Thursday, September 22, 2016

Digital Realty Launches Cloud Service Exchange

Digital Realty is launching Service Exchange, an interconnection platform that facilitates direct, private and secure connections from clients in its data center to multiple cloud service providers – including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure – as well as telecommunications providers and other Digital Realty customers worldwide.


The new Service Exchange, which is powered y Megaport, provides the elastic, SDN-based Ethernet fabric that enables interconnection between cloud providers and Digital Realty customers. An online portal will enable Digital Realty customers to actively manage multiple virtual private connections ("Virtual Cross Connects") to cloud operators and service providers.

Digital Realty said its new Service Exchange will be available in 24 data centers across 15 markets by mid-year 2017, beginning with Atlanta , Chicago , Dallas , Los Angeles , New York , San Francisco , Seattle and Ashburn, VA in the fourth quarter of 2016. Service Exchange will be available in London and Phoenix in the first quarter of 2017, and in Amsterdam , Dublin , Miami , Singapore and Portland in the second quarter of 2017.
About Digital Realty

"We're delighted to partner with Megaport to bring customers enhanced, easy-to-use interconnection services and SDN-enabled flexibility to their IT operations," said Chris Sharp , Digital Realty's Chief Technology Officer. "The Service Exchange creates a simple, flexible and scalable solution for our customers, including those looking to make, jump-start or accelerate their digital transformations."

"We look forward to working with Digital Realty on this pioneering initiative," said Denver Maddux , Megaport's Chief Executive Officer. "Service Exchange is fully integrated with Megaport's ubiquitous elastic fabric, which enables Digital Realty customers around the world to easily access the newest interconnection services and cloud network solutions. Megaport and Digital Realty have partnered to bring services, capabilities, SDN-enabled flexibility, and a great customer experience to IT operations in every business segment. Digital Realty has a longstanding tradition of enabling rapid scalability through its global infrastructure platform, and these benefits are now being complemented by Megaport's similarly scalable interconnection platform. The combination of these capabilities creates an innovative offering for the industry."

https://www.digitalrealty.com



What does the future of Internet Exchange points look like? Software will bring new capabilities.

Digital Realty to Acquire Telx for Data Centers and Internet Exchanges

Digital Realty Trust agreed to acquire Telx, a national provider of data center colocation, interconnection and cloud enablement solutions, for $1.886 billion from private equity firms ABRY Partners and Berkshire Partners.

The combination is expected to double Digital Realty's footprint in the rapidly-growing colocation business, as well as provide Digital Realty customers access to a leading interconnection platform.

As of March 31, 2015, Telx managed 1.3 million square feet of data center space operating out of 20 facilities across the country, of which two are Telx-owned, 11 are leased from Digital Realty, one is partially sub-leased from Digital Realty and an unrelated third party, and six are leased from third parties. Telx's flagship facilities include its NYC1 data center at 60 Hudson Street in Manhattan, which serves as a nerve center for international communications and offers access to physical connection points to the world’s telecommunications networks and Internet backbones. Telx occupies multiple floors at 60 Hudson with interconnectivity to more than 400 carriers, financial exchanges and application, media, content, and software-as-a-service providers with just a single connection. Telx operates other NYC data centers at 111 8th Ave. and 32 Avenue of the Americas (6th Ave).

As of March 31, 2015, Digital Realty's portfolio consisted of 130 properties, including 14 properties held as investments in unconsolidated joint ventures, comprised of approximately 22.1 million square feet, excluding approximately 1.2 million square feet of space under active development and 1.3 million square feet of space held for future development, located throughout North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

Yahoo Cites State Actor for Massive Security Breach

Yahoo believes a state-sponsored actor breached its network in late 2014 and may have stole names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (the vast majority with bcrypt) and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers from at least 500 million accounts.

Yahoo said its ongoing investigation suggests that stolen information did not include unprotected passwords, payment card data, or bank account information.

http://www.yahoo.com


New Jersey Fiber Exchange Builds Tier 3 Colocation on the Shore

New Jersey Fiber Exchange (NJFX) officially commissioned its new 64,800-aquare-foot, Tier 3, carrier-neutral data center that intersects where subsea cables from around the globe meet on the New Jersey coast.

NJFX has operated the exclusive carrier-neutral Meet-Me-Room (MMR) inside Tata Communications cable landing station (CLS) in Wall, New Jersey for the past year.  The new facility builds this out to a data center campus with 250 fiber conduits connecting the new data center to the MMR.

NJFX said its key advantages include:

  • Direct Connectivity to leading service providers within Tata’s CLS and secured express routes with several facility-based carriers
  • Direct Access to robust international capacity and the availability of Tier 1 ISP services with multiple fiber-based providers offering regional, national and independent international networks
  • Interconnection Options, at the cable head-end, for service providers, enterprises, carrier-neutral operators and cable companies without recurring cross-connect fees
  • Direct Peering and the ability to design high-capacity, low latency networks directly to and from the cable head, minimizing the need for traditional backhaul connectivity. This removes a detour to New York City, eliminates choke points and lowers cost and latency. 

http://www.njfx.net/



Level 3 Launches Adaptive Threat Intelligence Service

Level 3 Communications is launching an Adaptive Threat Intelligence service that provides customized threat intelligence and alerting for customers. The cloud-based service leverages Level 3's expansive view of worldwide Internet traffic and a broad view of risks. The solution distills actual communications, indicators of compromise (IoC), between customers and bad actors.

The company said the new offer works as follows:

  • Adaptive Threat Intelligence is a one-stop shop for customers. They no longer have to purchase reputation feeds for malicious activity, manage on-premises boxes or have in-house resources to correlate threat data and identify risks on their network.
  • Adaptive Threat Intelligence is a cloud-based service that handles these requirements, providing a personalized, ranked list of actual malicious communications, no hardware needed.
  • Sampled customer data is correlated against known malicious communications using Level 3 proprietary analysis from threat data sources, including its DNS, CDN and MSS infrastructure, and third-party data.
  • Customers receive near real-time alerts for correlated events on their network.
  • Level 3 SOC experts are available to provide additional context, and if needed, to mitigate threats or escalating Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
  • The interactive near-real time reporting system also provides historical views for additional analysis.

"Investigating threats using intelligence or reputation feeds is painful for customers. They need a smart filter for their security alerts to help them understand their priorities and to allocate resources. We correlate and prioritize live communications and rank the potential risks for customers, taking the burden off their IT and security teams so they can focus on their core business initiatives," stated Anthony Christie, Chief Marketing Officer, Level 3.

http://news.level3.com/

Cisco and Salesforce Set Alliance

Cisco and Salesforce announced a strategic alliance under which the two companies will jointly develop and market solutions that join Cisco’s collaboration, IoT and contact center platforms with Salesforce Sales Cloud, IoT Cloud and Service Cloud.

New integrations will include:

  • Collaboration: Cisco and Salesforce will natively integrate Cisco Spark and WebEx into Sales Cloud and Service Cloud via the Salesforce Lightning Framework. With this integration, joint customers will be able to communicate in real-time using chat, video, and voice without leaving Salesforce or having to install a plug-in, eliminating the hassle of toggling between apps.
  • IoT Services: Cisco Jasper and the Salesforce IoT Cloud will integrate to provide visibility, control and recommended customer actions for connected devices, providing businesses with a more comprehensive and intelligent view of their IoT services. Cisco Jasper provides real-time visibility into launching, managing and monetizing IoT devices at every stage of their lifecycle. The Salesforce IoT Cloud connects billions of IoT events with Salesforce, unlocking insights from the connected world that empower anyone to take the right action, for the right customer, at the right time. 
  • Customer Service: The two market leaders in customer service are teaming up to deliver a complete customer service solution, from communications infrastructure to an integrated, intelligent agent desktop experience. 
“Cisco wants to deliver simple, magical experiences. Our goal is for technology to fade into the background so people can get their best work done,” said Rowan Trollope, SVP and GM of IoT and Applications Groups, Cisco. “Cisco and Salesforce coming together to form a strategic alliance can eliminate the friction users experience today so they can become more productive.”

https://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=1791687

Openreach Picks Huawei and Nokia for G.fast Rollout

BT's Openreach division has selected Huawei and Nokia to provide a range of equipment in support of its ultrafast broadband roll out across the UK. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The companies, which have been working with Openreach on the world’s largest trials of G.fast technology in Huntingdon, Gosforth and Swansea, will provide cutting edge switches, modems and cabinet ‘side pods’ to help deliver download speeds up to 330 Mbps – more than 20 times the current UK average – to 10 million homes and businesses by the end of 2020.

The new kit will be rolled out in parts of Gillingham and Cherry Hinton later this year and will help Openreach deliver its ambition of getting ultrafast broadband of at least 100Mbps to 12 million premises in the same timeframe, and the majority of the UK by the end of 2025.

Clive Selley, Openreach CEO, said: “Openreach is pioneering G.fast technology because we want to get affordable ultrafast speeds to as many people as possible in the fastest possible time.

“We also want to deliver this next generation of broadband services in the most efficient and least disruptive way – so it is a testament to our world leading R&D team that they’ve managed to define and drive new standards with operators and equipment manufacturers around the globe.

Openreach noted that more than 91% of homes and businesses in the UK currently have access to speeds of 24 Mbps and above, whilst the Openreach fibre network is available to more than 25 million homes and businesses. More than 100 different communications providers (CPs) are offering services over the company’s open wholesale fibre network, and all CPs will have access to these new ultrafast services under the same terms, conditions and pricing.

http://www.btplc.com/news/#/pressreleases/openreach-selects-huawei-and-nokia-to-support-its-ultrafast-broadband-roll-out-1572100

BT to Offer Microsoft Azure Services

BT is set to launch a "Compute for Microsoft Azure" service that allows BT customers to order Microsoft Azure alongside BT’s own cloud services through its Compute Management System (CMS) online management tool. The service enables customers to build hybrid cloud infrastructure with a single service wrap, contract and on a single bill.

BT customers already use private and public cloud services – also known as hybrid cloud - hosted in BT Compute’s 48 data centres globally. With BT acting as their cloud services integrator, and by using CMS, customers can manage their cloud services end-to-end from datacentre to network, maximising the benefits and minimising the complexity, risk and costs of moving to the cloud. Using local delivery with global scale allows BT to meet the evolving needs of organisations for cloud services and at the same time address the complexity of regulatory requirements.

BT said integration of Microsoft Azure into its CMS expands choice for BT customers. They gain access to Microsoft’s rapidly growing collection of integrated cloud services, including leading Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) computing capabilities.

http://www.btplc.com/news/#/pressreleases/bt-joins-forces-with-microsoft-to-simplify-hybrid-cloud-1570135

Viptela Extends SD-WAN to Microsoft Azure

Viptela is extending its Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) platform to enable customers to extend their Wide Area Network (WAN) into the Microsoft Azure public cloud environment. An

Enterprise can now treat their Azure Virtual Network (VNET) resource as a branch and benefit from all the SD-WAN capabilities offered by the Viptela platform. All Viptela elements can also be deployed on a Hyper-V hypervisor.

Viptela said its SD-WAN platform provides ubiquitous connectivity, zero-trust security, end-to-end segmentation with application aware SLA and QoS policies for enterprise WANs that span data centers, branches, remotes offices and cloud resources. It enables organizations to mix and match a variety of connections from different service providers including MPLS, broadband, 3G/4G LTE, satellite and point-to-point links and manage them as a single network. With Viptela, cloud applications running on Microsoft Azure provide the same user experience as if they were hosted in a company’s own data centers.

“Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Skype for Business are pervasive application services used by our customers,” said Ramesh Prabagaran, Vice President of Product Management for Viptela. “The ability of the Viptela SD-WAN platform to integrate Enterprise WANs with Azure public cloud resources, creates one ubiquitous, optimized and easy to manage connectivity fabric.”

http://www.viptela.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...


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...

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...