Seacom to acquire South Africa's FibreCo

SEACOM, which operates subsea cable systems encircling the African continent, agreed to acquire FibreCo Telecommunications, which owns and operates a national open access dark fibre network in South Africa.

FibreCo connects over 60 points of presence across South Africa, including major data centres in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Bloemfontein, Durban, Port Elizabeth and East London.  FibreCo’s network also connects the SEACOM subsea cable system (which lands in Mtunzini on the east coast of South Africa) to the WACS cable (which lands at Yzerfontein, on the west coast of South Africa), enabling fully redundant high-speed ring protection for diversity around the African continent.

SEACOM said the FibreCo acquisition significantly strengthens its operations in South Africa by creating a platform for the expansion of its business services.

The acquisition is subject to approval by the South African Competition Commission.

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MARS subsea cable brings terabit capacity to Rodrigues Island

The MARS subsea cable has landed on Rodrigues Island, a 108-square-kilometre outer island with a population of 41,000 that forms part of the nation of Mauritius.

MARS, which is the first submarine cable system to connect the islands of Mauritius and Rodrigues, was deployed by Huawei Marine on behalf of PCCW Global. The 730km cable uses Huawei's advanced 100G WDM transmission technology for system design capacity of 16 Tbps.

Frederick Chui, Senior Vice President, Global Data Sales and Presales of PCCW Global, emphasizes: "Despite being traditionally underserved, Africa has the fastest-growing youth population in the world and a constantly increasing appetite for connectivity across both the continent and its neighboring islands. The linking of Rodrigues to the main island of Mauritius through the MARS project will result in substantial economic benefit and demonstrates PCCW Global’ s long-standing commitment to building infrastructure in Africa to support and grow the continent's emerging digital economy.”

http://www.huaweimarine.com

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Equinix plans new data center at its London Slough campus

Equinix will build a new International Business Exchange (IBX) data center at its London Slough campus.

The LD7 data center will cost approximately $120M (£90M) and scheduled to open Q2 2019. The facility will be built to LEED gold certified standards. This will bring the company's UK portfolio to 12 IBXs.

Equinix said it remains confident in the future of London as Europe's major financial hub and one of the world's greatest commercial cities, regardless of the outcome of the ongoing negotiations around the UK's departure from the European Union. The new $120M (£90M GBP) data center forms part of a total $387M (£295M GBP) investment in the UK's digital economy from Equinix throughout 2018/19.

Russell Poole, managing director UK, Equinix, states: "London is one of the most important connection points in the world and we expect this growth to continue as the city continues to play a crucial role in powering the global digital economy. LD7 will be one of the most technologically advanced colocation data centers in the world and will be a major addition to our thriving London Slough campus. This latest data center will also act as a sustainability benchmark for future data centers – something we are very passionate about."

http://www.equinix.com/

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Cisco: 400G Data Center Outlook - 1 min video

Ish Limkakeng gives a one minute perspective on the development of 400G in the data center.

https://youtu.be/wYcGJ9ReSno

Cisco launches 400G data center switches

Wednesday, October 31, 2018  400G, Cisco  

Cisco launched its portfolio of Nexus 400 Gigabit Ethernet (400G) switches for large cloud data centers. Field testing is expected in December and general availabity is targeted for the first half of 2019. Beyond bringing just a new level of speed to the network, Cisco said its Nexus 400G platforms deliver: Superfast policy, segmentation and whitelisting; Real-time visibility into packets, flows and events – beyond just data sampling and system...

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OSA announces $20K prize for early career photonic researchers

The Optical Society Foundation (OSAF) and Coherent, Inc. announced the establishment of an annual Bernard J. Couillaud Prize, a merit-based award to support early-career OSA members who are engaged in ultrafast photonics research and application development.

Each Bernard J. Couillaud award will total $20,500 with up to an additional $5,000 in travel expenses to attend an OSA scientific conference. Deadline for application for the first prize is 08 March, 2019. The inaugural winner will be announced at CLEO: Laser Science to Photonic Applications, San Jose, CA USA, 5-10 May 2019.

The prize honors the extraordinary contributions of laser physics pioneer, Bernard J. Couillaud, who was a former President and CEO of Coherent (1996-2002) and later served as Chairman of the company’s Board of Directors (2002-07). He had joined the firm in 1983 after a three-year visiting fellowship at Stanford University, where he contributed to the development of the Hänsch-Couillaud technique of laser frequency stabilization. At Coherent, he was instrumental in the development of numerous dye, DPSS and Ti:S lasers. A native of France, Couillaud received his Ph.D in laser physics in 1978 at the University of Bordeaux where he helped pioneer continuous wave and pulsed dye lasers. He passed away in 2017.

“To support early-career laser scientists and engineers who are pursuing innovative and impactful work is fundamental to the mission of The Optical Society Foundation,” said Executive Director, Chad Stark. “We all look forward to the naming of the first recipient of this distinguished prize.”

Coherent CEO John Ambroseo said Couillaud “had the rare ability to combine a passion for physics, lasers and photonics with business. He consistently nurtured and encouraged younger people to innovate and develop their own ideas. We believe this prize will honor that legacy."

https://www.osa.org/en-us/foundation/programs/bernard_j_couillaud_prize

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Pure Storage intros Cloud Data Services on AWS

Pure Storage announced a new set of Cloud Data Services running its software on AWS:

Cloud Block Store for AWS - designed to enable mission-critical applications to run seamlessly in the cloud, Cloud Block Store enables hybrid mobility and adds new storage services to webscale applications.

CloudSnap for AWS - cloud-based data protection, built right into Pure FlashArray. CloudSnap allows FlashArray snapshots to be easily sent to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which enables cost-effective protection in the cloud along with flexible recovery both on-premises or in the cloud.

StorReduce - cloud-native deduplication technology, designed to enable fast, simple, cost-effective cloud backup to AWS S3 storage, in conjunction with on-premises flash for fast recovery. 

"Today, there exists a cloud divide - the cloud is not purpose-built for enterprise applications, and enterprise infrastructure isn't as user-friendly as the cloud," said Charles Giancarlo, Chairman and CEO, Pure Storage. "Customers should be able to make infrastructure choices based on what's best for their environment, not constrained by what the technology can do or where it lives. Today's announcement extends Pure's data centric architecture to the cloud, allowing our customers to build hybrid applications that provide true mobility and freedom."

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Pure Storage posts Q3 revenue of $372.8 million, up 34% yoy

Pure Storage reported revenue of $372.8 million for its third quarter ended October 31, 2018, up 34% yoy, and exceeding the high end of the company's guidance.

Gross margin was a record 66.8% (GAAP) and 68.1% (non-GAAP).

"Pure delivered another excellent quarter, and today we're announcing the extension of Pure's data centric architecture to the cloud," said Charles Giancarlo, Chairman and CEO, Pure Storage. "With the launch of our new Pure Storage Cloud Data Services, we're bringing our storage software directly to the public cloud in partnership with AWS."

"Q3 was a strong quarter for Pure with revenue and margins exceeding our expectations," said Tim Riitters, CFO, Pure Storage. "As we finish the fiscal year we are excited about the opportunities ahead, and have raised FY19 guidance to reflect the momentum we are seeing in our business."

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Metaswitch files antitrust suit against Ribbon Communications

Metaswitch Networks has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Ribbon Communications alleging that the company is illegally using its dominant market position to hurt competition.

Metaswitch notes that it is Ribbon’s only significant remaining competitor in the U.S. and Canada that competes to transform and modernize rural land-line telephone networks for the use of VoIP. The lawsuit alleges that Ribbon has aggressively consolidated the industry through serial acquisitions and is illegally using exclusionary and deceptive tactics to eliminate its last major competitor in the market.

Specifically, the complaint alleges that after Metaswitch refused to be acquired by Ribbon in 2013, Ribbon launched an anticompetitive campaign to “kill Metaswitch”, including by asserting certain intellectual property rights in bad faith and in contravention of royalty-free licensing obligations, systematically maligning Metaswitch to customers with false and misleading information, and coercing customers to choose Ribbon instead of Metaswitch with anticompetitive pricing practices, among other things.

Martin Lund, Metaswitch Chief Executive Officer stated, “This litigation seeks to ensure Americans’ access to desperately needed land-line network upgrades, particularly in rural areas where cellular service can be less reliable. If left unchecked, Ribbon will be free to raise prices for more than 700 local network operators who will have no choice but to either slow down much-needed upgrades or to pass on the impact of increased costs to consumers.”

Lund added, “Blatant efforts to dominate a captive market and price gouge are exactly what the antitrust laws are designed to stop. We are pursuing this case not just to protect Metaswitch, but because we believe Ribbon’s conduct is hindering customers’ ability to make fixed-line upgrades that could enhance the day-to-day lives of millions.”

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Silver Peak bolsters its SD-WAN partner program

Silver Peak announced enhancements to its global Partner Edge program aimed at driving business opportunity and growth in a hyper-growth market that industry analyst firm IDC projects will exceed $8B USD in 2021.

New programs include:

New Partner Tier Criteria: proving all partners with a clear path to understanding what is required at the Silver, Gold and Platinum tiers, including up-front revenue and training objectives. With a more predictable model, partners can tightly align their SD-WAN investments directly to a set of partner rewards, enabling them to see the direct correlation between their investments and revenue growth, margins and profitability.

Partner Accelerators: This new program, available to Gold and Platinum partners, creates a set of Silver Peak incentives with the sole purpose of rewarding partners that focus on growth initiatives in selling the Unity EdgeConnect™ SD-WAN edge platform. Incentives will be introduced every 6 months and offered for a period of 6-to-12 months, enabling partners to plan ahead while opening new routes to expanded revenues. The program spans several reward levels and includes partner level, sales and technical team rewards. Partners realize the direct margin benefit to their company when they shift customers away from shrinking hardware margins toward higher-margin software-defined offerings.

Silver Peak: A new programmatic approach now available to Gold and Platinum partners, enables Silver Peak inside and field sales teams to pass active leads directly to partners in a highly collaborative manner. Engaging partners from the start provides a more focused and measured approach to teaming in front of customers and makes the sales process more predictable, expediting time to revenue for partners.

Silver Peak is introducing two new incentives that will be available to Gold and Platinum tier partners immediately.

New Customer Incentive: An incremental margin incentive of up to 10 percent paid to the partner at the close of a new EdgeConnect SD-WAN edge platform opportunity. This incentive not only includes the first order, but extends to all follow-on business from that customer for 12-months following the initial sale.

Fast Start Incentive: An additional two percent incentive will be paid against all new EdgeConnect customer sales. This incentive is accretive to the 10 percent new customer capture incentive and provides partners with the opportunity to earn up to a 12 percent margin incentive for new customer deployments.

http://www.silver-peak.com

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SK Telecom signs Keysight for 5G design

SK Telecom signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Keysight Technologies to collaborate on 5G network design development and testing technology.

The MoU covers development of 5G device performance validation technology, test cases and processes to help verify that new products perform as intended on the mobile operator’s network. The two companies will also collaborate on Massive MIMO and beamforming to achieve higher data speeds and lower latencies, which many future 5G applications will require.

"We are excited to extend our collaboration with SK Telecom to support their early deployments of 5G on mmWave frequencies,” stated Kailash Narayanan, vice president and general manager of Wireless Devices and Operators at Keysight Technologies. “Keysight’s early engagements with market leaders, contributions to the 3GPP standardization development and scalable 5G test and measurement solutions is enabling a connected mobile ecosystem to accelerate 5G deployment.”

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