Thursday, June 30, 2016

Blueprint: LSO Hackathons Bring Open Standards, Open Source

Open standards and open source projects are both essential ingredients for advancing the cause of interoperable next-generation carrier networks. When a standards developing organization (SDO), like MEF, creates standards, those written documents themselves aren’t the end goal. Sure, the specifications look good on paper, but it takes a lot of work to turn those words and diagrams into hardware, software and services. And if there are any ambiguities...

IDC: Q1 Cloud Infrastructure Spending Grows 3.9% to $6.6 Billion

Sales of infrastructure products (server, storage, and Ethernet switch) for cloud IT, including public and private cloud, grew by 3.9% year over year to $6.6 billion in the first quarter of 2016 (1Q16) on slowed demand from the hyperscale public cloud sector, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker. "A slowdown in hyperscale public cloud infrastructure deployment demand negatively...

Faster Wi-Fi Wave 2 Approaches

The Wi-Fi Alliance is expanding its certification program to include "wave 2" features, including: MU-MIMO: Networks with MU-MIMO are capable of multitasking by sending data to multiple devices at once rather than one-at-a-time, improving overall network efficiency and throughput 160 MHz channels: Wi-Fi CERTIFIED ac increases the maximum channel bandwidth from 80 MHz channels to 160 MHz channels, potentially doubling transmission speeds Four spatial...

Xirrus Announces Cloud-Managed Wave 2 Portfolio

Xirrus announced new four-and eight-radio high density 802.11ac Wave 2 Wi-Fi access points (APs), which the company says can deliver up to eight times the Wave 2 capacity per AP compared to competitive solutions. The new four radio XD4 and eight radio XR high density Wave 2 solutions were built specifically for enterprises, educational institutions and large public venues face. Key features: Full spectrum of Wave 2 Wi-Fi features on four and...

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Transpacific FASTER Cable Enters Service with 60 Tbps Capacity

The world's highest capacity undersea cable system has entered commercial service -- six fiber pairs capable of delivering 60 Terabits per second (Tbps) of bandwidth across the Pacific. FASTER is a 9,000km trans-Pacific cable connecting Oregon and two landing sites in Japan (Chiba and Mie prefectures). The system has extended connections to major hubs on the West Coast of the U.S. covering Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Portland and Seattle....

O3b Beams "Fiber from the Sky" to Amazon

O3b Networks began delivering its "Fiber from the Sky" satellite service to Tefé, a city of 60,000 located in the interior of the Amazon, about 500km from the regional capital of Manaus. The announcement marks O3b's entrance into the Brazilian market. O3b provides high-performance connectivity to Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and government so that they enjoy a link via satellite with fiber optic quality...

Nokia Intros Cloud-based Diameter Engine

Nokia introduced a cloud-based Dynamic Diameter Engine (DDE) aimed at simplifying, scaling and securing control plane traffic in mobile and fixed networks. The platform is the first to incorporate Nokia's Agile Rules Technology (A.R.T.), which is backed by more than 150 patents. It can run on commercial off the shelf hardware but is designed to run in the Telco Cloud. It is integrated with Nokia's CloudBand portfolio that hosts, orchestrates, automates,...

Windstream Launches Cloud Connect

Windstream introduced its new Cloud Connect service for making it easier for companies to access the cloud and use it as a foundational element of their IT strategy. Windstream Cloud Connect benefits new and existing Ethernet, MPLS and Wave (optical) customers, by providing mission critical cloud connectivity through highly secure, performance-optimized virtual and dedicated private access to third party public and private cloud providers. Bandwidth...

Google's Project Zero Discloses Symantec Vulnerabilities

The Project Zero team at Google published details of multiple critical vulnerabilities in all platform editions of Symantec Endpoint Protection. The report said the "vulnerabilities are as bad as it gets", with the potentila for remote exploits corrupting kernel memory without requiring any user action. Symantec has responded by publishing a long list of security advisories. http://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2016/06/how-to-compromise-en...

Australia's Vocus to Acquire Nextgen

Vocus Communications agreed to acquire NextGen Group, including its North West Cable system and the planned Australia Singapore Cable. Vocus Communications, which is headquartered in Sydney, owns a significant fibre network across Australia and New Zealand. Vocus also owns and operates 18 data centers across Australia and New Zealand. The deal includes Nextgen’s 17,000km national fiber network, the almost‐completed subsea Port Hedland to Darwin...

Red Hat Insights Now Extends to Containers, OpenStack

Red Hat announced a number of enhancement to its analytics platform, including  risk assessment and remediation planning capabilities for virtualization hosts, containers, and OpenStack-based private clouds. Red Hat Insights provides highly scalable, prescriptive analytics across users’ hybrid IT infrastructure. It is delivered as a Software-as-a-Service offering and generates tailored remediation steps that can be fully automated. The newest...

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

GSMA: Over 2.5 Billion Mobile Subscribers in Asia-Pac

The number of mobile subscribers in the Asia Pacific region reached 2.5 billion at the end of last year and will grow to 3.1 billion by 2020, according to a new GSMA study published at GSMA Mobile World Congress Shanghai. Some highlights of the report: 62 per cent of the Asia Pacific population was subscribed to a mobile service in 2015 and this is forecast to rise to almost three-quarters of the population by 2020 as a further 600 million new...

AWS Launches Elastic File System

Amazon Web Services introduced a fully managed service to simplify the process of setting up and scaling file storage in the AWS Cloud. Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) can be used to create file systems that are accessible to multiple Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances via the Network File System (NFS) protocol. Amazon EFS can automatically scale without needing to provision storage or throughput, enabling file systems...

Open-NFP Opens Cloud-based Lab for SDN and NFV Apps

Open-NFP (Open Network Function Processing), an industry group focused on on research and development in datapath offloads and acceleration for SDN and NFV applications, will host a series of webinars focused on P4 programming techniques, applications and usage. The six session series runs from July 13 through September 21, 2016. Open-NFP also announced the creation of a cloud-based infrastructure for server hardware-accelerated P4-based application...

VMware's Yanbing Li on the Future of Software-defined Storage

Big changes are underway in the IT industry, with new architectures being defined for application delivery, new cloud models, and the rise of software-defined everything, says VMware's Yanbing Li, Senior VP and GM of Storage and Availability. In this video, she talks about software-defined storage, including hyper-converged software.  The future is about the explosive growth of data. See video: https://youtu.be/j2lFBKV4A4...

Cisco to Acquire Cloudlock for $293 Million

Cisco agreed to acquire CloudLock, a start-up focused on cloud security, for $293 million in cash and assumed equity awards. CloudLock specializes in cloud access security broker (CASB) technology that provides enterprises with visibility and analytics around user behavior and sensitive data in cloud services, including SaaS, IaaS and PaaS. The company is based in Waltham, Massachusetts. Cisco said the deal extends its Security Everywhere strategy,...

Brocade-Viavi Partner on Mobile Analytics

Viavi Solutions and Brocade are rolling out a joint solution that enables mobile operators to capture and analyze subscriber data to quickly resolve quality of experience (QoE) issues. Viavi’s xSIGHT Targeted Subscriber Search (TSS) leverages the Brocade Packet Broker and Brocade Session Director to filter and deliver targeted subscriber traffic so only the data required to resolve customer experience problems is forwarded to xSIGHT TSS. The joint...

SanDisk Pops 256GB MicroSD Cards

SanDisk introduced two 256 gigabyte (GB) microSD cards -- a high-performance 256GB SanDisk Extreme microSDXC UHS-I card – the fastest microSD card in its class, and the 256GB SanDisk Ultra microSDXC UHS-I card, Premium Edition, for mainstream consumers. “Our microSD cards are now at the center of many consumer devices, and we’re excited to not only raise the bar with the launch of the world’s fastest microSD card, but to also offer a family of...

Monday, June 27, 2016

OIF Approves Multi-Link Gearbox 3.0

The Optical Internetworking Forum has approved Multi-Link Gearbox (MLG) 3.0, an agreement that supports 100G links and allows independent 10GBASE-R signals to transit physical 20G and 40G lanes for higher bandwidth capability. The MLG 3.0 specifies a logic layer between the Ethernet MAC and PHY layer hardware that allows the data from multiple MACs to be aggregated onto higher speed data links.  This allows independent 10GBASE-R and 40GBASE-R...

3GPP Outlines Work Plan for 5G Specs

The 3GPP Technical Specifications Group outlined a detailed workplan for Release-15, the first release of 5G specifications. The plan includes a set of intermediate tasks and check-points for putting 3GPP in a position to make the next major round of workplan decisions when transitioning from the ongoing studies to the normative phase of the work in December 2016:- the start of SA2 normative work on Next Generation (NexGen) architecture and in...

Qualcomm Shows 5G Prototype in Sub-6GHz Band

Qualcomm unveiled a 5G New Radio (NR) prototype system and trial platform that operates in the sub-6 GHz spectrum bands and is being utilized to showcase the company’s innovative 5G designs to efficiently achieve multi-gigabit per second data rates and low latency. The 5G NR prototype system consists of both a base station and user equipment (UE), serving as a testbed for verifying 5G NR capabilities. It supports wide RF bandwidths over 100 MHz,...

Red Hat JBoss Targets Cloud-Native Apps

Red Hat released its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 7 (JBoss EAP), an open source Java EE 7 compliant application server, and introduced JBoss Core Services Collection, a set of technologies that provide customers with common and fundamental application components. Red Hat said these releases will help enterprises to transition to emerging architectures and programming paradigms that will require a lightweight, highly modular, cloud-native...

Quantum Random Number Generators for Better Encryption

Quantum random number generators could become the building blocks for effective encryption, according to the Cloud Security Alliance's Quantum-Safe Security (QSS) Working Group. A newly published whitepaper titled Quantum Random Number Generators looks at leveraging quantum mechanics in the real of cyber security as an improvement over today's software or hardware-based random number generators. https://downloads.cloudsecurityalliance.org/asse...

Sunday, June 26, 2016

Blueprint: Why SD-WAN Cannot Solve for the MPLS Conundrum

by Gur Shatz, Co-Founder and CTO, Cato Networks Software-defined infrastructure has firmly gained traction in public and private data centers and clouds, because of its game-changing nature: It has virtualized the server, giving it scalable capacity on demand at a fraction of the cost of its hardware counterpart. And what software-defined did for the server and storage markets, it is bound to do for the network, too. Initial advances in...