Verizon Deploys OpenStack NFV in 5 Data Centers

Verizon has completed a Network Function Virtualization OpenStack cloud deployment across five of its U.S. data centers.

Verizon said its NFV project, which began in 2015, created a production design based on a core and pod architecture that provides hyperscale capabilities. The project is based on OpenStack with Red Hat Ceph Storage and a spine-leaf fabric for each pod controlled through a Neutron plugin to Red Hat OpenStack Platform. The multi-vendor deployment leverages Big Switch’s Big Cloud Fabric for SDN controller software managing Dell switches, which are orchestrated by Red Hat OpenStack Platform.

Verizon said the OpenStack pod-based design that went from concept to deployment of more than 50 racks in five production data centers in less than nine months. Rollouts are currently in progress in additional domestic data center and aggregation sites, with international locations to be deployed over the next several months. The design also will be adopted in edge network sites by the end of the year.

Architecturally, the large scale NFV deployment had five key needs, which were identified early in the project:

• Resiliency at Scale - The design followed a hyperscale-inspired “core and pod” approach with a 12-rack pod design replicated at data centers across the United States.
• No Bandwidth Bottlenecks - A modern leaf-spine Clos design, using centralized SDN control designed to take the network from spine to leaf to vSwitch and avoid bandwidth bottlenecks.
• Logical Network Design Flexibility - The pod design accommodates unique NFV workloads with unique logical network requirements that share the same physical leaf/spine fabric and vSwitches.
• Reduced Operational Complexity - Operational complexity is reduced through a simplified lifecycle management of the network control systems relative to the OpenStack control systems.
• Integrated Security and Visibility - The NFV Pod is designed to be compliant and secure against intrusions and other threats, monitoring fabric was used to monitor intra-pod traffic and inline traffic.

“Building on our history of innovation, this NFV project is another step in building Verizon’s next-generation network -- with implications for the industry. New and emerging applications are highlighting the need for collaborative research and development in technologies like NFV. We consider this achievement to be foundational for building the Verizon cloud that serves our customers’ needs anywhere, anytime, any app.”  Adam Koeppe, vice president, network technology planning, Verizon

http://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-launches-industry-leading-large-openstack-nfv-deployment

A 35 minute presentation from this week's OpenStack Summit in Austin is posted here: https://youtu.be/1aVB3QvEYcI

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Verizon Reports 57 Incidents of Sabotage in 2 Weeks

Verizon reported a more than 100 percent increase in the number of suspected incidents of sabotage that have cut off thousands of Verizon customers from critical wireline services, since April 13.  The incidents include:

• In Delaware, three separate incidents occurred this week in Hockessin at fiber hub locations; fiber cables were severed in multiple locations.
  
• In New Jersey, there have been 17 incidents of suspected sabotage since April 13, primarily in the northern part of the state.
• In New York, the second most impacted state, 15 incidents are under investigation.
• In Pennsylvania, 10 incidents are under investigation, including suspected arson involving a fire-damaged terminal in Drexel Hill.
• In Virginia, cables have been severed, or equipment stolen, in eight separate incidents.
• In Maryland, fiber cables were ripped from a hub in Brandywine on April 22.

“These are criminal activities, affecting people’s safety and putting lives at risk. We are investigating all reports and pursuing all avenues to assist law enforcement in finding and convicting the perpetrators of these acts,” said Michael Mason, Verizon’s chief security officer.

Verizon said it normally experiences about a half dozen dangerous and reckless acts of destructive vandalism each year.

http://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-reports-57-suspected-incidents-network-sabotage-and-related-criminal-activity-past-two

• On April 13, nearly 40,000 Verizon workers from Maine to Virginia, represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), went on strike as of Wednesday morning at 6am. The parties have been unable to resolve differences since the last contract expired on August 1st, 2015.

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Telia Carrier Lights 2nd West Coast Route with Infinera

Telia Carrier is adding a second low latency, high capacity route between Silicon Valley and Los Angeles, connecting the Internet Content superpowers of the Bay Area with the entertainment and media giants of Hollywood. The route uses the Infinera DTN-X platform.

In addition, Telia Carrier has lit up a 100G-enabled metro ring linking strategically important connection points in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Infinera TM-Series features multi-service capabilities including the ability to support MEF 2.0 certified Ethernet services, mobile fronthaul, wholesale bandwidth and metro aggregation. The solution offers a unified network management layer across DTN-X and TM-Series and programmable SDN application programming interfaces (APIs) to enable rapid service delivery.

Infinera noted that Telia Carrier now utilizes an end-to-end Infinera Intelligent Transport Network, from long-haul to metro, as the foundation of its leading ‘built from the ground-up’ network infrastructure. The company also cited a track record of supporting Telia Carrier with network ‘firsts.’ Telia Carrier was the first network operator in North America to deploy the Infinera DTN-X Family with Instant Bandwidth and the first network operator to test a terabit super-channel on a live network. Now Telia Carrier is the first announced provider to extend a nationwide DTN-X network by deploying Infinera’s TM-Series for Metro 100G at scale.

“The West Coast is a critical network segment in the U.S. and we are adding an additional route to further enhance customer experience in the region. The Infinera TM-Series makes the economics of 100G work. This metro solution brings with it the benefits of an integrated, low-power and space-saving design. More and more of our customers are doing the math and working out that now is the time to invest in 100G. And thanks to Infinera, we are ready for them,” said Mattias Fridström, Chief Technology Officer at Telia Carrier.

“Telia Carrier now has an end-to-end unified Infinera Intelligent Transport Network that is optimized for scale, operational simplicity, and to accelerate network service delivery to Telia Carrier’s customers,” said Bob Jandro, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales at Infinera. “Telia Carrier’s expanding deployment of Infinera’s end-to-end solutions underscores the value we bring to our customers across the globe.”

http://www.infinera.com
http://www.teliacarrier.com/

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Facebook Reaches 1.65 Billion Monthly Users

With its record quarterly financial report, Facebook posted several other impressive growth metrics:

• Monthly active users (MAUs) were 1.65 billion as of March 31, 2016, an increase of 15% year-over-year.
• Daily active users (DAUs) were 1.09 billion on average for March 2016, an increase of 16% year-over-year
• Mobile DAUs were 989 million on average for March 2016, an increase of 24% year-over-year
• Mobile MAUs - Mobile MAUs were 1.51 billion as of March 31, 2016, an increase of 21% year-over-year.
• 1 billion users on WhatsApp each month
• 900 million users on Messenger each month
• 400 million Instagram users each month

http://newsroom.fb.com/news/

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AT&T Brings NetBond Connectivity to its Cisco WebEx Global Service

Starting in May, AT&T Conferencing with Cisco WebEx global conferencing solution will include AT&T NetBond connectivity for customers meeting eligibility requirements.

AT&T NetBond ensures improved network performance and security to cloud platforms.

In a blog posting, Vishy Gopalakrishnan, Product Marketing Management AVP at AT&T, observes that millennials are becoming a driving force for unified voice and collaboration solutions.

"For today’s mobile workers and those teaming up with peers around the globe, integrated communications tools are critical. As a new tech-loving generation enters the workforce and mobile workers multiply, providers must prepare to deliver more seamless, intuitive, and unified voice and collaboration solutions," writes Gopalakrishnan.

https://networkingexchangeblog.att.com/enterprise-business/the-mobile-generation-has-arrived

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NHN Techorus Links Data Centers with Infinera Cloud Xpress

NHN Techorus Corp., a data center operator in Japan, has deployed the Infinera Cloud Xpress to interconnect its Tokyo data centers.

Working with Infinera’s partner, Nissho Electronics, Techorus selected the Infinera Cloud Xpress to serve the growing need for high capacity interconnectivity among Techorus locations, helping its customers to grow efficiently and connect to the metro Tokyo ecosystem of customers, partners and service providers.

Infinera’s unique photonic integrated circuit technology enables the Cloud Xpress to support up to one terabit per second (Tbps) of input and output capacity in just two rack units. With its small form factor and low power consumption, Cloud Xpress delivers a full 500 Gbps super-channel of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) line-side bandwidth over 150 kilometers (km) without additional multiplexers or amplifiers, and up to 600 km with an amplified line system. Cloud Xpress also enables efficient scaling with simple provisioning and open interfaces to plug into existing cloud provisioning systems using open software defined networking (SDN) application programming interfaces (APIs). Instant Bandwidth allows the activation of WDM bandwidth in 100 Gbps increments with a few clicks of a mouse enabling rapid scale to meet continued customer demand.

http://www.infinera.com

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6WIND Integrates with Mirantis OpenStack for NFV

6WIND announced integration with Mirantis OpenStack to simplify joint customer deployments for high performance data centers and Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure (NFVI).

Specifically, 6WIND Virtual Accelerator, which is hypervisor acceleration software, will integrate an OpenStack Fuel plugin for increased application throughput and efficiency in KVM environments. Both companies have worked together to release a Mirantis certified 6WIND Virtual Accelerator Fuel plugin. Developed in open source, Fuel provides an intuitive, GUI-driven experience for deployment and management of a variety of OpenStack distributions and plugins.

Based on DPDK, 6WIND Virtual Accelerator provides a packet processing solution for a full-featured and high performance virtual networking infrastructure allowing:

• High performance I/Os leveraging DPDK, with multi-vendor NIC support
• High performance virtual switching (Open vSwitch and Linux bridge) and networking (Overlays, Filtering/NAT, IP Forwarding, IPsec)
• Support for existing workloads through standard Virtio drivers

“Many Network Operators are working with Mirantis OpenStack as they transition to NFV,” said Kamesh Pemmaraju, VP of Product Marketing at Mirantis. ”The partnership between Mirantis and 6WIND expands the use cases for OpenStack NFV by leveraging Fuel to automate hypervisor scaling for critical high performance virtual networking requirements.”

http://www.6wind.com

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Red Hat Cites OpenStack Rollouts with Fastweb, Paddy Power Betfair, and Produban

Red Hat announced OpenStack rollouts with several organizations across Europe, including Fastweb, Paddy Power Betfair, and Produban.

• Fastweb, a leading Italian telecommunications company, provides enterprise cloud-based information and communications technology (ICT) services to Italian businesses that lack internal resources to independently develop and support them. Fastweb has migrated to the Red Hat OpenStack Platform.
• Paddy Power Betfair, one of the largest online betting companies, and the largest betting exchange in the world, uses technology as a strategic advantage to disrupt the betting industry. Paddy Power Betfair’s i2 program, which aims to create a greenfield private cloud platform for Paddy Power Betfair using Red Hat OpenStack Platform and software-defined networking (SDN) in order to support continuous delivery of Paddy Power Betfair’s applications. With its new OpenStack-based private cloud, Paddy Power Betfair can deliver a new network and hosting infrastructure based on IaaS principles, hosting all development, test and production applications, and the associated tooling in a single location. Using SDN, Paddy Power Betfair reports that it has been able to reduce its reliance on physical networking equipment and simplify network operations, enabling them to process more transaction volume per second with less server downtime.
• Produban, Santander bank’s IT services company, specializes in the continuous design and IT infrastructure operation. Produban’s global footprint includes 10 datacenters to support all of Grupo Santander’s businesses, including Banco Santander, S.A., one of Europe’s largest banks and among the largest banks globally by market value. To support its global datacenters, Produban built a hybrid cloud infrastructure based on Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Red Hat CloudForms, and software-defined technology from Nuage Networks, a Red Hat certified partner. Produban also deployed OpenShift Enterprise, Red Hat’s container application-development platform, as the default Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution to develop and deploy its enterprise banking applications. The new solution meets Produban’s requirements for an open hybrid cloud that includes core infrastructure (IaaS), DevOps (PaaS), and multi-cloud management, all built on an underlying virtualized network.

http://www.redhat.com

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