Tuesday, July 26, 2016

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

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)


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

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

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.

Juniper Posts Q2 Revenue of $1.221 Billion - Flat YoY

Juniper Networks reported Q2 2016 revenue of $1.221.3 billion, flat year-over-year and an increase of 11% sequentially. Juniper posted GAAP net income of $140.0 million, a decrease of 11% year-over-year and an increase of 53% sequentially. GAAP diluted earnings per share for the second quarter of 2016 was $0.36. The company's GAAP operating margin for the second quarter of 2016 was 16.7%, a decrease from 19.9% in the second quarter of 2015, and an increase from 13.5% in the first quarter of 2016.

"Despite an uncertain macro environment, we delivered solid revenue performance and profitability metrics in the second quarter," said Rami Rahim, chief executive officer at Juniper Networks. "There is no shortage of appetite for network innovation. Our diversification strategy and differentiated portfolio enabled us to deliver sequential growth across all geographies, technologies and sectors. We remain as committed as ever to innovating for our customers and to executing with excellence in everything we do."

http://www.juniper.net

LogMeIn to Merge with Citrix's GoTo Meeting

LogMeIn will merge with Citrix's GoTo business in a transaction valued at approximately $1.8 billion based on shares to be issued and LogMeIn's closing price of $65.31 as of July 25, 2016.

The deal combines two popular applications for collaborating online. The combined company is expected to have annual revenues in excess of $1 billion with more than two million customers.
The companies cited cost saving synergies of $65 million within the first year post-close, and run rate cost synergies of more than $100 million in year two.

Bill Wagner, President and CEO of LogMeIn, who will lead the combined company as President and CEO, commented, “We are extremely excited about this transformative merger and the profound benefits it will bring to our customers, our people and our shareholders.  Both companies have passionate employees who are committed to developing easy-to-use software that simplifies the way we connect with people, devices, apps and products.  The additional scale of the combined company will allow us to accelerate innovation in order to deliver better outcomes for our customers and also creates a compelling financial model that will reward our shareholders.”

Kirill Tatarinov, President and Chief Executive Officer of Citrix, said, “We believe this combination is a winning outcome for all parties. Both LogMeIn and GoTo have a shared goal of developing innovative solutions to exceed customer expectations by simplifying business and personal communications. Given that we have already been working towards a spinoff of GoTo, we expect this to be a smooth transition for the business. From Citrix's perspective, this transaction will allow us to further enhance our strategic focus, operational efficiency and accelerate execution of our strategy to provide the world's best integrated technology services for secure delivery of apps and data.”

http://www.citrix.com
http://www.logmein.com

Analog Devices to Buy Linear Tech for $14.8 Billion

Analog Devices agreed to acquire Linear Technology for $14.8 billion in cash and stock.

The combined company would be the the premier global high-performance analog industry leader.  The combined entity would have a market cap of $30 billion.

Linear Technology, which is based in Milpitas, California, produces power management, data conversion, signal conditioning, RF and interface ICs, µModule subsystems, and wireless sensor network products.  Target markets include communications, networking, industrial, automotive, computer, medical, instrumentation, consumer, and military and aerospace systems.

Analog Devices, which is based in Norwood, MA, produces data converters, amplifiers and linear products, radio frequency (RF) ICs, power management products, sensors based on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology and other sensors, and processing products, including DSP and other processors.

http://www.analog.com/

China's LeEco to Acquire Vizio for US TV Set Business

LeEco, a Beijing-based technology company and one of the largest online video companies in China, agreed to acquire Vizio for $2 billion. The deal includes all of the VIZIO hardware and software operations, technology and intellectual property.

Vizio, which is based in Irvine, California and founded in 2002, is a leading consumer electronics brand in North America, with #1 unit share in Smart TVs and #1 unit share in Sound Bars.

“Fourteen years ago, I mortgaged my house to start VIZIO and since then, it has grown into one of the most well-known and respected CE brands in North America. As an entrepreneur, I couldn’t be more proud of what has been accomplished,” said William Wang, Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, VIZIO.

http://www.leeco.com/