Thursday, June 23, 2016

Cisco Prevails over Arista in Patent Case

Cisco has prevailed in a long-running patent dispute with Arista (the '944 case).

On Thursday, the International Trade Commission issued a Final Determination that Arista’s products infringe three Cisco patents. Two of the patents cover Cisco’s private VLAN network security technology which Arista included in its switches. The third covers Cisco’s proprietary core SysDB technology.

Additional court ruling are expected in the coming months for a different group of patents covered by a second ITC investigation (the ‘945 Investigation). A further trial covering patent and copyright infringement is expected in November.

In a blog post, Mark Chandler, General Counsel at Cisco, writes the ITC remedies include an exclusion order, which would ban all Arista switches and their components from importation into the U.S., and a cease and desist order blocking them from building infringing products in the US that are comprised of any imported components.

Arista has as much as acknowledged the infringement of the Private VLAN patents, announcing that they will discontinue the private VLAN feature “for now,” belying their claim that they had developed workarounds.  The remedies also include a cease and desist order prohibiting the marketing, sale, and distribution of infringing Arista switches in the U.S. These orders are scheduled to go into effect at the end of the Presidential Review Period on August 23, 2016. Arista made much of the fact that it had challenged the validity of Cisco’s patents. Arista did not challenge the validity of the Private VLAN patents, however, and the Patent and Trademark Office declined to institute review proceedings on six claims in the SysDB patent which the ITC found infringed.

For its part, Arista noted that the ITC ruled in its favor with respect to two of the five patents under investigation (U.S. Patent Nos. 7,290,164 and 7,340,597), finding that two accused Arista features do not infringe the asserted claims. Arista previously announced that it has released a new version of its EOS software containing design-arounds that it believes address the ITC’s findings with respect to the features implicated in the Final Determination. Arista said it intends to seek appropriate regulatory approvals for these design-arounds.

http://blogs.cisco.com/news/final-itc-determination
http://investors.arista.com/company/investors-relations/press-releases/press-release-details/2016/ITC-Issues-Final-Determination-in-944-Investigation/default.aspx


Huawei Marine Builds Cable Linking Kamchtka-Sakhalin

Rostelecom has authorized Huawei Marine to begin the construction of a 900-km submarine fiber cable connecting Kamchatka and Sakhalin.

The construction represents the second phase of the Far East cable system that connects the regions of Kamchatka-Sakhalin-Magadan.

Phase One connecting Sakhalin – Magadan was completed in 2015 along with the land-based  telecommunication network on the Kamchatka peninsula. This terrestrial network connects to the submarine cable in the area of Ust-Bolsheretzk, from where the submarine cable is buried beneath the seabed as it crosses the Okhotsk sea, connecting Ust-Bolsheretzk in Kamchatka with Okha residential point in Sakhalin.

http://www.huaweimarine.com/marine/marine/commonWeb.do?method=showContent&webId=487
http://www.rostelecom.ru/projects/FarEast_FOCL/

OpenDaylight Lauches TransportPCE Projects

Orange, with the support of Telia Company and AT&T, has initiated a new TransportPCE project within OpenDaylight.

The new Transport PCE project aims to make it easier to deploy multi-layer transport use cases using OpenDaylight, as well as IP/MPLS. The project will develop the first Transport PCE for L1 service requests and serve as a testing and validation means for network topology updates. The group said it seeks to foster broad adoption of common YANG data models for Layer 0/1 networks and devices.

https://www.opendaylight.org/news/foundation-news/2016/06/european-telecom-operators-orange-and-telia-take-leadership-role

Pica8 Adds Support for 25/50/100 GbE

Pica8 is rolling out a new version of its networking operating system for white box switches that adds support for 25/50/100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) networking.

PicOS supports ultra-fast networking on switches based on Cavium’s XPliant and Broadcom’s Tomahawk switch ASICs. These enhancements are incorporated into PicOS 2.7.1, which is now shipping on 100GbE white box switches from Edgecore Networks and Inventec.

In addition, PicOS 2.7.1 introduces AdvanceFlow, a set of features for more granular flow management and optimization that allows customer to achieve greater scale. This includes larger tables for L3 flows, controls for specifying hardware vs. software flows, and better integration of L2 and L3 tables into the memory tables of the switch.  These enhancements, along with the recent introduction of Table Type Patterns (see Pica8 Unlocks Last Open Networking Black Box at OCP), further solidify Pica8 as a brand leader in SDN scale and optimization for large-scale service provider deployments.

http://www.pica8.com/

Samsung and Red Hat Collaborate on NVMe + Ceph Storage

Samsung Electronics and Red Hat announced a high-performance, data center storage architecture that combines NVMe SSDs with Ceph.

Samsung said its NVMe Reference Design platform, together with Red Hat Ceph Storage, can deliver a highly scalable, more efficient TCO reference architecture that supports unified storage for enterprise IT or cloud environments in handling transactional databases, machine-generated data and unstructured data.

The combined storage solution – referred to as the Red Hat Ceph/Samsung Reference Architecture – can be deployed in an OpenStack environment to support the bandwidth, latency and IOPS requirements of high performance workloads and use cases, such as distributed MySQL databases, telco nDVR content retrieval and financial services. The Samsung NVMe Reference system is a dual-socket Xeon-based system with an EIA-compliant, 2RU chassis. It uses 4x 40Gb/s networking connectivity with remote direct memory access (RDMA).

“The data center community will appreciate the importance of the Red Hat Ceph/Samsung Storage Reference Architecture, as the harvesting of data analytics becomes a priority for businesses that want to better understand their customers and stay ahead of their competition,” said Jim Elliott, corporate vice president, memory marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc. “Data-driven companies in search of performance optimization in an OpenStack environment can benefit from the high performance offered by Red Hat Ceph Storage software and our NVMe Reference Design as a compliment to existing capacity-optimized infrastructure,” he added.

http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/support/tools-utilities/All-Flash-Array-Reference-Design/