Predictions 2017: VMware's Lee Caswell on Virtualized Storage

What's new with storage? For many networking industry insiders, storage has been a sleepy area for the past decade or so.  Not anymore, says Lee Caswell, VP of Storage and Availability Products at VMware.

Flash technology, combined with hyper-converged software, are now putting stress on networks. Its now the fastest growing product inside VMware. Here's a perspective for 2017.

See video: https://youtu.be/pxpnqiJYO-E

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AT&T Delivers 5G to Intel's Austin Office

AT&T has initiated its first customer trial of 5G service.  The carrier is now delivering a 5G connection to Intel's office in Austin, Texas, using using millimeter wave (mmWave) spectrum and equipment from Ericsson.

AT&T said the connection delivers more than 1 Gbps of bandwidth for testing multiple, enterprise proof-of-concept use cases, including Internet access, VPN, Unified Communications applications and 4K video streams.

“This trial is a significant step forward. We’re leaving the lab and heading into the field with a real-world business customer,” said Rick Hubbard, senior vice president – Networking Product Management, AT&T. “We expect mmWave technology to be an important part of 5G. The trial will help accelerate our 5G work by shedding new light on how the technology acts in a business environment.”

http://about.att.com/story/att_launches_first_5g_business_customer_trial_with_intel_and_ericsson.html

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AT&T Prices 1 Gbps Service in Chicago area at $70 per Month

AT&T is now offering a 1 Gbps Internet service over its 100% fiber network in the Chicagoland area for $70 a month.  AT&T Internet 100 is also available on the network for $60 a month.

AT&T said its 100% fiber Internet service has spread quickly across Chicagoland since launching in April 2015. The carrier now offers the served to over 150,000 customer locations in the Chicago area.

“This is an aggressive offer. Our enhanced price for the area comes at a time when other providers are doubling the price of their service or failing to meet their commitment to connect Chicago,” said Cheryl Choy, vice president, data and voice products at AT&T.

http://www.att.com

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Yahoo! JAPAN Interconnects Data Centers with Infinera Cloud Xpress

Yahoo! JAPAN, one of the largest portal sites in Japan, has deployed the Infinera Cloud Xpress to interconnect its data centers in Osaka. Yahoo! JAPAN also uses the Infinera XTM Series in its metro networks.

Infinera partner ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation provides Yahoo! JAPAN information technology solutions and data center maintenance services.

Infinera's Cloud Xpress leverages the company's photonic integrated circuit technology to deliver a 500 Gb/s super-channel over 150km km without additional multiplexers and amplifiers. The Cloud Xpress incorporates Infinera’s Instant Bandwidth technology to allow customers to software-activate line-side bandwidth in 100 Gb/s increments as and when needed, closely matching their end-customer demands. In addition, the Cloud Xpress is designed for plug-and-play installation with simplified provisioning and support for data center automation using open software defined networking (SDN) application programming interfaces (APIs).

“Yahoo! JAPAN's deployment of the Cloud Xpress is made possible by the collaboration of our partner ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation, offering its customers the best solutions for data center interconnect as DCI applications become more pervasive across the globe,” said Andrew Bond-Webster, Vice President, Regional Sales APAC at Infinera. “The compact design, ease of use and scalability of Cloud Xpress and the XTM Series stand out in metro data center interconnect applications where data center operators need to grow capacity rapidly while minimizing the cost of space and power.”

https://www.infinera.com/yahoo_japan_deploys_infinera_cloud_xpress_for_data_center_interconnect

Infinera Debuts Cloud Xpress 2 for Data Center Interconnect

Wednesday, September 21, 2016  #Cloud, DCI, Infinera  No Comments

Infinera introduced its second generation Cloud Xpress platform for scalable 100 gigabit Ethernet (100GbE) data center interconnect (DCI) over multi-terabit optical links. The platform is aimed at connecting cloud data centers, which are rapidly migrating to 25 GbE server uplinks and 100 GbE fabrics between server racks. Infinera, which was first to market with a purpose-built compact DCI product in 2014, said its new Cloud Xpress 2 raises the bar...

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NTT Com's RagingWire Plans Massive Ashburn Data Center Expansion

RagingWire Data Centers, a subsidiary of NTT Communications (NTT Com), will invest $160 million to build the new Ashburn VA3 Data Center in the heart of the famed ‘Data Center Alley’ in Ashburn, Virginia.

The VA3 Data Center with 245,000 square feet of space and 16 megawatts of power, is scheduled to be available by the end of 2017. The company said this "phase one" expansion could be further extended.  The campus could accommodate six buildings on the 76.5 acre site in Ashburn.

The VA3 Data Center joins RagingWire’s VA1 and VA2 data centers, which also are in Ashburn. The combination of VA1, VA2 and VA3 creates a data center footprint of over a half million square feet of space and 44.4 megawatts of power, and includes on-site security officers and multi-layered security systems, highly efficient cooling and carrier-neutral telecommunications, and direct connectivity to top cloud providers and other data centers in Data Center Alley. On a wider scale, VA3 will grow RagingWire’s existing 1.2-million-square-foot U.S data center platform, which includes CA1, CA2, and CA3 in Northern California and TX1 in Dallas, Texas, as well as NTT Com’s global data center services platform operated under the Nexcenter TM brand.

“The Ashburn VA3 Data Center raises the bar for data center colocation in the largest data center market in the world,” said George Macricostas, Chairman, CEO and founder of RagingWire Data Centers. “VA3 offers mission-critical performance, flexible configurations for hyperscale cloud and enterprise deployments, exceptional customer amenities and global integration with NTT Com’s growing portfolio of over 140 data centers around the world.”

“NTT Communications is proud to be investing in RagingWire’s VA3 Data Center and Ashburn Data Center Campus,” said Tetsuya Shoji, President and CEO of NTT Communications. “Virginia is the top data center market in the world and a strategic location for NTT Com as we expand our data center capacity. RagingWire’s VA3 Data Center will be a key platform for the NTT family of companies to deliver global information and communications (ICT) solutions that enable our customers to digitalize their businesses.”

http://www.ragingwire.com

RagingWire to Double its Ashburn Data Center Campus

Friday, October 24, 2014  Data Centers, NTT Com  No Comments

RagingWire Data Centers will begin construction on a 140,000 sq. ft. data center facility with 14MW of highly available power as part of its Ashburn, Virginia campus. The addition is a two-story building that nearly doubles the size of RagingWire’s Ashburn, Virginia campus to 290,000 sq. ft.. RagingWire opened its first data center in Ashburn, Virginia in July 2012, a 150,000 sq. ft. facility called VA1, and has purchased 78 acres of land in...

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Arista's AlgoMatch Targets Advanced Network Enforcement

Arista Networks introduced an advanced network enforcement mechanism for providing customers with more flexible and scalable access control, telemetry and secure cloud networking.

Arista AlgoMatch combines general purpose memory technology with advanced software algorithms. The company said its AlgoMatch innovation provides more scale, performance and efficiency compared to TCAMs (Ternary Content Addressable Memories) commonly used in traditional silicon chipset architecture. AlgoMatch provides a packet matching algorithm that enables flow matching for access control, policy and visibility. Benefits include a high performance network policy engine with increased functionality and scale delivered in a cost and power efficient manner.

The company also introduced its new Arista 7160 Series 25/100GbE programmable platforms, including three models, all featuring 25/100GbE ports. The new platform delivers operational consistency and automated efficiency through the same common Arista EOS (Extensible Operating System) and CloudVision software.

The 7160 Series is available in three models:

• 7160-32CQ - 32 x 100GbE, 1RU, or 128 x 25GbE with 6.4Tbps of performance
• 7160-48YC6 - 48 x 25GbE, 6 x 100GbE with 3.6Tbps of performance
• 7160-48TC6 - 48 x 10GbE BASE-T, 6 x 100GbE and 2.16Tbps of performance

“25GbE offers a 2.5X performance improvement over 10GbE at a significant price-per-gigabit discount while using the same cabling infrastructure,” said Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research. “Unrelenting traffic growth, large scale cloud adoption and the recent release of the IEEE standard are already starting to drive the demand for server networking upgrades to speeds of 25, 50 and 100GbE where we expect combined shipments to surpass two million ports by 2017. This, in-turn, is fueling the strong demand for next generation 25GbE and 100GbE switches.”

AlgoMatch will ship on the Arista 7160 Series in Q1 2017.

https://www.arista.com/

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Datrium Lands $55 Million for Open Convergence Platform

Datrium, a start-up based in Sunnyvale, California, secured $55 million in Series C funding for its Open Convergence platform for cloud builders.

Datrium said its converges storage and compute in a radical new way, modeled on public cloud IaaS services instead of traditional 3-tier infrastructure or hyperconvergence.

“Storage arrays are a dying market, but for most datacenters hyperconverged infrastructure is too inefficient and siloed to replace much of it,” said Brian Biles, CEO of Datrium.  “Clouds need elastic data services that scale efficiently in a heterogeneous datacenter landscape.  Datrium is the first vendor to bring the Open Convergence vision to life, splitting elastic data services from efficient data persistence.  DVX is available for VMware today in the US and Japan, and we are excited to broaden our reach with this new investment.”

The new funding round was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), with return investment by Lightspeed Venture Partners, as well as funding from a third, outside investor.  This bring total funding at Datrium to more than $110 million.

The company cited rapid growth for its Datrium DVX platform, which was introduced in Q1. Some milestones:

• Customer Adoption: More than 50 companies in banking, cloud hosting, health care, public sector, manufacturing, media & entertainment and technology leaders have deployed Datrium in two full quarters of availability.
• NVMe Adoption: NVMe-based DVX systems have been deployed by multiple customers since Q1 2016.
• Pace of Innovation: Three major releases in seven months. In addition to Datrium DVX General Availability in January,  Datrium has released Insane Mode in May, an on-demand VM acceleration utility that doubles performance with the touch of a button, as well as Performance Density in August, which doubled per-server flash to 100 terabytes for both SATA/SAS and PCIe/NVMe flash.
• Go-to-Market Growth: Authorized go-to-market partners has soared to 80 companies in North America and Asia today and growing.

http://www.datrium.com

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