Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Video: Karen Bartleson - Advancing IEEE's Internet Initiative

The IEEE is the world's largest professional society with over 400,000 members around the world and dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity, Karen Bartleson, President-elect of the IEEE, discusses her involvement with the IEEE's Internet Initiative, which is tacking tough problems in cyber security, privacy, and governance.

She also talks about inspiring future engineers, especially young women, to take up the challenge of improving technology for betterment of the world.

See video: https://youtu.be/xzYEy4gtAdQ







Salesforce Signs with AWS as Preferred Cloud

Salesforce has selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider.

Under the deal, Salesforce will expand its use of AWS to core services—including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, App Cloud, Community Cloud, Analytics Cloud and more—for the company's planned international infrastructure expansion. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Many Salesforce services, including Heroku, Marketing Cloud Social Studio, SalesforceIQ, and the recently announced Salesforce IoT Cloud, already run on AWS infrastructure. Salesforce will utilize AWS to help bring new infrastructure online more quickly and efficiently.

“We are excited to expand our strategic relationship with Amazon as our preferred public cloud infrastructure provider,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce. “There is no public cloud infrastructure provider that is more sophisticated or has more robust enterprise capabilities for supporting the needs of our growing global customer base.”

“Leading enterprises and ISVs around the world are migrating their business-critical applications to the AWS Cloud to be more agile and efficient, reduce costs, and take advantage of the security, reliability, and broad functionality we offer,” said Andy Jassy, CEO, AWS. “Companies rely on Salesforce to transform their businesses and we are thrilled Salesforce has chosen AWS as their public cloud infrastructure partner, helping them continue to scale, add new services and maintain their incredible momentum.”

http://aws.amazon.com
http://www.salesforce.com



Viptela Pulls In $75 Million for its SD-WAN Platform

Viptela, a start-up based in San Jose, announced $75 million in Series C funding for its Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) platform. The company cites deployments by more than 25 Fortune 500 enterprises including some of the world’s largest retailers, financial institutions, conglomerates, healthcare organizations and other businesses that have many geographically distributed locations. The company has licensing partnerships with Tier-1 carriers Verizon and Singtel; and has been recognized as a Gartner Cool Vendor and a Next Billion Dollar Startup by Forbes.

Viptela said it plans to use the proceeds to scale sales, marketing, technical support and research & development to meet aggressive customer demand for its products and execute its global go-to-market strategy.

The round was led by Redline Capital with participation from new investor Northgate Capital and existing investor Sequoia Capital. This brings total funding to nearly $110M.

“Our ability to raise this level of financing, while many technology vendors are struggling to raise capital or experiencing ‘down rounds’ is a testament to our team, technology and execution,” said Amir Khan, CEO of Viptela. “These funds will enable us to add the resources to expand into new geographies, extend our lead in this hyper-growth sector and capture a lion’s share of the market.”

http://www.viptela.com

Viptela Intros LTE-enabled SD-WAN Routers

Viptela introduced a compact SD-WAN router that natively supports any transport method including 3G/4G/LTE and wireless LANs.

The company said the new product extends the business case for SD-WAN to smaller companies, home/remote offices, ATMs and other sites that don’t require the scalability of the company’s existing enterprise and campus vEdge models.

The Viptela vEdge-100 provides the same secure data connectivity over any transport technology as the vEdge-1000 and 2000 router models, while adding integrated support for 3G/4G/LTE connections and Wireless LANs. It can be deployed without any onsite configuration and is centrally managed via the cloud.  The unit is fully integrated with the Viptela SEN platform and establishes secure DTLS sessions with the vSmart controller and IPsec sessions with other vEdge routers. It performs full IP router functions including OSPF, BGP, QoS, ACLs, etc.

“Increasing bandwidth requirements being generated by cloud, mobile and unified communications applications are making the use of MPLS connections cost prohibitive, especially for small/home offices, remote sites, retail outlets and ATMs,” said Ramesh Prabagaran, Vice President of Product Management at Viptela. “The new line of vEdge-100 devices opens up the use of SD-WAN to a wide range of new business locations with the addition of integrated wireless capabilities. It eliminates the complexity associated with using third-party add-ons or external modems to deploy 3G/4G/LTE as a WAN connection. Like all our vEdge models, it supports zero-touch deployment and is centrally managed which eliminates need for an onsite technician to bring new sites online.”

http://www.viptela.com

Verizon Delivers SD-WAN with Viptela

Verizon will deliver a new software defined networking solution using Viptela’s Software Defined WAN Platform. Viptela also entered into an exclusive managed services arrangement with Verizon in the United States.

The new Verizon service, powered by Viptela, allows enterprises to “mix and match” private and public IP connections such as MPLS, wireless LTE, broadband and Ethernet to meet an organization’s unique application requirements based on geographic location, bandwidth and application service availability needs. The new managed service is being offered in the U.S., Europe and the Asia Pacific region. It is delivered from Verizon’s cloud and will be supported by Verizon’s IT consulting group.

The Viptela SD-WAN solution expands Verizon’s Managed SD WAN portfolio currently based on Cisco’s iWAN technology in the US, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.

Key features of Viptela’s SD-WAN platform:

  • Centralized management and increased agility: Deploy changes in service policies in minutes using centralized management and zero-touch capabilities
  • Application performance and service availability: Visibility into application and infrastructure performance to enable informed decisions on resource utilization and application tuning
  • Security: Every device is authenticated and every packet encrypted in the network for added protection while supporting network segmentation
  • Service-chaining: Enables supplementary L4 – L7 services like WAN optimization, firewalls and data leak prevention delivered from the Verizon cloud across the enterprise network
“Viptela SD-WAN creates a unified and secure WAN that allows Verizon to deliver a new range of business application capabilities with exceptional levels of security, performance and availability,” said Amir Khan, CEO of Viptela. “The new Viptela-powered service enables Verizon to expand its WAN footprint by harnessing the power of software defined networking, and capitalize on new business opportunities made possible by the cloud and virtualized infrastructures.”

http://www.viptela.com

Blueprint: What’s Wrong with the WAN?



by Khalid Raza, CTO, Viptela Today’s WANs are built on largely the same infrastructure as they were 10 years ago.  Back then, demands by users and applications were more predictable, resulting in more expected traffic patterns and bandwidth requirements.  And there was no cloud.  And there was no virtualization. But things are different today.  Delay-sensitive real-time applications such as VoIP and video are now enterprise...


Telefónica Renews Submarine Cable Maintenance Contracts

Telefónica has renewed the marine maintenance service agreement for its domestic and South America-1 (SAM-1) submarine cable systems with Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks (ASN), now part of Nokia, and TE SubCom.  The five-year extension will take effect on January 1, 2017.

Under the Atlantic Private Maintenance Agreement (APMA), ASN and TE SubCom will continue to make available three dedicated maintenance vessels in the Western Atlantic (Curaçao) and Eastern Atlantic (Cape Verde and Calais), as well as experienced, fully trained and certified personnel for cable repairs on Telefónica’s domestic and SAM-1 cable systems, totaling more than 27,000 km. The SAM-1 cable systems provide high bandwidth connectivity between the U.S. and Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Peru, with Telefónica’s domestic network providing service between Spain’s mainland and the Canary Islands.

“Telefónica is committed to providing best-in-class services to its customers by partnering with trusted companies for the provisioning of the fastest and best quality service and solutions,” said Telefónica Communications Department. “The high quality marine maintenance services demonstrated since 2012 by TE SubCom and ASN made it easy for our organization to decide to renew the APMA service agreement for another five years.”

http://www.nokia.com
http:/www.subcomm.com

eero Raises $50 Million for Home WiFi System

eero, a start-up based in San Francisco, raised $50 million for its home WiFi system.

ero uses multiple 802.11ac access points placed throughout the home to provide strong coverage in every room.  The company will use the funding to build its customer support team and prepare for a widespread retail presence in Best Buy.

The funding was led by Menlo Ventures with significant participation by Index Ventures. They join eero’s existing investors, First Round Capital, Shasta Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Playground Global, and others, which also participated in the round, bringing the company's total funding to over $90 million.

“Since we started shipping eero systems to customers earlier this year, we have been building on our momentum, scaling our infrastructure, and improving our software so we can support our growing customer base,” said Nick Weaver, eero founder and chief executive officer. “With this round of funding from leading investors, eero is well-positioned to provide a strong foundation for the connected home on an even larger scale.”

http://www.eero.com

CloudBolt Manages Cloud Bursting to VMware, AWS, Azure, Openstack

CloudBolt, a start-up based in Campbell, California, has added cloud bursting capabilities to its cloud management platform.

CloudBolt said its tech-agnostic approach to cloud bursting and cloud management enables IT teams to build and rebuild VMs in an automated fashion, eliminating the need for complicated and resource-intensive migration of live VMs from one technology to another. These same CloudBolt blueprints can be deployed and scaled into different environments and technologies, enabling both the initial automated provisioning and cross-technology auto-scaling.

CloudBolt customers can define tiers within services that can be deployed to VMware, Azure, OpenStack, AWS, a physical server, or any of the other technologies CloudBolt supports. Key capabilities include:

  • Automated cloud bursting based on load levels detected on servers
  • Per application-tier scaling configuration, including configurable thresholds, minimums, maximums, and behavior on how to scale when conditions are met
  • Automated scale back
  • Scaling triggered by users, on a schedule, or via CB’s REST API
  • Inter- and intra- technology scaling. For example, the ability to scale from VMware to AWS or from one VMware cluster to another.
  • Support for the 14 resource handler technologies that CloudBolt supports, including seven public clouds, six private virtualization technologies, as well as physical server provisioning
  • Out of the box support for four different load balancers, three configuration management systems, plus common IPAM, change management, SDN, and monitoring systems

“Cloud bursting is the shining promise of hybrid cloud, capable of cutting IT costs by optimizing resource utilization. However, because of the complexity of implementing cloud bursting, these benefits have been within the reach of only the smallest fraction of organizations,” said Jon Mittelhauser, CEO, CloudBolt. “CloudBolt’s cloud management platform takes the complexity out of cloud bursting by making it easier for IT shops to set up and build on top of what they already have, and by enabling them to extend the behavior to include and automate their processes and procedures. With CloudBolt’s cloud bursting, IT shops can own the base and rent the spike.”

http://www.cloudbolt.io