Nokia announces strategic collaboration with AWS

Nokia has entered into a strategic collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) that could shake up the market.

The partnership is aimed at accelerating the migration of service provider applications to the cloud and drive digital innovation for large enterprise customers. AWS continues to hold the position of largest public cloud provider

Nokia said the agreement with AWS covers four areas of collaboration:

Nokia will support service providers in their AWS implementation strategy with a complete suite of services including consulting, design, integration, migration and operation for infrastructure and applications.
Nokia and AWS will work together to generate new 5G and Edge Cloud strategies and guidance for customers including reference architectures that enable both service providers and enterprises to benefit.
Nokia and AWS are working to bring an improved user experience for Nuage Networks SD-WAN customers who use AWS. Enterprises can benefit from this seamless integration with AWS and launch secure branch connectivity in hybrid environments with "Single Pane of Glass" capabilities.
Finally, the companies are commercializing IoT use cases with AWS Greengrass, Amazon Machine Learning, Nokia Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) and Nokia IMPACT platform.

"The 4th Industrial Revolution requires a tighter integration between the IT and networking infrastructure worlds. Our collaboration with AWS will accelerate the migration of service provider applications to the cloud and enable us to forge new opportunities together by delivering on next-generation connectivity and cloud services. This is a wide-ranging collaboration, spanning our services capabilities in application migration, SD-WAN from Nuage Networks, 5G, and IoT, allowing new growth opportunities for our top customers across both the service provider and large enterprise market segments," stated Kathrin Buvac, Nokia's Chief Strategy Officer.

"Service providers are accelerating their migration to AWS in order to drive innovation for their customers and deliver lower total cost of IT to their organizations. We are excited to partner with Nokia to accelerate cloud transformation for service providers, and enable the digital transformation journey for our mutual large enterprise customers," added Terry Wise, Global Vice President of Channels and Alliances, AWS.

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Fujitsu launches SD-WAN-as-a-Service with Silver Peak

Fujitsu Network Communications introduced an SD-WAN-as-a-Service based on the Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnectSP SD-WAN solution.

The solution, which is driven by the Fujitsu SDN/NFV Consulting Service and Managed Network Service practices, aims to help service providers to launch SD-WAN for their enterprise customers.

Fujitsu is offering a subscription based, pay-as-you-grow model that minimizes the service provider’s investment and operational costs. It is managed by
the Fujitsu Network Operations Center (NOC) and complies with service provider’s requirements for security, reliability, availability and scalability.

Silver Peak's Unity EdgeConnectSP SD-WAN solution consists of physical and virtual appliances. It also feautuers a multi-tenant Unity OrchestratorSP that can streamline service management for thousands of customers. It also sports an optional Unity Boost WAN optimization performance pack, as well as zero-touch provisioning of physical or virtual SD-WAN Edges.

Fujitsu said a key advantage of its SD-WAN-as-a-service is that allows service providers to quickly enter the SD-WAN market without a long testing and rollout timeline.

See video on SD-WAN-as-a-service with Ralph Santitoro
https://youtu.be/iTWO-2NakVY

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GTT announces low-latency routes, time synchronization service

GTT Communications is now offering ultra-low latency transport services to key financial centers in Latin America, Asia and Africa. These include New York to Mexico City, Hong Kong to Tokyo, Hong Kong to Singapore, Mumbai to Singapore, and Johannesburg to London. The new routes run on GTT’s recently launched Ethernet Direct service platform, which is highly scalable and customizable to meet unique capacity, diversity and latency performance requirements. The company is offering a latency service level agreement on these routes.

GTT is also launching a Time Synchronization service, offering clients a single source of time across their entire trading infrastructure. This can be used to correlate data sets and time-stamp trade executions within sub-microsecond Coordinated Universal Time accuracy.

“Our new ultra-low latency routes and Time Synchronization service build upon GTT’s leadership and commitment to the financial services sector,” stated Rick Calder, GTT president and CEO. “Clients can benefit from enhanced reach throughout the global financial trading ecosystem, as well as unparalleled latency, security and accuracy, providing them with immediate access to financial trading information and a competitive advantage.”

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Interoute launches Edge SD-WAN service

Interoute launched its "Edge SD-WAN" service, which leverages the company's global Cloud Fabric of interconnected data centers as well as public and private access networks to improve application performance.

Interoute said its Edge SD-WAN ensures application traffic is directed over the fastest routes without impacting availability or needing costly, unused backup circuits. It also supports WAN optimization.  The integrated network acceleration uses de-duplication and compression to reduce bandwidth requirements and deliver non-business critical traffic using a secure tunnel over the public internet. Low priority public internet activity is also passed through Interoute SD-WAN Edge Connect to ensure it is secure.

“Interoute Edge SD-WAN is bringing new levels of optimised application performance in the cloud,” explained Mark Lewis, Executive Vice President of Products and Development at Interoute. “As more applications move to the cloud, enterprise users can be forced to take an indirect route across the global internet to access those apps, resulting in increased latency and poor performance. Interoute Edge SD-WAN combined with Interoute’s Cloud Fabric Software Defined core ensures that traffic takes the fastest and most direct route, optimising throughput and ultimately cloud application performance. It provides access to public and private computing combined with accelerated access to other applications elsewhere in the cloud.”

Interoute’s global Cloud Fabric interconnects its 17 VDC (Virtual Data Centre) Cloud Zones, co-location facilities, Points of Presence (PoP) and third-party cloud providers with an ultra-low latency private network backbone.

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Deep Blue Cable plans a more extensive Caribbean subsea cable network

Deep Blue Cable, which is the developer, owner and operator of a subsea fibre-optic system that will provide connectivity across the Caribbean islands and the Americas, announed plans for an extension to Colombia and Panama, as well as expand to additional landing points throughout the region.

The extension to Colombia and Panama will necessitate an adjustment to the project timeline. Deep Blue said route survey activities will commence in Q1 2018, with manufacturing and installation continuing through 2018 and into 2019.

Deep Blue is also considering the design of the network in view of the recent extreme weather events in the region, seeking ways to mitigate any future environmental and connectivity concerns. The projected Ready for Service date of the Deep Blue subsea cable system is Q2 2020.

The new Deep Blue subsea cable design spans nearly 12,000 km with initial landing points in 14 markets throughout the region, including the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Colombia, Curaçao, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Panama, Puerto Rico, Trinidad & Tobago, and Turks & Caicos Islands, with dual diverse landings in the U.S., which will include the first landing of a cable on the Gulf Coast of Florida.  Plans call for up to 8 fibre pairs with an initial capacity of 6 Tbps, and ultimate capacity of approximately 20 Tbps per fibre pair.

“With the planned extension of our subsea fibre-optic cable system to Colombia and Panama, Deep Blue underscores its commitment to the long-term solution of providing advanced subsea connectivity across the Caribbean islands and to the Americas,” commented Stephen Scott, CEO of Deep Blue Cable.  “The Deep Blue subsea cable network will have a profound impact not only on the communications ecosystem of the Caribbean, but also on the economic growth potential of an underserved region. Now more than ever, the Caribbean needs resilient communications infrastructure.”

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EXFO intros pocket-sized tester

EXFO introduced its EX1, a pocket-sized solution enabling technicians to measure subscribers’ real-life throughput — up to full line rate Gigabit Ethernet — using Speedtest by Ookla.

The multipurpose and portable EX1 offers active testing capabilities for service lifecycle testing and continuous- or on-demand performance monitoring at points of contention.

“The EX1 is a powerful tool to validate that speed promised is speed delivered. Technicians can simply connect to the EX1 through their smart device for a true untethered testing experience,” said Stéphane Chabot, EXFO’s Vice President, Test and Measurement. “Add continuous monitoring capabilities and our customers get precise and actionable data intelligence using a solution that’s perfect for use in service commissioning or break/fix scenarios.”

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1025 OCR raises $14M credit for data center expansion

1025 Old Country Road (1025 OCR), which is a 200,000 square-foot commercial property in Westbury, New York, announced a $14 million senior secured credit facility. The property hosts 1025 Connect, which is a network-neutral Meet-Me Room that is used, in part, for connecting subsea systems to terrestrial networks. The location on Long Istland provides the option of bypassing Manhattan for greater network diversity.

“We are seeing strong demand for our interconnection facility that offers unmatched international carrier connectivity and a unique bypass alternative to New York City,” comments Jeff Wasserman, Owner of 1025 Old Country Road and Chairman of 1025Connect.  “This infusion of new capital will support our ability to build inventory and increase capabilities to meet burgeoning customer demand.  We will continue to invest in our core infrastructure in order to enhance our platform going forward.”

The senior secured debt financing was arranged by Meridian Capital Group, one of the nation’s largest commercial real estate finance and advisory firms. 

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