Facebook Expands Fort Worth Data Center to Five Buildings

Facebook revealed plans to expand its data center in Fort Worth, Texas from one building to five buildings on the same campus.

Construction on the first building is nearing completion. Facebook is now rolling racks of servers into the new building.

The facility will be powered by 100% renewable energy, thanks to the more than 200 MW of new wind power that we worked with Citigroup Energy, Alterra Power Corporation, and Starwood Energy Group to bring to the Texas grid.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/fort-worth-data-center/expanding-our-fort-worth-data-center-to-five-buildings/1187767507983650

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SC16 Opens in Salt Lake City

SC16, annual super computing confernce is underway this week, November 13-18, in Salt Lake City with with more than 12,000 conference exhibitors and attendees expected.

SCinet, the high-performance, experimental network built specifically for the conference, will deliver more than 5 Tbps of internal network bandwidth.

The Utah Education Network (UEN) and CenturyLink are partnering wtih SCinet to enable tens of 100 Gbps Ethernet circuits to bring 3.15 Tbps of Wide Area Network bandwidth to the convention center. UEN guides this collaboration with national and international research & education networks and commodity Internet providers.

For SC16, the SCinet team used more than $32 million in vendor-provided equipment and services. They also installed 56 miles of fiber optic cable and 200+ wireless access points that can support more than 10,000 simultaneous users on the conference wifi. The wireless network supports eduroam, the worldwide education roaming service, which allows anyone from participating institutions to securely access the protected wireless network using their home organization’s login credentials.

“SCinet is more than hardware and software; its unprecedented scale is achieved by volunteers and vendors from around the world,” said Corby Schmitz, SCinet chair and manager of network communications operations and support at the Argonne National Laboratory. “SCinet hardware is supplied by vendors, and then volunteers collaborate to design a network architecture that exists nowhere else in the world.”

Platinum vendor contributors: CenturyLink, Ciena, Cisco, Coriant, Corsa, ESnet, Infinera, Internet2, Juniper, Zayo
Gold vendor contributors: Arista, Brocade Communication Systems, UEN/CloudLab
Silver vendor contributors: ADVA, ECI Telecom, Gigamon, InMon, Ixia, Metaflow, Nokia, Reservoir, Spirent, Splunk, Viavi
Bronze vendor contributors: Cablexpress, Commscope, Leverage, Palo Alto, Puppet Labs, RedSeal

http://www.supercomputing.org

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MEF16: Accedian's Greg Spear on Performance Monitoring

Accedian Networks' Greg Spear describes the Proof-of-Concept focused on ensuring customer quality of experience for advanced network services.

The Carrier Ethernet demonstration, which was conducted at MEF16 in Baltimore with CenturyLink, focused on test & turn-up as well as performance monitoring at Layer 2 and Layer 3.

See video: https://youtu.be/LUhxWYjx0LE

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MEF16 - Colt's Mike Kopp on 100G Rollouts

Colt is excited about the 100G connectivity it is now able to deliver in some 200 data centers internationally, says Mike Kopp, VP of Channel Sales.  Delivering 100G capacity enables customers to scale up their cloud connectivity as required.

See video: https://youtu.be/_GwaqtEeZ-4

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IEEE Approves 802.3bz-2016 for 2.5 Gbps and 5.0 Gbps

IEEE has approved and published 802.3bz™-2016 - Standard for Ethernet Amendment: Media Access Control Parameters, Physical Layers and Management Parameters for 2.5 Gb/s and 5 Gb/s Operation.

The starndard supports Ethernet over structured twisted pair wiring beyond the 1 Gbps capability provided by the IEEE 802.3ab standard (1000BASE-T). It defines Ethernet Media Access Control (MAC) parameters, physical layer specifications, and management objects for the transfer of Ethernet format frames at 2.5 Gbps and 5 Gbps.

"The development team for IEEE 802.3bz-2016 has done a commendable job and responded quickly to a market demand that represents a huge cost savings for enterprises by allowing them to improve their network performance over existing cabling," said David Chalupsky, chair, IEEE 802.3bz 2.5G/5GBASE-T Task Force. “This project is yet another example of how IEEE 802.3 Standards development is quickly adapting to the changing needs of the Ethernet user community and playing a significant role in driving the Ethernet ecosystem forward.”

http://standards.ieee.org

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High-Speed Rail and CENIC Join Forces

The California High-Speed Rail Authority (Authority) and the Corporation for Education Networking Initiatives in California (CENIC) announced a partnership to expand the availability and accessibility of high-capacity broadband to communities and institutions throughout California.

As a part of the high-speed rail system corridor, the Authority and CENIC will create an ultra-fast broadband network, connecting into CENIC’s statewide research and education network, as well as to other public and private sector broadband networks.

The Authority and CENIC will jointly develop a strategic plan that will include network design, deployment, economics, operation and management. Furthermore, the Authority and CENIC will engage parties from private, public, and governmental sectors in the planning process to effectively serve this diverse region.

“This new network will provide needed connectivity for communities located near the high-speed rail system starting in the Central Valley,” said Authority Chief Executive Officer Jeff Morales. “This partnership and new network will advance economic development and public benefit, while generating ancillary revenue for the high-speed rail program,” said Morales.

http://hsr.ca.gov/docs/about/partnerships/mou/Cenic_MOU_2016.pdf
http://www.cenic.org

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Couchbase Powers Verizon Labs’ Next-Generation Enterprise IoT Platform

Couchbase announced that its NoSQL document-oriented database supports device management capabilities for millions of connected enterprise devices on Verizon Labs’ IoT platform.

The company said its technology was selected to support Verizon’s IoT platform because of its scale of deployment, flexible schema and ease-of-use.  The database enables enterprises to scale quickly to support billions of connected devices and to achieve sub-milliseconds latency lookup.

“Customer experience is the new competitive battlefield for IoT developers and providers,” wrote Bhavish Sood, research director at Gartner, et al. “The convergence of IoT and a data-driven approach toward customer experience allows enterprises to use sensor data in real time to offer greater personalization for products and services. It is the data generated by devices; collected at endpoints, gateways and in the cloud; and consumed in analytic applications that will enable enterprises to derive value from participating in IoT.”1

“The future of enterprise success in the Digital Economy will rely heavily on data management as enterprises’ mission-critical applications and devices become increasingly more connected,” said Bob Wiederhold, Couchbase CEO. “Couchbase is enabling some of the world’s most innovative enterprises to harness Verizon’s IoT network data in meaningful ways and to inform important business decisions vital for lasting success.”

http://www.couchbase.com/connect

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Viptela and LiveAction Develop Visibility Solution for SD-WAN

Viptela and LiveAction announced a joint solution for network visibility for SD-WAN deployment planning, operation and service assurance.

The Viptela SEN (Secure Extensible Network) platform allows organizations to “mix and match” private and public IP connections such as MPLS, wireless LTE/4G, broadband and Ethernet to meet application requirements based on geographic location, bandwidth and whether they are based in the branch office, campus, data center or cloud.

LiveAction's LiveNX is a visualization and analytics engine that can ingest any form of network generated metadata including flow, SNMP and IPFIX to qualify SD-WAN Return-On-Investment (ROI) by monitoring application traffic on an end-to-end basis in real time and retrospectively to identify changes associated with network problems.

The companies highlighted the following capabilities of the Viptela-LiveAction solution:

Planning: Select pilot sites when planning SD-WAN deployments, identify unsanctioned applications and end users, and establish network utilization baselines which are used for right-sizing

Deployment: Use LiveNX real-time visualization to verify Viptela SEN policies and assure services are not impacted in the event of brownouts or abnormal events

Management: Monitor bandwidth and visualize path control so network administrators can manage performance and mitigate problems before they affect users. Use reporting on business applications to manage and optimize voice and video communications. Easily visualize issues and fix with the click of a mouse.

http://www.liveaction.com
http://viptela.com


“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 th

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UNH-IOL Launches Three Time Sensitive Networking Consortiums

The University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) has launched three industry-specific time sensitive networking (TSN) consortiums – Automotive Networking, Industrial Networking, and ProAV Networking - designed to provide deterministic performance within standard Ethernet for real-time, mission critical applications.

UNH-IOL will provide high quality test plans, tools, and test beds for the consortiums.

TSN standards enable deterministic real-time communication over Ethernet, allowing solutions to be built to provide extremely precise, predictable timing across the network. By adding features to Ethernet such as time synchronization, ingress policing, seamless redundancy, frame preemption, scheduled traffic, and stream reservation, TSN ensures mission-critical, time sensitive data is not held up on the network, promoting an interoperable ecosystem spanning across many industries.

“Standards-based precise time, guaranteed bandwidth, and guaranteed worst-case latency in a converged Ethernet network is a game-changer to many industries,” said Bob Noseworthy, Chief Engineer, UNH-IOL. “Through UNH-IOL’s industry-specific TSN consortiums, companies can be at the forefront and drive the technology forward by validating their solutions with a full suite of testing services, which will allow applications such as self-driving cars and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to take off.”

https://www.iol.unh.edu/

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O3b Delivers 7 Gbps of Connectivity Across Africa

Since launching commercial service in September 2014, O3b Networks has brought up more than 18 African customers in Chad, Somalia, Madagascar, DRC, Congo, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Cameroon, and Angola. The company said these customers have contracted over 7Gbps of internet capacity, supplementing existing satellite links from GEO systems and, in many cases, fiber connections with limited reliability.

O3b is a satellite-based global network, but the company’s satellites are much closer to the earth than geostationary (GEO) satellites, reducing latency, increasing internet speed and improving voice and video quality. Internet and mobile data performance over the network rivals the throughput and latency of long-haul fiber, while avoiding the high costs of laying fiber cables across difficult terrain.

http://www.o3bnetworks.com/news-and-media/blog/

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Zayo Adds M. Catherine Morris to Board

Zayo Group Holdings announced that M. Catherine (Cathy) Morris was elected to the company’s Board of Directors, effective immediately.

Morris is the chief strategy officer of Arrow Electronics, leading its strategic initiatives, including global merger and acquisition activity. During her 20-year tenure at Arrow, she has held progressively senior roles in computing solutions, finance and corporate development. She joined Arrow in 1994 through its acquisition of Anthem Electronics, where she was vice president of finance and corporate controller. Prior to Arrow, Morris held various financial leadership roles in the banking and manufacturing industries.

http://www.zayo.com

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