. It offers interoperability with the Layer 2 and IP/BGP...

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Blueprint: Ready to Evolve with SDN and Open Alternatives?

Sunday, March 29, 2015  #SDN, Blueprint, Pluribus  No comments

by Kumar Srikantan and Dave Ginsburg, Pluribus Networks One of the great promises of SDN is its programmability and interoperability.   Both are required if the evolution from legacy approaches in the way our networks are deployed and operated is to succeed. I’ll first look at programmability, the software and applications, and a great comparison is the evolution of the phone.  For those old enough to experience the old black handset,...

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Pluribus Races Ahead in SDN with $50 Million in New Funding

Wednesday, January 21, 2015  #SDN, Enterprise, Pluribus  No comments

Pluribus Networks, a start-up based in Palo Alto, California, announced $50 million in a Series D round of funding to advance its vision for unified computer, network, storage and virtualization driven by a single, open and programmable SDN platform. Pluribus features a distributed network hypervisor operating system that converges compute, network, storage and virtualization with an open, programmable approach. The platform brings full bare-metal...

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PMC Intros Smart Solutions for Data Center Storage Connectivity

PMC-Sierra introduced its HBA 1000 series of 12Gb/s SAS/SATA Host Bus Adapters, the first products in PMC’s new Smart family of solutions for high-performance cloud and enterprise server storage connectivity.

The HBA 1000 use field-proven Smart intellectual property (IP) from the most widely deployed server storage stack and PMC’s SmartIOC controller. It offers up to 16 internal or external SAS/SATA ports in a low-profile MD2 form factor.

A low-profile form factor and mini-SAS HD connectors allow the HBA 1000 to install into 2U servers for maximum native connectivity in the smallest footprint with no impediment to air flow. It is fully compatible with RAID adapters and expanders for complete scalability to store, retrieve, and manage data across SSDs, HDDs and tape drives. The HBA 1000 saturates the PCIe Gen 3 bus and delivers up to 1.3 million I/Os Per Second (IOPS) with SAS SSDs, utilizing 60 percent less power than competing HBAs. This lowers energy consumption and helps avoid the heat dissipation issues that are typically found in dense server environments. The HBA 1000 also delivers 2.5 times greater sequential throughput and 85 percent higher random read performance for cloud data centers deploying SATA drives for application acceleration, compared to a common configuration of up to 10 SATA SSDs attached directly to the server without an HBA.

“PMC’s new Smart Storage Solutions combine over 25 years of Adaptec compatibility with our high performance and resilient Smart IP that’s based on the industry’s most broadly deployed server stack, running on high-density PMC silicon,” said Pete Hazen, vice president of the Scalable Solutions Group at PMC. “The HBA 1000 products are the first offering in our Smart family, enabling storage connectivity at less than half the power of alternatives.”

http://www.pmc-sierra.com

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