Cisco and Google Partner on New Hybrid Cloud Solution

Cisco and Google Cloud have formed a partnership to deliver a hybrid cloud solutions that enables applications and services to be deployed, managed and secured across on-premises environments and Google Cloud Platform. The pilot implementations are expected to be launched early next year, with commercial rollout later in 2018.

The main idea is to deliver a consistent Kubernetes environment for both on-premises Cisco Private Cloud Infrastructure and Google’s managed Kubernetes service, Google Container Engine.

The companies said their open hybrid cloud offering will provide enterprises with a way to run, secure and monitor workloads, thus enabling them to optimize their existing investments, plan their cloud migration at their own pace and avoid vendor lock in.

Cisco and Google Cloud hybrid solution highlights:

• Orchestration and Management – Policy-based Kubernetes orchestration and lifecycle management of resources, applications and services across hybrid environments
• Networking – Extend network policy and configurations to multiple on-premises and cloud environments
• Security – Extend Security policy and monitor applications behavior
• Visibility and Control – Real-time network and application performance monitoring and automation
• Cloud-ready Infrastructure – Hyperconverged platform supporting existing application and cloud-native Kubernetes environments
• Service Management with Istio – Open-source solution provides a uniform way to connect, secure, manage and monitor microservices
• API Management – Google's Apigee enterprise-class API management enables legacy workloads running on premises to connect to the cloud through APIs
• Developer Ready – Cisco's DevNet Developer Center provides tools and resources for cloud and enterprise developers to code in hybrid environments
• Support – Joint coordinated technical support for the solution

"Our partnership with Google gives our customers the very best cloud has to offer— agility and scale, coupled with enterprise-class security and support," said Chuck Robbins, chief executive officer, Cisco. "We share a common vision of a hybrid cloud world that delivers the speed of innovation in an open and secure environment to bring the right solutions to our customers."

"This joint solution from Google and Cisco facilitates an easy and incremental approach to tapping the benefits of the Cloud. This is what we hear customers asking for," said Diane Greene, CEO, Google Cloud.

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AWS launches NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs instances

Amazon Web Services began offering P3 instances, the next generation of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) GPU instances for compute-intensive applications that require massive parallel floating point performance, including machine learning, computational fluid dynamics, computational finance, seismic analysis, molecular modeling, genomics, and autonomous vehicle systems. The instances are based on NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs.

AWS said the new P3 instances allow customers to build and deploy advanced applications with up to 14 times better performance than previous-generation Amazon EC2 GPU compute instances, and reduce training of machine learning applications from days to hours.

P3 instances can combine up to eight NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs to provide up to one petaflop of mixed-precision, 125 teraflops of single-precision, and 62 teraflops of double-precision floating point performance. A 300 GB/s second-generation NVIDIA NVLink interconnect enables high-speed, low-latency GPU-to-GPU communication. P3 instances also feature up to 64 vCPUs based on custom Intel Xeon E5 (Broadwell) processors, 488 GB of DRAM, and 25 Gbps of dedicated aggregate network bandwidth using the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA).

“When we launched our P2 instances last year, we couldn’t believe how quickly people adopted them,” said Matt Garman, Vice President of Amazon EC2. “Most of the machine learning in the cloud today is done on P2 instances, yet customers continue to be hungry for more powerful instances. By offering up to 14 times better performance than P2 instances, P3 instances will significantly reduce the time involved in training machine learning models, providing agility for developers to experiment, and optimizing machine learning without requiring large investments in on-premises GPU clusters. In addition, high performance computing applications will benefit from up to 2.7 times improvement in double-precision floating point performance.”

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Sprint's revenue declines but income rises as it gains subscribers

Driven by lower wireless and wireline service revenue, partially offset by higher equipment revenue, Sprint reported net operating revenues of $7.9 billion for the quarter declined $320 million year-over-year and declined $230 million sequentially.  Sprint reported operating income of $601 million and its highest fiscal second quarter adjusted EBITDA in 10 years at $2.7 billion.

Some highlights:

• The company had 378,000 net additions in the current quarter compared with 599,000 in the year ago period and 61,000 net additions in the prior quarter.
• Sprint ended the quarter with just over 54.0 million connections, including 31.7 million postpaid, 8.7 million prepaid, and 13.6 million wholesale and affiliate connections.
• The company has had nearly 1.4 million net additions over the last four quarters.
• Postpaid net additions were 168,000 during the quarter compared to net additions of 344,000 in the year-ago period and net losses of 39,000 in the prior quarter. 
• Tablet and other device net losses of 111,000 in the quarter compared to 3,000 in the year-ago period and 127,000 in the prior quarter. 

“Sprint was able to deliver net additions in both its postpaid phone and prepaid business for the third consecutive quarter,” said Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure. “I’m even more proud that the team was able to deliver this customer growth while continuing to attack the cost structure, improve the network, and maintain positive adjusted free cash flow.”

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Ixia issues warning on Reaper IoT botnet

Ixia warned that new botnet known as “Reaper” is gaining traction and attacking IoT devices, especially routers, using publicly disclosed vulnerabilities which have not yet been patched on these devices. There is concern that a new wave of DDoS or other attacks could follow.

Ixia's Application Threat Intelligence (ATI) Research Center began tracking “Reaper” during the first week of October.

Last year, an IoT botnet known as “Mirai” created havoc for enterprise cyber business through DDoS attacks utilizing bots made up of IoT devices.

Ixia has applied the Reaper’s IoT router compromises to its ATI service for the company’s BreakingPoint and ThreatARMOR solutions.

“Ixia suggests that any IoT device with public Internet facing connectivity be patched with the latest updates and be closely monitored,” stated Steve McGregory, Senior Director of Application Threat Intelligence at Ixia. “Network visibility is the ability to know what is in your network and what it is doing, and it is a key tenet to being prepared to defend and proactively mitigate weaknesses in your network.”

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Intel ships Stratix 10 FPGA with ARM Cortex-A53

Intel has begun shipping a high-end FPGA family with an integrated quad-core ARM Cortex-A53. 

The ARM-based Intel Stratix 10 FPGA, which packs more than 1 million logic elements (MLE) with an integrated ARM processor, could serve multiple application categories, such as 5G wireless communication, software defined radios, secure computing for military applications, network function virtualization (NFV), and data center acceleration.

For NFV, Intel said its new FPGA can handle the high-speed data path while the integrated processors enable low latency transactions needed to manage flow tables for control plane processing. With hardware acceleration, Intel Stratix 10 SX FPGAs provide a heterogeneous computing environment to create optimized, low latency accelerators.

“With Stratix 10 SX, Intel reaffirms its ‘all in’ commitment to SoC FPGA devices combining integrated, flexible ARM cores with high-performance Intel Stratix® 10 FPGAs,” said Reynette Au, vice president of marketing, Intel Programmable Solutions Group. “We now provide a wide set of options for customer needing processors and FPGAs, with device offerings across the low-end, mid-range and now, high-end FPGA families, to enable their system designs.”

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Skybox Security raises $150 million

Skybox Security, a privately-held company based in San Jose, California, raised $150 million in venture funding for its cybersecurity management software.

The Skybox Security Suite combines attack vector analytics and advanced threat intelligence to continuously analyze vulnerabilities in a customer's environment and correlate them with exploits in the wild. Skybox extends across complex networks, including those in physical, virtual, cloud and operational technology (OT) environments.

Skybox says it has a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 46 percent and positive cash flow (2014 ­– 2016).

The new funding includes $100 million from the CVC Capital Partners’ Growth Fund (CVC Growth) and $50 million from Pantheon.

Skybox was founded in 2002. The company is headed by Gidi Cohen.

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F5 posts sales of $538m, rising services revenue

F5 Networks posted revenue of $538.0 million for its fourth quarter of fiscal 2017, up 2.4% from $525.3 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2016. For fiscal year 2017, revenue was $2.1 billion, up 4.8% from $2.0 billion last year. GAAP net income for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2017 was $135.7 million, or $2.14 per diluted share, compared to $108.9 million, or $1.64 per diluted share in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2016

“We finished fiscal 2017 on a solid note, delivering record fourth quarter and annual revenue and earnings,” said François Locoh-Donou, F5 President and Chief Executive Officer. “We are excited by the meaningful role we are playing in helping customers solve the complexity of deploying applications across on-premise and multi-cloud environments.

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Mellanox Posts Q3 sales of $225.7 million - flat yoy

Mellanox Technologies reported Q3 2017 revenue of $225.7 million, up 0.7 percent compared to $224.2 million in the third quarter of 2016. GAAP gross margins were 65.7 percent, compared to 65.1 percent in the third quarter of 2016. GAAP net income was $3.4 million, compared to $12.0 million in the third quarter of 2016.

“We are pleased to achieve a record revenue quarter and resume our growth. Our third quarter Ethernet revenues achieved double digit sequential growth, driven by increasing deployments of our 25 gigabit per second and above products, which demonstrates our leadership position in these markets,” said Eyal Waldman, President and CEO of Mellanox Technologies. “During the third quarter, InfiniBand revenues declined seven percent sequentially mainly due to a large Department of Energy CORAL deployment in the second quarter. On a year-over-year basis, our InfiniBand high-performance computing and artificial intelligence revenues increased by double digit percentages."

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Telefónica Colombia deploys Coriant Groove G30

Telefónica Colombia is deploying the Coriant Groove G30 muxponder DCI platform to deliver high-performance 100G interconnect solutions to large enterprises and web-scale Internet operators,

In addition to the recent deployment of the Groove G30 platform, the Coriant metro to long haul packet optical transport solution for Telefónica Colombia includes the latest features of the Coriant hiT 7300 Multi-Haul Transport Platform and the Coriant mTera Universal Transport Platform.

“We are pleased to support one of the most technically advanced networks in the region that is optimized to serve the needs of Telefónica Columbia’s customers today and into the future,” said Uwe Fischer, Executive Vice President, R&D and PLM, and Chief Technology Officer, Coriant.

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Molex opens Silicon Valley Technology Center

Molex, a subsidiary of Koch Industries, has opened a technology center in Fremont, California. The facility will be one of the main innovation hubs for Molex Optical Solutions business and home to sales and customer development teams serving all of Molex customers in the region. 

The 108,000-sq. ft. building features over 50 miles of Molex Optical and Copper Cable Assembly Solutions, patch panels, adapter panels, modular office electronics and wire management tools. Advanced building capabilities include an intelligent, low-voltage Molex Transcend Network Connected Lighting System using a Power over Ethernet (PoE) LED lighting network to enable energy savings through sensor feedback.

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