CORD: Telcos Look to Adopt the Cloud Architecture

The CORD Project (Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter) is moving rapidly beyond the proof-of-concept and gaining support of major telcos and cloud providers such as AT&T, China Unicom, Google, Telefonica and Verizon, said Guru Parulkar, speaking at the inaugural CORD Summit, which was held 29-July-2016 at the Google campus in Silicon Valley.  CORD, which originated at ON.Lab, is now managed under The Linux Foundation.

The sold-out CORD Summit attracted about 200 participants from a diverse array of companies, ranging from silicon providers, system vendors, software developers, cloud companies and global carriers.

Some highlights:

• CORD has just released its first open reference implementation built on SDN, NFV, Cloud and open source platforms such as ONOS, Trellis, OpenStack, Docker and XOS.
  
• CORD will leverage merchant silicon, white boxes servers, bare metal switches and open source software platforms.
  
• XOS is the Everything-as-a-Service paradigm featuring service composition, multi-tenant services, and services with scalability and high availability;

• ONOS is the SDN OS for service providers also developed at ON.Lab. It targets scalability, performance, high availability, abstractions for apps and devices
  
• Trellis is open source SDN fabric on bare metal, combined with virtual network overlay, unified control of underlay and overlay and many applications;
  
• CORD is not only servers/switches but also network access boxes, including FTTH, LTE, etc.
  
• the CORD project is divided into the following domains: Mobile, Residential, and Enterprise.
  
• CORD introduces an SDN-enabled central office fabric with multiple levels of resiliency.
  
• CORD is using OpenStack and Docker to support a micro-services approach
  
• Google's Craig Barrett noted that his company has made considerable investments in SDN and NFV, and that it has huge network access project underway, such as Google Fiber in a growing number of U.S. cities, Wi-Fi/mobile access services, and even the futuristic Google Loon balloon Internet project. In India, Google's project with RailTel is already delivering Internet service to train commuters using a Wi-Fi + subscriber management system running in a cloud, not a traditional central office.
  
• AT&T's Al Blackburn spoke about this company's commitment to open source projects, including CORD and its ECOMP
  
• Newly announced CORD collaborators include Broadband Forum, Lime Micro (open source Software Defined Radio products), NTT East, Quortus and Telefonica. The five new collaborator companies also joined the ONOS Project
  
• Last week, CORD announced Google, Radisys and Samsung Electronics Co. as new members. Original backers include AT&T, China Unicom, Google, NTT Communications, SK Telecom, and Verizon, vendors Ciena, Cisco, Fujitsu, Intel, NEC, Nokia, etc.

“The CORD community continues to quickly grow and attract a diverse range of collaborators eager to work with us,” said Guru Parulkar, executive director of ON.Lab and board member of the CORD Project. “We are united in our focus on developing and building CORD into a mainstream solution for service providers as quickly as possible. Besides our existing service provider partners, more than 20 active collaborators and many other global service providers have also expressed interest in wanting to use CORD.”

http://www.opencord.org

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Broadband Forum and ON.Lab collaborate on CORD

The Broadband Forum agreed to collaborate with Open Networking Laboratory (ON.Lab) on the development of future broadband requirements and standards in close collaboration with open source projects in areas such as SDN, NFV, Cloud, and the CORD project.

Broadband Forum CEO Robin Mersh said: “Working with ON.Lab on CORD has been a very fruitful exercise and we’re pleased to formalize the arrangement with this MOU. The CORD project is an important example of the vast amount of work being done in this area and collaborating with projects like this one will be key for the Broadband Forum as we look to work more closely with open source projects to help our members feel the business benefits of SDN, NFV, Cloud and other new technologies.”

ON.Lab Executive Director Guru Parulkar said: “The Cloud CO as a concept is going to be a vital part of our work going forward and with it, operators will be able to quickly and efficiently deliver new technologies into the central office. With the help of the Broadband Forum, ON.Lab will continue to meet the challenges of re-imagining the telco CO as concepts and use cases emerge.”

http://www.broadband-forum.org
http://onlab.us

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Intel Puts its Rack Scale Design into Open Source

Intel announced the release of its Intel Rack Scale Architecture into open source code.

Intel describes its design as an industry-standard framework for disaggregating and dynamically managing compute, storage, and network resources for more efficient utilization of data center assets. The aim is to provice dynamic management of compute, memory, PCIe, and storage resources and the pooling of those resources for more efficient use of data center assets.

The architecture was discussed at last year's Intel Developer Forum (IDF 2015).

Intel Rack Scale Design is based upon and use the Redfish industry standard from DMTFOpens in a new window for modern and secure management of scalable platform hardware in the modern data center.

http://itpeernetwork.intel.com/intel-rack-scale-design-now-ready-open-source-development/

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SES Posts 1H16 Revenue of EUR 956.8 million, down 4.2%

SES S.A. reported revenue of EUR 956.8 million, down 4.2% as reported (-4.8% at constant FX), for the first six months of 2016. EBITDA came in at EUR 699.8 million, down 5.4% as reported (-5.8% at constant FX and same scope).

“SES’s first half results were in line with management’s expectations, while the appeal of SES’s differentiated and holistic solutions to major customers has continued to deliver substantial contract backlog and validates SES’s capability-driven strategy," stated Karim Michel Sabbagh, President and CEO.

A few operational highlights from the financial statement:

• HDTV channels up 12.1% (YOY) to 2,442 channels, improving HD penetration from 30.4% to 32.7%
• Of the 7,463 total TV channels broadcast by SES’s global fleet (30 June 2015: 7,164), 32.7% are broadcast in HD (30 June 2015: 30.4%). This represents a growth in HDTV channels of 12.1% (YOY) to 2,442 HDTV channels. 
• At 30 June 2016, 60% of SES’s total TV channels are broadcast in MPEG-4 (30 June 2015: 54%).
• At 30 June 2016, SES now broadcasts 16 commercial UHD TV channels (30 June 2015: none), including all regional variations. In January 2016, SES and Vivicast Media unveiled UHD-1 for audiences of North American cable operators and telcos. Then, in May 2016, SES announced an agreement for the world’s first Ultra HD sports channel, Viasat Ultra HD. 
• SES now supports a total of 57 global government customers. In January 2016, SES secured a new contract with the Kativik Regional Government, in Canada, to provide satellite services across the northern Quebec region. The contract, which began on 30 June 2016, includes 12 transponders on SES-2 to deliver critical C-band communications capabilities. The service will triple the bandwidth currently available across the region.
• As at 30 June 2016, the SES fleet had 1,550 available transponders (30 June 2015: 1,518 available transponders). The movement in available capacity includes the entry in commercial service of SES-9 (+53 incremental transponders) on 1 June 2016. This was partly offset by the ARSAT migration (-16 transponders) and reduction in available capacity on NSS-6 (-5 transponders) as a result of power degradation.

http://www.ses.com/

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Netflix Suffers Outage a Day After Amazon Prime

On Saturday, 30-July-2016, Netflix appeared to suffer a widespread outage affecting customer in many regions and lasting several hours.

On Twitter, Netflix said the issue appeared to be limited to web browsers.

The outage one day after Amazon experienced a widespread outage with its Amazon Prime video service.

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Amazon Prime Video Suffers Widespread Outage

Amazon Prime Video, which is the company's consumer video streaming service, suffered a widespread outage across the United States lasting several hours during peak viewing times on Friday evening.

As tracked by downdetector.com, the outage appeared to be extensive.

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Netrality Buys St. Louis Carrier Hotels from Digital Realty

Netrality Properties has acquire two fiber-rich, network-dense carrier hotels in St. Louis, Missouri: 210 N. Tucker, a 400,000-square-foot building, and 900 Walnut, a 100,000-square-foot building.  Additionally, the company has acquired a colocation business located within 210 N. Tucker from 365 Data Centers. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Netrality said these buildings are the most critical core interconnection sites in St. Louis, serving as a gateway to long haul fiber in the region.  Each facility offers carrier-neutral, building-owned and managed Meet-Me Rooms (MMRs).  210 N. Tucker and 900 Walnut offer customers access to over 43+ and 45+ network operators, respectively.

Netrality intends to integrate the operations of the two buildings along with the 365 Data Centers business under common management.

“The acquisition of this portfolio enhances Netrality’s growing national footprint,” said Gerald M. Marshall, Netrality’s President and Chief Executive Officer.  “St. Louis is a key interconnection point for carriers, service providers and enterprise customers in the region.  It was a pleasure working with Mike Darragh and the entire Digital Realty team on this transaction, and we look forward to building on their tremendous legacy in St. Louis.”

http://www.netralityproperties.com

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Red Hat Enhances Lifecycle Mgt Tool for Clouds and Containers

Red Hat released an updated version of its systems lifecycle management tool (Red Hat Satellite 6.2) for physical, virtual, and private and public cloud environments. In this release, Red Hat introduces remote execution and extends capabilities for container management and security.

Red Hat Satellite 6.2 offers several new features, including:

• Container host provisioning, supporting and managing Red Hat’s lightweight container operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host. Red Hat Satellite supports enterprises who are migrating to a lightweight container architecture, enabling them to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Hosts as a compute resource and directly deploy containers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host. In addition, Red Hat Satellite now supports the Open Container Initiative format and registries.
• Remote execution, enabling users to take multiple actions against a group of systems while automating workflows. With these new capabilities, users can reboot a system after a patch install, or conduct rolling upgrades across hundreds of systems with the same ease and consistency as updating a single system. New scheduling features and dashboards enhance interaction with systems under Red Hat Satellite management, bringing increased efficiency to its provisioning and discovery processes.
• Support for disconnected environments. Red Hat Satellite 6.2 provides the ability to synchronize and export content from one Red Hat Satellite server to another, a new feature designed for workloads that may require systems management solutions to run disconnected from the Internet for security purposes.
• Expanded capsule management. The Red Hat Satellite Capsule Server, which provides federated services especially helpful for scaling, can now provide deeper insight into the health of the capsule, including service run statues from the centralized Red Hat Satellite console. 
• More flexible provisioning via new discovery enhancements in Red Hat Satellite, helping to simplify the process of building systems and enable end users to more efficiently provision systems in secured environments where DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) and PXE (Preboot Execution Environment) may not be available.
• Enhanced migration services via the ability to import existing hosts running on any version of Red Hat Satellite 5 or 6 thanks to new feature scripts and automation capabilities. This bootstrap script automates the process of registering systems to Satellite, reducing the steps needed to add existing systems to Red Hat Satellite.

http://www.redhat.com

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CoreSite Appoints Paul Szurek as CEO, Succeeding Tom Ray

CoreSite Realty announced the appointment of Paul Szurek as President and CEO, effective September 10, 2016, replacing Tom Ray, who is retiring.

Szurek has been CoreSite’s lead independent director since September 2010. He has been Chief Financial Officer of Biltmore Farms, LLC, a residential and commercial real estate development and operating company, since 2003. Prior to joining Biltmore Farms, LLC, Mr. Szurek served as Chief Financial Officer of Security Capital Group Incorporated, a publicly traded real estate investment, development and operating company with extensive REIT engagement.

 “It has been a privilege to have served CoreSite over the past 15 years. We have a strong team in place, and now is the right time for new leadership to continue to build upon what we have assembled. I am humbled by what the team has accomplished, and honored to have worked alongside such talented and committed professionals. I look forward to supporting a seamless transition with Paul and am confident in leaving the Company in his hands and under his capable leadership, along with the deep bench of talent we have built over the years,” stated Tom Ray.

http://www.coresite.com

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Riverbed to Acquire Aternity for End User Experience Monitoring

Riverbed Technology agreed to acquire Aternity, a provider of End User Experience (EUE) and application performance monitoring solutions.

Aternity helps enterprises see the entire user experience for any application running on any device, providing a user-centric, application performance experience vantage point.  Aternity said it currently monitors more than 1.7 million mobile, virtual and desktop workforce endpoints.  The company is based in Westborough, MA.

Riverbed said the acquisition of the privately-held company will expand its SteelCentral performance monitoring solutions with an end user experience offering, and provide Riverbed customers and partners with an end-to-end visibility solution– spanning network, application and end user experience performance management.

“Aternity is another exciting and strategic acquisition for Riverbed. Their innovative end user experience monitoring offering perfectly complements and extends our SteelCentral solutions,” said Jerry M. Kennelly, Riverbed Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “With the increased use of mobile devices, virtual desktop environments and the cloud, the ability to manage end user experience has become more important and complex for IT organizations. With this acquisition, Riverbed and our partners are now uniquely positioned to provide CIOs and businesses with a complete view across networks, applications and end users, all in one solution.”

The acquisition also follows Riverbed’s acquisition of leading SD-WAN provider Ocedo in January 2016, which enabled Riverbed to get to market faster with application-defined SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network) solution SteelConnect in April. Additionally, Riverbed offers a comprehensive Application Performance Platform that delivers end-to-end visibility, optimization and control.

http://www.riverbed.com/solutions/end-user-experience-monitoring.html

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AWS Grew 58% YoY in Q2, Reaching $2.9 Billion in Sales

In its Q2 financial report, Amazon revealed that revenue for Amazon Web Services (AWS) reached $2.886 billion, up 58% year over year.  The division posted operating income of $718 million.

Some Q2 highlights for AWS:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that Salesforce selected AWS as its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider. For the first time, Salesforce will expand use of AWS to Salesforce’s core services — including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, App Cloud, Community Cloud, Analytics Cloud and more — for the company’s planned international infrastructure expansion.
• AWS announced the industry’s first fully-managed, cloud-based file system, Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS). Amazon EFS is a new service that makes it easy to set up and scale file storage in the AWS Cloud, allowing customers to create petabyte scale file systems with gigabytes of throughput that are accessible to multiple Amazon EC2 instances and can support thousands of concurrent client connections with consistent performance.
• AWS launched its Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region, the sixth AWS Region in Asia Pacific. With this launch, AWS provides 35 Availability Zones across 13 technology infrastructure regions globally.
• AWS announced the availability of X1 instances, a new Memory Optimized instance for Amazon EC2. X1 instances have 2 TB of memory — the most memory available in any cloud instance offered today by any cloud provider. Powered by the latest Intel processors and certified by SAP, X1 instances are ideal for running in-memory databases like SAP HANA, big data processing engines like Apache Spark or Presto, and high performance computing (HPC) workloads.
• AWS also announced that SAP business-critical applications are gaining momentum on AWS as customers including GE Oil & Gas, Kellogg’s, Brooks Brothers, Ferrara Candy Company, GPT Group, Hoya Corporation, Lionsgate, Macmillan Publishers India, RWE Czech Republic, and Bart & Associates Inc., are running SAP on AWS.
• AWS achieved the new FedRAMP High compliance certification, giving U.S. government agencies the ability to use the AWS Cloud for highly sensitive applications and workloads like patient records, financial data, and law enforcement data.

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2189731

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Google Races Forward with 21% YoY Revenue Growth

Alphabet Inc. posted Q2 revenue of $21.5 billion, up 21% over the same period last year. GAAP income came in at $5.968 billion, ahead of market expectations.

"Our terrific second quarter results, with 21% revenue growth year on year, and 25% on a constant currency basis reflect the successful investments we've made over many years in rapidly expanding areas such as mobile and video. We continue to invest responsibly in support of our many compelling opportunities,” said Ruth Porat, CFO of Alphabet.

During Q2, CAPEX was $2.123 billion, down from $2.515 billion for Q2 2015.

The company now has 66,575 employees.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVpWjo023cE

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Oracle to Acquire NetSuite for Enterprise Resource Planning

Oracle agreed to acquire NetSuite (NYSE: N), for $109.00 per share in cash, or approximately $9.3 billion.

NetSuite provides a suite of cloud-based financials / Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and omnichannel commerce software that runs the business of more than 30,000 companies, organizations, and subsidiaries in more than 100 countries. NetSuite (originally NetLedger) was founded in 1998 by Evan Goldberg and is based in San Mateo, California.

“We expect this acquisition to be immediately accretive to Oracle’s earnings on a non-GAAP basis in the first full fiscal year after closing,” said Safra Catz, Chief Executive Officer, Oracle.

“NetSuite has been working for 18 years to develop a single system for running a business in the cloud,” said Evan Goldberg, Founder, Chief Technology Officer and Chairman, NetSuite. “This combination is a winner for NetSuite’s customers, employees and partners.”

“NetSuite will benefit from Oracle’s global scale and reach to accelerate the availability of our cloud solutions in more industries and more countries,” said Zach Nelson, Chief Executive Officer, NetSuite. “We are excited to join Oracle and accelerate our pace of innovation.”

The evaluation and negotiation of the transaction was led by a Special Committee of Oracle’s Board of Directors consisting solely of independent directors. The Special Committee unanimously approved the transaction on behalf of Oracle and its Board of Directors.

http://www.oracle.com/netsuite

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A10 Networks Hits Revenue of $57 Million, up 20% YoY

A10 Networks reported record Q2 2016 revenue of $57.1 million, up 20 percent year-over-year. On a GAAP basis, A10 Networks reported a net loss for the second quarter 2016 of $4.9 million, or $0.08 per share, compared with a net loss of $10.0 million, or $0.16 per share, in the second quarter of 2015.

• Enterprise revenue of $32.0 million, increased 16 percent year-over-year
• Product revenue of $38.8 million, up 16 percent year-over-year
• Cash and marketable securities increased to $113.7 million, up from $96.2 million at June 30, 2015

“We delivered record revenue as our high-end security and cloud-ready Thunder solutions continued to drive growth,” said Lee Chen, president and chief executive officer of A10 Networks. “We also significantly improved our bottom-line results and we believe we are on track to meet our financial goals for the year. In addition to our strong performance in the quarter, we took a strategic step to accelerate the A10 Harmony vision and expand our addressable market with the acquisition of Appcito. Appcito is a cloud-native subscription service that maximizes the agility and improves the visibility and security of enterprise applications deployed in the cloud. Appcito fits into our vision to become the most comprehensive secure application services company in the industry and helps customers become more secure and agile as they bridge traditional and cloud application environments.”

http://www.a10networks.com

Video: A10 Networks at a Glance

Tuesday, July 19, 2016    2 Comments

You may not have heard of A10 Networks since it is one of the best kept secrets in the industry, but the company is a major supplier of networking equipment to the video gaming industry, the financial industry, and even for some of the largest casinos in Las Vegas.

Gunter Reiss, VP of Strategic Alliances, A10 Networks, provides a two-minute overview of the 12-year old, Silicon Valley-based company, which has grown to roughly 5,000 customers worldwide. A10 Networks is known for its feature-rich, high-scalable, high-performance, application delivery controller that can be used for carrier-grade NAT, DDoS mitigation, SSL decryption visibility and as a converged firewall.

See video: https://youtu.be/EOtr45E43Mg

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Sprint Renews Portion of Managed Services Contract with Ericsson

Ericsson and Sprint announced a renewal of portions of the companies' 2009 managed services contract, which reaches its full term in September 2016. Financial terms were not disclosed and the companies did not reveal how large a portion of the contract has been renewed.

The companies did say that Ericsson will continue to be a key business partner for Sprint, providing some multi-vendor services that support the ongoing operations, development and transformation of Sprint's networks. Overall Network Service Assurance management of the network will be performed by Sprint.

Roger O'Hargan, Head of Network Services, Ericsson North America, says: "We are very proud of the work Ericsson has done to help Sprint achieve its business objectives over the past seven years. We look forward to continuing our partnership and helping Sprint deliver enhanced operational performance and achieve the cost advantages that can come through our managed services offerings."

Dr. John Saw, Sprint Chief Technology Officer, says: "Sprint's network is performing at best-ever levels, and we are proud of the progress we have made with Ericsson over the last seven years. Ericsson remains a valued strategic partner in supporting the Sprint network. As with any long-term managed services agreement, it is crucial that the relationship is regularly reviewed and adjustments made when necessary so that business strategies remain aligned."

http://www.ericsson.com
http://www.sprint.com

Sprint Awards 7-Year Network Mgt Deal to Ericsson

Wednesday, July 08, 2009  Service Providers  No Comments

Sprint awarded a seven-year network management outsourcing contract to Ericsson covering its CDMA, iDEN and wireline networks. Sprint said the deal enables it to focus on delivering a superior customer experience, innovative services and popular new devices while letting Ericsson handle the day-to-day operations of its network. Key points of the deal include:

• Sprint retains full ownership and control of its network assets, and solely owns network strategy and investment decisions.


• Customers will continue to work directly with Sprint employees as their primary contact, as Sprint retains full control of the customer experience, customer technical support and services review.


• Sprint retains technology and vendor selections.


• Ericsson assumes responsibility for the day-to-day services, provisioning and maintenance for the Sprint-owned CDMA, iDEN and wireline networks.
  
• Ericsson will optimize Sprint's multi-vendor inventory of assets such as spare parts and transmission equipment, and provide processes and tools for managing the national network platforms and operational support systems.
  
• The transferred employees will become part of Ericsson Services Inc., a wholly-owned Ericsson subsidiary based in Overland Park, KS, a move that retains jobs in the United States. No force reductions are currently contemplated as a result of this agreement.

The agreement, with an option for renewal, will result in payments for services valued at between $4.5 billion and $5 billion (USD) over the seven-year term of the contract. The transaction calls for about 6,000 Sprint employees to begin performing their network functions as Ericsson employees sometime in the 3rd quarter.

A new entity called Ericsson Services Inc. will be established in Overland Park, KS.

Sprint said it also foresees cost savings, better inventory management and increased network efficiencies from the deal. The cost savings will be reinvested in the network for better coverage. Expected cost savings were not specified in the announcement.
http://www.ericsson.com
http://www.sprint.com

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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/j2lFBKV4A4U

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Amdocs to Serve as Integrator for AT&T’s Open Source ECOMP

Amdocs will serve as integrator for telecom companies and cloud developers who want to use AT&T’s ECOMP platform to build their own software-centric network services.

ECOMP is the service orchestration system that powers the AT&T software-defined network (SDN). Earlier this month, AT&T confirmed that it is committed to releasing ECOMP into open source. Amdocs said it will help companies deploy that open source software into their own networks. ECOMP is a vital tool for service providers struggling to meet today’s network demands while preparing for an even greater load in the next few years from applications like virtual reality and augmented reality, 4K video and the Internet of Things.

“ECOMP is the engine of our software-centric network. And recently, we revealed our plan to build a global community around ECOMP to help service providers and developers meet the network demands of next-gen technologies,” said Chris Rice, VP of Advanced Technologies and Architecture at AT&T Labs. “Today, we’re excited to share that a few months back Amdocs became an early collaborator on ECOMP and will become an integrator for ECOMP in the industry. We believe ECOMP will set the standard for virtual network (VNF) automation, and Amdocs will support the growth of the platform as more and more service providers begin using it.”

“Achieving better service agility is at the heart of this initiative and is one of the key business imperatives. Using carrier-optimized cloud infrastructure to separate hardware and software layers will increase the value of the network by allowing the rapid onboarding of new services to our customers,” said Anthony Goonetilleke, division president at Amdocs. “Together, we will deliver the ECOMP platform to the industry to simplify network environments and drive operational and capital savings, while continuing to accelerate service innovation and network value through agile software powered networks.”

http://www.amdocs.com/news/pages/att-and-amdocs-collaborate-to-deliver-open-software-solutions-to-accelerate-nfv.aspx

AT&T Commits its ECOMP Service Orchestrator to Open Source

Wednesday, July 13, 2016  #SDN, ATT, Mano, NFV, Open Source  No Comments

AT&T confirmed that it is committed to releasing into open source its current Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy (ECOMP) platform, which is the service orchestration system that powers the AT&T software-defined network (SDN).

AT&T said ECOMP is mature, feature-complete, and tested in real-world NFV deployments. The company believes open source ECOMP will bring maturity to SDN and become the industry standard for orchestration, management and policy control.

By releasing the ECOMP code as open source, AT&T said other service providers will be able to use this software to meet non-stop network demands as data-hungry technologies like autonomous cars, augmented and virtual reality, 4K video and the Internet of Things (IoT) take off.

“In March, we opened the hood of our network, showed you the engine and the industry responded asking to join us,” said John Donovan, Chief Strategy Officer and Group President, Technology and Operations, AT&T. “Over the last few years, AT&T invented what we believe to be the most sophisticated, comprehensive and scalable software-centric network in the world. Today, we’re letting anyone use and build upon our millions of lines of software code by committing to releasing it into the open source community.”

“This is a big decision and getting it right is crucial,” Donovan continues. “We want to build a community – where people contribute to the code base and advance the platform. And, we want this to help align the global industry. We’ve engaged a third-party company to be the integrator and provide support in the industry for the ECOMP platform. And we’ve received positive feedback from major global telecom companies. We’re excited to share more on that front very soon.”

http://about.att.com/story/network_playbook_into_open_source.html

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NTT Com Expands Enterprise Cloud Service

NTT Communications expanded the geographic availability and service menu of its Enterprise Cloud service for hosted-private and multi-tenant clouds.

The three new service areas — West Japan ("JP2"), Hong Kong ("HK1") and Germany ("DE1") — are available immediately.

Users in the newly added areas of East Japan (JP2), Hong Kong (HK1) and Germany (DE1) will have full access to Enterprise Cloud's hosted private cloud and the compute functions of its multi-tenant cloud based on the OpenStack open-source cloud platform. Useful functions include monitoring and block storage for logical networks.

Newly Added Functions in JP1

• vSphere ESXi hypervisor for private cloud - resources can be flexibly and speedily changed and managed with vSphere ESXi installed on an Enterprise Cloud bare-metal server. VMware's virtual environment can still leverage operations for existing environments and management software after shifting to Enterprise Cloud.
  
• Block storage with 4 IOPS/GB -- This new function offers block storage with high-performance 4 IOPS/GB based on the Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) protocol for TCP/IP data transfers. Capacity ranging from 100GB to 12,000GB is available for high-speed databases and external storage for big data analysis. Stable environments are not influenced by other data loads.

NTT Com said its future plans include expanded functions for VMware solutions for conventional ICT, strengthened open-source functions for cloud-native ICT, additional OpenStack components, and virtual private clouds based on the Cloud Foundry open-source cloud-computing platform. Managed services will be strengthened for cloud management platforms. By upgrading functions for unified management of new SDx services, such as SD-Exchange, SD-WAN and SD-LAN, NTT Com aims to offer customers total outsourcing of their ICT environments.

http://www.ntt.co.jp

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TE Launches micro Quad Small Form-Factor Pluggable I/O Connectors

TE Connectivity (TE) is the first to launch micro Quad Small Form-Factor Pluggable (microQSFP) input/output (I/O) interconnects.

The microQSFP connectors are the next step forward in high-density faceplates for data center infrastructure. MicroQSFP connectors deliver QSFP28 functionality in a smaller, generally SFP-sized form factor while providing significantly better thermal performance to help save energy costs, improved electrical performance at 25 gigabits per second (Gbps) and 33 percent higher density than QSFP to fit more ports on a standard line card.

The new microQSFP connectors deliver 56Gbps performance with backward compatibility to 28Gbps to support next generation designs. Built-in fins on TE’s new connectors eliminate the need for additional clips and heatsinks and allow faceplate airflow to the interior of the equipment, which helps microQSFP deliver significantly better thermal performance than QSFP28 and other leading solutions.

TE is a member of the microQSFP Multi Source Agreement (MSA) group, which is working to build an industry-wide ecosystem for microQSFP, and ensuring that products can be easily adopted and integrated into existing data center designs.

“At a time when faceplate real estate and thermal performance are at a premium, TE’s microQSFP products deliver on both counts,” said Phil Gilchrist, CTO, TE Data and Devices. “The technological innovations of TE’s microQSFP products can revolutionize the industry by enabling customers to place up to 72 ports of 100 Gbps each on a 1RU line card.”

http://www.microQSFP.com
http://www.te.com/microqsfp

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Facebook is at 1.13 Daily Active Users, up 17% YoY

In its Q2 financial report, Facebook reported the following operational highlights:

• Daily active users (DAUs) – DAUs were 1.13 billion on average for June 2016, an increase of 17% year-over-year.
• Mobile DAUs – Mobile DAUs were 1.03 billion on average for June 2016, an increase of 22% year-over-year.
• Monthly active users (MAUs) – MAUs were 1.71 billion as of June 30, 2016, an increase of 15% year-over-year.
• Mobile MAUs – Mobile MAUs were 1.57 billion as of June 30, 2016, an increase of 20% year-over-year.
• Mobile advertising revenue – Mobile advertising revenue represented approximately 84% of advertising revenue for the second quarter of 2016, up from approximately 76% of advertising revenue in the second quarter of 2015.
• Capital expenditures – Capital expenditures for the second quarter of 2016 were $995 million.
• Cash and cash equivalents and marketable securities – Cash and cash equivalents and marketable securities were $23.29 billion at the end of the second quarter of 2016.

http://www.facebook.com

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Infinera Posts Q2 Revenue of $259 Million

Infinera reported GAAP revenue for Q2 2016 of $258.8 million compared to $244.8 million in the first quarter of 2016 and $207.3 million in the second quarter of 2015.

GAAP gross margin for the quarter was 47.8% compared to 47.5% in the first quarter of 2016 and 46.7% in the second quarter of 2015. GAAP operating margin for the quarter was 6.2% compared to 6.1% in the first quarter of 2016 and 8.0% in the second quarter of 2015.

GAAP net income for the quarter was $11.5 million, or $0.08 per diluted share, compared to $12.0 million, or $0.08 per diluted share, in the first quarter of 2016, and $17.9 million, or $0.13 per diluted share, in the second quarter of 2015.

“While I am very pleased with our second quarter and year to date financial results, demand is softening in certain areas of our business and we face a difficult near-term revenue outlook,” said Tom Fallon, Infinera’s Chief Executive Officer. “Despite the current challenges, I am confident that by continuing to deliver the differentiated technologies and superior service that our customers have come to expect, we will earn significant market share over time across all of the markets that we serve.”

http://www.infinera.com

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Procera Cites Big Order from tier 1 South American MSO

Procera Networks announced an initial multi-million dollar analytics and traffic management deployment with a tier one South American cable operator. The South American cable operator is replacing its existing DPI platform with Procera's technology to ensure its network can keep pace with the growth in bandwidth usage sparked by subscribers in recent months. Over 60% of traffic on the operator's network is streaming video, and it expects this figure to rise even further in the coming years.

Procera noted that this latest development marks the third tier one deployment in the region for Procera, and the fifth new tier one operator customer to be secured in recent months across EMEA, the US, and APAC.

"This was a very technical and commercial process, with steep competition. We are excited to be associated with this marquee operator, and to have the opportunity to help them build their next generation analytics data platform," said Lyn Cantor, President and CEO at Procera Networks.

http://www.proceranetworks.com

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Momentum Builds for Central Office Re-architected as a Data Center Project (CORD)

The Central Office Re-architected as a Data Center (CORD) initiative, which was initially developed by ON.Lab as a use case for the ONOS open source SDN operating system, will now be managed as an independent open source project under The Linux Foundation. CORD aims to utilize merchant silicon and  the elasticity of commodity clouds to enable data center economics and cloud agility in the central office environment.

Google, Radisys and Samsung Electronics Co. are joining CORD and ONOS Projects as new partners. Additional members of the CORD community include service provider partners AT&T, China Unicom, Google, NTT Communications, SK Telecom, and Verizon, vendors Ciena, Cisco, Fujitsu, Intel, NEC, Nokia, etc.

In addition, Google will host the first CORD Summit on July 29 at Google Sunnyvale Tech Corner Campus in California.

“We are delighted to welcome Google to the open source ONOS and CORD partnerships,” said Guru Parulkar, executive director at ON.Lab. “Given Google’s track record as a provider of cloud and access services, we anticipate it will play an important role in strengthening the CORD architecture, implementation, and deployments.”

“We are also delighted to partner with Radisys, a leading system integrator in the service provider space, and Samsung, which is committed to advancing next-generation mobile technologies. CORD is very well-positioned for future growth,” said Parulkar. “Radisys’ leadership for an open, vendor-agnostic solution for central office transformation will be critical in providing turn-key CORD Pods that will accelerate development and adoption of CORD, enabling ground-breaking network transformation. And Samsung as a leader in mobile networking will help ONOS and CORD in this impornat domain of use.”

“CORD has the potential to significantly improve the economics and agility of access networks globally,” said Ankur Jain, principal engineer at Google. “We are excited to join CORD, host its inaugural summit and work closely with leading ecosystem players to bring greater scalability and rapid innovation to access networks.”

http://www.opencord.org

Updates for CORD - Central Office Re-architected as Data Center

Tuesday, March 15, 2016  #ONS2016, #SDN, CORD, Service Providers  1 Comment

Vendors are ready to show the first reference implementation of CORD - the Central Office Re-architected as Data Center - initiative within the ONOS Project. uUse cases for CORD are on display at this week's Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, California.

CORD is expected to bring the economies of scale and the agility of cloud computing to the service provider central office by leveraging infrastructure constructed from commodity building blocks. It uses merchant silicon, white boxes and open-source platforms such as ONOS, OpenStack, and XOS.

CORD Use Cases Showcased at ONS:

Enterprise (E-CORD) - Extends CORD with enterprise services and enables service providers to offer SDN-WAN, as well as MEF carrier Ethernet services. That is the ability to create multi-site virtual networks on demand with customer-specified services such as intrusion detection, WAN acceleration, and others. E-CORD POC will be demonstrated at ONS.
Mobile (M-CORD) - Integrates disaggregated and virtualized RAN, disaggregated and virtualized EPC, and mobile edge computing with CORD and helps service providers and vendors move closer to realizing 5G. M-CORD POC will be demonstrated at ONS.
Residential (R-CORD) - Combines vCPE and virtualized wireline access technologies (e.g., GPON, 10GPON, G.Fast) with cloud-based subscriber services (e.g., parental control, video delivery). R-

Companies are actively contributing to and advancing CORD: AT&T, China Unicom, NTT Communications, SK Telecom, Verizon, Ciena, Cisco, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Huawei, Intel, NEC, Nokia

Collaborators: Accton, AirHop, Broadcom, Cavium, Celestica, Ciena, Cobham, Flextronics, NetCracker, PMC Sierra, Radisys.

"AT&T supports the goals and achievements that are embodied in CORD," said Andre Fuetsch, senior vice president of Architecture and Design at AT&T. "The work is pushing the boundaries of many technologies and architectures, as well as open source and open spec hardware. We are learning from the CORD experiments and trials and using this knowledge to refine AT&T's Integrated Cloud. We look forward to continuing to collaborate with ON.Lab and others in advancing NFV and SDN technology."

AT&T and ONOS to Show Central Office Re-architected as Data Center (CORD)

Thursday, June 11, 2015  #NFV, #ONS2015, #SDN, ONOS  No Comments

At next week's Open Networking Summit (ONS2015) in Santa Clara, California, AT&T, ONOS project, PMC-Sierra and Sckipio will showcase the first public demonstration of the Central Office Re-architected as Data Center (CORD) proof-of-concept (POC). The idea behind CORD is to use SDN and NFV to transform carrier functions into workloads that are hosted on common, commodity infrastructure. The CORD solution POC spans the Telco Central Office, access...

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A10 Powers into Cloud ADC Market with Acquisition of Appcito

A10 Networks has acquired Appcito, a start-up based in Santa Clara, California, that developed a SaaS-based, multi-cloud ADC (application delivery controller) solution utilizing microservice and container architectures. Financial terms were not disclosed.

A10's existing Thunder ADC is an on-premise solution for load-balance and optimizing application delivery. Appcito's solution is a cloud-native application delivery system with web-scale elastic load balancing, DDoS protection, integrated analytics and a self-service portal. Appcito enables scale-out by leveraging public clouds such as AWS, Azure or Google.

The company said the acquisition helps its customers bridge traditional and cloud application environments.  Appcito fits seamlessly into A10 Networks’ A10 Harmony solution architecture, which was introduced in early 2015 and supports secure application service offerings that span traditional data centers, private clouds, public clouds, and hybrid clouds.

New A10 Harmony-based cloud offerings that integrate Appcito technology will be available beginning in 2016. Solutions will include a cloud services controller for centralized application policy management and orchestration, elastic application traffic management capabilities integrated with DevOps processes, deep per-application visibility and analytics, and support for microservice and container-based applications.

“Appcito was founded with a vision to deliver cloud-native application delivery services and help application teams become more nimble, while delivering application performance and security that their end users demand,” said Kamal Anand, CEO and Co-founder of Appcito. “Becoming part of A10 Networks and their customer-focused innovation culture will bring added benefits to application teams. The acquisition makes solid sense for customers wanting to collectively manage traditional on-premise and cloud application needs.”

https://www.a10networks.com/a10-acquires-appcito_secure-application-services

Video: A10 Networks at a Glance

Tuesday, July 19, 2016    2 Comments

You may not have heard of A10 Networks since it is one of the best kept secrets in the industry, but the company is a major supplier of networking equipment to the video gaming industry, the financial industry, and even for some of the largest casinos in Las Vegas.

Gunter Reiss, VP of Strategic Alliances, A10 Networks, provides a two-minute overview of the 12-year old, Silicon Valley-based company, which has grown to roughly 5,000 customers worldwide. A10 Networks is known for its feature-rich, high-scalable, high-performance, application delivery controller that can be used for carrier-grade NAT, DDoS mitigation, SSL decryption visibility and as a converged firewall.

See video: https://youtu.be/EOtr45E43Mg

Appcito Enhances Enterprise Application Delivery Capabilities

Friday, January 29, 2016  Appcito, Silicon Valley, Start-Ups  No Comments

Appcito, a start-up based in Santa Clara, California, announced the latest release of its Appcito Application Delivery System (ADS), formerly known as Appcito Cloud Application Front-End (CAFÉ). The new capabilities allow enterprise IT and network infrastructure teams to act as providers and enable application owners and DevOps teams to rollout new applications with a self-service model, while still being 100% compliant to existing security policies and governance models.

New capabilities include:

• Provider-Tenant Portal – allows enterprise infrastructure teams to define policies and arm application teams with a self-service portal to spin-up new services – traffic management, application security and analytics
• Service Adapters for F5 Big-IP LTM and HAProxy Deployments – service adapters can be non-disruptively inserted into existing data center or cloud deployments complementing existing ADC and open source tools to provide per-application health, visibility and analytics. For F5 Big-IP deployments Appcito ADS service adapters provide application-centric monitoring with real-time monitoring and threat detection leveraging Big-IP high speed logging (HSL). For HAProxy based deployments Appcito provides ongoing and meaningful monitoring with a dedicated system that stores, visualizes and co-relates HAProxy metrics. It provides alerting based on HAProxy metrics and an application-specific dashboard providing real-time and per-application views of health and performance of applications served by HAProxy.

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