Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Arista Unveils 100+ Terabit Switching/Routing Platform

Arista Networks introduced a 100+ Terabit switching and routing platform for cloud service provider and next generation enterprise data centers. The new Arista 7500R is being positioned as the industry's highest performance universal spine switch for data centers.

Arista believes that shifting traffic patterns inside the data center are best served with scalable two-tier active Leaf-Spine and single tier Spline architecture. The traditional core routing layer can be replaced with an Arista 7500R series-based spine for rapid re-convergence and network-wide resilience between data centers and to the Internet. The Arista 7500R Series supports familiar MPLS functions allowing up to 13-labels deep packet lookup for programmatic control across the largest networks. Along with the state oriented architecture of Arista’s Network–wide Database NetDB and SDK, Arista EOS (Extensible Operating System) users can customize their own preferred path across the largest networks in the world, instead of relying on best-effort forwarding on the Internet.

The new Arista 7500R Series, which begin shipping in Q2, provides industry-leading 100GbE density and large table sizes in a single chassis. Key attributes:

  • Chassis Fabric capacity of up to 115 Tbps
  • Up to 432 wirespeed 100GbE ports in a choice of three form factors
  • 288 Gigabytes of deep and smart packet memory for reliable packet transfers
  • Virtual Output Queues (VoQ) for lossless forwarding
  • Agile port speeds of 1/10/25/40/50/100GbE
  • FlexRoute technology delivers up to 1 Million wire speed routes with MPLS, Segment Routing and EVPN (Ethernet Virtual Private Network) protocol support
  • Programmable traffic engineering with up to 128,000 MPLS, GRE (Generic Routing Encapsulation), VXLAN (Virtual Extensible Local Area Network) and IP-in-IP tunnels
  • Support for NEBS (Network Equipment Building System) compliance for Service Provider deployments
  • Mix and Match across the wide selection of 7500E and 7500R series line-card options
Arista is also introducing three new wire speed 7500R Series line cards:

  • 36 x 100GbE QSFP - choice of 10/25/40/50/100GbE
  • 36 x 40GbE with flexible combinations of 10GbE and up to 6 ports of 100GbE
  • 48 x 10GbE SFP+ and 2 x 100G QSFP

“The 7500R is the highest performance switching and routing platform that supports the full Internet routing table, enabling a Universal Spine in cloud-scale networks,” said Andreas Bechtolsheim, Arista’s Chairman and Chief Development Officer.

https://www.arista.com/en/company/news/press-release/1283-pr-20160329

AT&T to Bring its Fiber GigaPower Network to LA

AT&T is launching its fiber-based, residential and SMB Internet service in the Los Angeles metro area. This brings speeds up to 1 gigabit per second to more homes, apartments and small businesses over

AT&T GigaPower Internet Premier offers Internet speeds up to 1Gbps for $110 a month or speeds up to 300Mbps for $80 a month.

The AT&T GigaPower network is now available to tens of thousands of locations, including single family homes, thousands of apartments and small businesses in parts of Eastvale, Irvine, Los Angeles, Orange County and surrounding communities.

"We’ll continue to expand our 100% fiber AT&T GigaPower network to additional locations. We’re planning to triple availability by the end of the year. Eventually, we plan to make our AT&T GigaPower presence in the Los Angeles area one of the largest in the country. Additional local communities where we are planning to bring AT&T GigaPower include Arcadia, Glendale and more," stated Eric Boyer, senior vice president of AT&T wireless and wired product marketing.

AT&T also noted that it has invested more than $2 billion in its Los Angeles area wireless and wireline networks from 2012 through 2014.

http://www.att.com

Rancher Ships its Container Management Platform

Rancher Labs, a start-up based in Cupertino, California, released its open-source container management software.

The Rancher software is designed to simplify the deployment and management of containers in production enterprise applications. The software lets users select from multiple container orchestration frameworks such as Kubernetes and Docker Swarm, while maintaining a single management experience.  Rancher implements a cloud-agnostic infrastructure services layer that works across any public or private cloud, or traditional data center. The platform works across cloud and data center boundaries, and its load balancing and persistent storage services function uniformly on any computing resources.

Rancher said its solution allows organizations to gain visibility, manage policies and exert control of containers and infrastructure spread across different teams within an organization.  It also enables IT to improve deployment reliability, orchestrate software upgrades, and improve the utilization of infrastructure resources.
 
“Since announcing our beta product less than a year ago, Rancher Labs has experienced incredible demand, as well as received encouraging and helpful feedback and community support for this open platform which has enabled us to make meaningful enhancements to Rancher,” said Sheng Liang, CEO, Rancher Labs. “Now, with well over a million downloads, Rancher has quickly become the platform of choice for teams serious about running containers in production.”

http://rancher.com/

PLUMgrid Brings OpenStack SDN for Containers

PLUMgrid announced a major software update including SDN support for Docker containers, expanded gateway integration with Cisco Nexus 9000, IPv6, PLUMgrid SmartLogs and many other enhancements.

PLUMgrid's Open Networking Suite (ONS) 5.0, which supports OpenStack Kilo and Liberty release, enables data centers with virtual machines, containers, and bare metal architectures to leverage SDN overlays to provide secure micro-segmentation for multi-tenancy, traffic isolation, and policy enforcement.

“Cloud networking is adding virtualized network functions and applications at an accelerated rate and ONS is keeping pace with an aggressive iteration cycle,” said Pere Monclus, founder and CTO at PLUMgrid. “Adding support for Docker containers provides SDN services that are essential to secure multi-tenant networking. In this complex environment it is critical for data center operations to have a tool such as CloudApex that provides a simplified view of both physical and virtual resources in OpenStack clouds.”

Some highlights:

  • PLUMgrid now offers a SDN plugin for Docker containers to enable rich networking functions, secure multi-tenancy, multi-host networking, high availability, and distributed scale-out performance for Docker clouds. 
  • PLUMgrid ONS has added support for Project Kuryr, an OpenStack initiative that provides container network abstraction for Neutron API. 
  • In addition to supporting gateways from Arista Networks and Cumulus Networks, ONS 5.0 introduces gateway support for Cisco Nexus 9000 Series. Through VXLAN Tunnel End Point (VTEP) integration, PLUMgrid delivers unified physical and virtual network infrastructure with simple drag and drop configuration.
  • IPv6 can be configured within and between tenant clouds for flexible addressing while IPv4 is running concurrently. 
  • PLUMgrid ONS 5.0 introduces a number of smart wizards that check system and connectivity status to ensure workloads and applications have unhindered reachability and access to resources. 

http://www.plumgrid.com

CloudRouter Project Clears Release 3.0 Hurdle

The CloudRouter Project, which is a Linux-based open source routing and software-defined networking (SDN) initiative, released its CloudRouter 3.0 and new performance numbers showing throughput in excess of 650 Gbps on commodity hardware.

The CloudRouter 3.0 release ships with new versions of ONOS Drake 1.4, CentOS 7.2, and Fedora 23. Four new open source projects have been added including iSDX, an open source SDN exchange point, two new network traffic generator and analyzers, Ostinato and pktgen-dpdk, and pmacct, a network monitoring utility.

CloudRouter 3.0 new key features summary:

  • 100 GigE Performance: new DPDK 2.2.0 kernel enhancements tested at 650 Gig/sec
  • OS: upgraded to CentOS 7.2 or Fedora 23
  • SDN OS: ONOS 1.4 (Drake) in addition to OpenDaylight Lithium
  • SDN Exchange Point: iSDX for advanced routing interconnection
  • Security and Performance Testing: pktgen-dpdk, Otinato
  • pmacct: network monitoring utility


"Today's announcement gives network administrators the choice of continuing to use CloudRouter as a software-based router or advancing into deployments of software-based controllers with whitebox hardware," said Jay Turner, CloudRouter Project Lead and Senior Director of DevOps at IIX. "The community told us that they wanted the benefits of SDN in the future, but needed a bridge between old and new architectures. CloudRouter is an open source network innovation platform, and we believe it's the most flexible SDN platform out, incorporating best-of-breed open source projects, fully tested for security and stability."

"The traditional way of building networks with vertically integrated, proprietary, over-priced boxes is being disrupted, and replaced by the new and much more open way of disaggregation, abstraction and easy composition of network resources. This transformation was driven by hyper-scale cloud and web services providers and is being widely accepted to power web-scale IT. The decoupling of software from hardware first happened on switches, and CloudRouter is bringing it one step further to routers. Mellanox is a supporter and driver of this transformation, and we build hardware for the new open composable networks that enable this transformation to happen without performance or infrastructure efficiency compromises," said Chloe Jian Ma, Senior Director of Cloud Marketing at Mellanox.

https://cloudrouter.org

Brocade Acquires StackStorm for DevOps Automation

Brocade has acquired StackStorm, a start-up based in Palo Alto, California, that offers an event-driven automation platform. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Stack Storms ties together components across the IT infrastructure. It’s commonly used for auto-remediation—including response to security events—and other cases such as complex deployments.

https://stackstorm.com
http://www.brocade.com

César Alierta to Step Down as Executive Chairman of Telefónica

César Alierta announced his intention to step down as Executive Chairman of Telefónica.  He will remain on the company's Board.

Alierta is recommending that Telefónica’s Board of Directors consider the appointment of José María Álvarez-Pallete as its new Executive Chairman. Álvarez-Pallete has serves as Chief Operating Officer for the past 3 years. Previously, he was Telefónica’s CFO and has served as Executive Chairman of Telefónica Internacional and as Chairman of Telefónica Latinoamérica.

César Alierta has served as CEO and Chairman of Telefónica since 2000.

https://www.telefonica.com/es/web/press-office/-/cesar-alierta-ends-his-tenure-as-executive-chairman-of-telefonica-and-will-propose-the-appointment-of-jose-maria-alvarez-pallete-to-the-board-of-direc

Global Capacity Appoints Tony Thakur as CTO

Global Capacity named Tony Thakur as its new CTO, responsible for all aspects of its One Marketplace network strategy, architecture, engineering and planning.

Most recently, Thakur served as Vice President of Engineering & Technology for TelePacific Communications, where he provided strategic direction, technology selection and product development support for next-generation services including IP Virtual Private Network (VPN) and Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) wide-area Ethernet.  He also held executive positions at leading network and technology companies, including Executive Vice President of Engineering and Operations for CENX and Vice President of Network Technologies and Systems for tw telecom.

https://globalcapacity.com/news-resources/global-capacity-names-new-chief-technology-officer