Nokia Bell Labs, T-Labs and TU Munich Hit 1 Tbps w New Modulation

Nokia Bell Labs, Deutsche Telekom T-Labs and the Technical University of Munich have demonstrated a new modulation technique that achieved a net 1 Terabit per second transmission rate -  close to the theoretical maximum information transfer rate of that channel and thus approaching the Shannon Limit of the fiber link.

The trial, which was carried out as part of the Safe and Secure European Routing (SASER) project, used the optical fiber network of Deutsche Telekom. Bell Labs is calling the novel novel modulation approach "Probabilistic Constellation Shaping (PCS)."  It uses quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) formats to achieve higher transmission capacity over a given channel to significantly improve the spectral efficiency of optical communications. PCS modifies the probability with which constellation points - the alphabet of the transmission - are used. Traditionally, all constellation points are used with the same frequency. PCS cleverly uses constellation points with high amplitude less frequently than those with lesser amplitude to transmit signals that, on average, are more resilient to noise and other impairments. This allows the transmission rate to be tailored to ideally fit the transmission channel, delivering up to 30 percent greater reach.

Marcus Weldon, president Nokia Bell Labs & Nokia CTO, said:  "Future optical networks not only need to support orders of magnitude higher capacity, but also the ability to dynamically adapt to channel conditions and traffic demand. Probabilistic Constellation Shaping offers great benefits to service providers and enterprises by enabling optical networks to operate closer to the Shannon Limit to support massive datacenter interconnectivity and provide the flexibility and performance required for modern networking in the digital era."

https://www.bell-labs.com/

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Fujitsu and Fraunhofer HHI Develop Simultaneous Wavelength Conversion Technology

Fujitsu Laboratories and the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute HHI have developed a new method to simultaneously convert the wavelengths of wavelength-division-multiplexed signals.  The researchers have successfully tested the method using high-bandwidth signal transmission in the range of 1 Tbps.

Conventionally, optical wavelength conversion has worked by converting each individual optical wavelength into an electrical signal that is then re-transmitted at a new wavelength.  The researchers said this method is proving impractical for terabit-class processing, as each wavelength requires its own O/E/O circuit.

Using the new methos, the optical wavelength conversion and the polarization state are controlled at the same time, so simultaneous wavelength conversion of wide-band optical signals can be achieved without restrictions on the wavelengths of the optical input signal or the modulation formats. As a result, processing can be achieved with a single wavelength converter, regardless of the number of wavelengths multiplexed. Therefore, considering optical signals in excess of 1 Tbps multiplexed from ten wavelengths, for example, the new method can process them using just one-tenth of the power or less compared to previous technologies that required a separate circuit to convert each wavelength into an electrical signal and back.

http://www.fujitsu.com/jp/group/labs/en

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Acacia Debuts Long-haul Module for DCI

Acacia Communications introduced a new long-haul optical module solution as part of its AC100-CFP product family, which was initially launched in 2014 as a low power pluggable 100G optical transport solution targeted for metro and data center interconnect (DCI) applications.

Acacia’s new long-haul CFP-DCO model is based on Acacia’s latest silicon photonics integrated circuit (PIC) and contains an internal digital signal processor (DSP) chip.

In addition to improved receiver OSNR performance and 2500km of dispersion compensation, Acacia’s long-haul CFP-DCO module offers 37.5GHz channel spacing and supports passive multiplexing in CDC-ROADM applications.

Acacia also announced that more than 12 of its customers have adopted coherent solutions based on Acacia’s Dual-Core Flex-Rate Denali digital signal processor (DSP) for applications in data center interconnect, metro, long haul and submarine networks.

http://www.acacia-inc.com

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Oracles Targets IaaS Market with Bare Metal Servers

Oracle has set its sights on AWS, Azure and other infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers with the launch of bare metal cloud servers that it says are 11.5X faster and 20 percent cheaper than the fastest solution offered by the competition.

The new servers are deployed in a fully virtualized network environment and offer database-as-service, network block storage, object storage and VPN connectivity. In addition, Oracle Bare Metal Cloud Services provide a secure, private and high-performance software defined Virtual Cloud Network (VCN) that allows customers to treat Oracle Bare Metal Cloud Services as a secure and elastic extension of their on-premise network. The servers are designed to maximize network throughput by providing direct connectivity between compute and storage nodes.

Another new offering is the Oracle Ravello Cloud Service, which takes enterprise VMware and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) workloads and runs them in the public cloud without any changes. Customers can run VMware natively on public cloud without requiring VM conversion, application reconfiguration or networking changes. It is also allows enterprises to have full L2 and L3 networking flexibility in the public cloud.

The company is also introducing Oracle FastConnect, which provides secure connections from an enterprise data center to the Oracle Cloud. Connectivity options now include IPsec VPN, MPLS to connect to existing enterprise networks and Fast Connect for quick peering.

https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/iaas-cloud-offerings-091916.html

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IDC: Worldwide Server Market Revenue Declines 0.4% in Q2

Vendor revenue in the worldwide server market declined 0.4% year over year to $13.4 billion in the second quarter of 2016 (2Q16), according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker.

IDC attributed the slowing market to a pause in hyperscale datacenter expansion and the continued drag from high-end server sale declines. In addition, the robust enterprise refresh cycle of 2015 will create difficult comparisons in 2016 to the prior year’s quarterly results.

Some highlights:

• Worldwide server shipments increased 2.6% to 2.4 million units in 2Q16 when compared with the same year-ago period.
• On a year-over-year basis, volume system revenue increased 5.3% and midrange system demand increased 12.7% in 2Q16 to $10.6 billion and $1.3 billion, respectively. 
• Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) retained the number 1 spot in the worldwide server market with 25.4% market share in vendor revenue for 2Q16, as revenue decreased 0.3% year over year to $3.4 billion. 
• HPE's year-over-year growth rate as reported by IDC was impacted by the start of the H3C partnership in China that began in May of 2016; as a result, a portion of HPE-designed servers were rebranded as H3C for the China market. Had these systems been branded as HPE servers, their worldwide server market share would have been 26.6% in vendor revenue for the quarter as revenue increased 4.2% year over year to $3.6 billion. 
• Dell maintained its number 2 position in the worldwide server market, building on server revenue growth of 10.0% year over year to $2.6 billion, resulting in 19.3% vendor revenue market share in 2Q16. IBM retained the number 3 position with 9.8% share for the quarter as revenue decreased -34.0% year-over-year to $1.3 billion in 2Q16, as both POWER systems and system z mainframes experienced double-digit declines. 
• Lenovo and Cisco tied for the number 4 position for the second consecutive quarter with 7.2% and 6.4% market shares, respectively. Lenovo earned $969 million in revenues following an increase of 2.1%, while Cisco's revenues declined 0.7% year over year to $860 million.
• ARM sales have yet to make an impact on the server market.

"The server market is progressing exactly as expected, with close to flat growth in the second quarter, following a difficult first quarter, but growth in volume servers is still healthy, which is a good sign for the market moving forward," said Kuba Stolarski, research director, Computing Platforms at IDC. "As we prepare for the second half of 2016, expect to see market growth led by cloud datacenter buildouts from key hyperscalers. Looking out further, the market will be impacted by digital transformation initiatives, including the Internet of Things and cognitive computing, and by a continuing shift towards software-defined infrastructure."

http://www.idc.com

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Salesforce Embeds AI in its CRM Platform

Salesforce unveiled "Einstein" -- its artificial intelligence initiative for delivering more predictive and personalized customer experiences across its CRM platform.

The company plans to embed Einstein AI capabilities will be embedded across every Salesforce Cloud. The ideal is to leverage all the data in Salesforce—customer data; activity data from Chatter, email, calendar and ecommerce; social data streams such as tweets and images; and even IoT signals—to train predictive models.

The AI is powered by advanced machine learning, deep learning, predictive analytics, natural language processing and smart data discovery.  Salesforce said its AI allow models to be automatically customized for every single customer, with Einstein automatically discovering relevant insights, predicting future behavior, proactively recommending best next actions and even automating tasks.

One outcome is Predictive Lead Scoring, which aims to help sales reps focus on closing the best leads.

“With Salesforce Einstein, we are delivering the world's smartest CRM," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce. "Einstein is now every customer’s data scientist, making it easy for everyone to take advantage of best-in-class AI capabilities in the context of their business.”

http://sforce.co/2d0LYd7

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Mellanox and Oclaro Connect 100G PSM4 Silicon to 25Gb/s LR Transceivers

Mellanox Technologies has teamed up with Oclaro to connect Oclaro’s 1310nm LR (Long Reach) SFP28 transceiver line with Mellanox ’ 1550nm PSM4 transceivers, demonstrating the transparent interoperability between transceivers of differing wavelengths.

“Customers select PSM4 transceivers because they provide the most cost effective Ethernet links for reaches of 100m to 2km,” said Amir Prescher, senior vice president of business development, Mellanox Technologies. “We teamed up with industry leader Oclaro to demonstrate that PSM4 transceivers, with fiber breakout cables, can connect directly to four separate SFP28 LR transceivers. This enables next generation servers and storage appliances to be located anywhere in the data center or even across campus.”

“We are pleased to team with Mellanox Technologies to show our 1310nm LR transceivers working with Mellanox’s 1550nm transceivers,” said Yves LeMaitre, President, Optical Connectivity Business at Oclaro. “This illustrates the strength of our transceiver design as being capable of interoperating at multiple wavelengths.”

http://www.mellanox.com

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Vista Equity Partners to Privatize Infoblox

Vista Equity Partners plans to buy out Infoblox in a deal valued at $1.6 billion, or $26.50 per share of common stock in cash, which represents a 33% premium to Infoblox’s average closing share price over the last 60 trading days, and a 73% premium to Infoblox’s unaffected closing price as of May 11, 2016, when media reports of interest in acquiring Infoblox were first published.

“Vista has an excellent track record of supporting and adding value to technology companies, and we are thrilled to bring on a partner of their caliber and strategic expertise,” said Jesper Andersen, President and CEO of Infoblox. “This transaction will provide immediate and substantial value to Infoblox stockholders, while also giving Infoblox greater flexibility to execute on our long-term strategy to drive increased DDI automation and DNS security into the enterprise market. We are excited to begin our partnership with Vista and look forward to leveraging their operational insights as we continue to deliver the industry-leading products, solutions and customer service on which our customers rely.”

http://ir.infoblox.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=251270&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2204332

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Tech Data to Acquire Avnet's Technology Solutions Unit for $2.6B

Avnet, a leading global tech distributor, will sell its Technology Solutions operating group to Tech Data Corporation in a stock and cash transaction valued at approximately $2.6 billion.

Avnet’s Technology Solutions operating group is a global IT solutions distributor serving customers and suppliers in more than 80 countries. It provides next generation solutions, marketing, training, resources and services that span the cloud to the data center and encompass the entire IT lifecycle.

“This transformative transaction will position us as a premier global IT distributor with the most diverse end-to-end solutions from the data center to the living room,” said Bob Dutkowsky, chief executive officer of Tech Data. “Tech Data has competed with and admired Avnet Technology Solutions for many years. We’re thrilled to start this journey together and are confident that our customers, vendor partners, employees, and shareholders will appreciate and benefit from the value that we will bring to the market. We look forward to welcoming the Technology Solutions team to Tech Data and are excited for the opportunities that this combination creates.”

http://news.avnet.com/press-releases?item=127295

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Intel Appoints an Outsider as CFO

Intel announced the appointment of Robert “Bob” H. Swan as executive vice president and chief financial officer (CFO), replacing Stacy Smith, who, as previously announced, is taking a broader role within Intel leading manufacturing, sales and operations. Smith served nine years as Intel’s CFO.

Swan joins Intel from growth equity firm General Atlantic where he served as an operating partner. Previously, he served nine years as the CFO of eBay Inc. Before that, he was CFO at Electronic Data Systems Corp and at TRW Inc. He also served as CFO, COO and CEO of Webvan Group Inc.

http://www.intel.com

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