Wednesday, January 16, 2019

QTS opens Mid-Atlantic Network Access Point (NAP) in Virginia

QTS Realty Trust has established a Mid-Atlantic Network Access Point (NAP) within its 1.3 million square foot mega data center in Richmond, Virginia. The facility is the closest Tier 3 designed data center to the MAREA and BRUSA next-generation subsea cables, significantly closer to the subsea cables than other data centers and network exchange points in Ashburn, Va.

QTS' Richmond data center features diverse connectivity for cloud and hybrid colocation including carrier-neutral cloud interconnection (Megaport and PacketFabric), in-building access to 17 on-net carriers, multiple fiber routes, third party neutral internet peering exchanges and direct access to leading cloud ecosystems. QTS' existing facility in Richmond features more than 500,000 square feet of raised floor capacity with a future path to more than one million square feet of raised floor capacity across a 220-acre campus.

QTS said its Mid-Atlantic Network Access Point will offer the highest on-net capacity and lowest latency connectivity for network traffic between the US and Southern Europe and the highest capacity to Latin and South America.

"With the establishment of the Mid-Atlantic NAP of Virginia featuring Telxius, QTS has effectively removed the requirement for customers with international networking needs to colocate in or connect through Ashburn unless they absolutely have to," said Sean Baillie, EVP Marketing, QTS. "By eliminating unnecessary network components, QTS' Richmond data center is now the fastest, lowest latency network distribution center in Virginia to and from three continents."

 MAREA is a Telxius joint project with Facebook and Microsoft. It has reached 200 terabits per second (Tbps) of capacity, connecting Virginia and Sopelana (Spain).

BRUSA is a private cable built by Telxius and offers one of the lowest latency communication links between the U.S., Puerto Rico and Brazil.

"Telxius is highly focused on delivering the lowest latency connectivity solutions to enterprises globally," said Enrique Valdés, VP of Sales, North Region, Telxius. "We are pleased to join the Mid-Atlantic NAP of Virginia as the ideal exchange for any institution looking to colocate in North America and serve international customers with the lowest latency across the BRUSA and MAREA cables."

MAREA redefines the transAtlantic subsea bandwidth equation

Construction of the highest-capacity subsea cable to cross the Atlantic is now complete.

The 6,600 km MAREA subsea cable, which was jointly funded by Microsoft and Facebook, links Virginia Beach, Virginia to Bilbao, Spain. The cable will be managed by Telxius, Telefónica’s new infrastructure company. The cable features eight fiber pairs and an initial estimated design capacity of 160 Tbps.

The cable takes a more southern route than other transatlantic cables, which mostly connect northern Europe to the New York/New Jersey region.
  • TE SubCom served as the system supply partner for MAREA.
  • BRUSA is Telxius’ new submarine cable linking Rio de Janeiro and Fortaleza (Brazil) with San Juan (Puerto Rico) and Virginia Beach (USA). The 11,000-km cable consists of 8 fibre pairs, with 135 x 100 Gbps per fibre pair, with 4 direct fiber pairs connecting US-Brazil, and 4 fibre pairs entering Puerto Rico and Fortaleza. Alcatel Submarine Networks is the lead supplier.

Iridium activates its global L-band broadband service

Iridium Communications inaugurated its "Certus" global broadband service, offering on-the-move internet and high-quality voice access for assets, autonomous vehicles, trains, aircraft and ships at sea. The initial service is targeted at maritime and terrestrial applications, with Iridium Certus aviation solutions expected later in 2019, once certified.

Iridium Certus leverages the company's $3 billion Iridium NEXT satellite replacement program. Iridium is debuting the service, which will feature a variety of speed classes, with the Iridium Certus 350 (352/352 Kbps) offering, which supports capabilities like internet and high-quality voice services to compact terminals built specifically for maritime, aviation and terrestrial/vehicle applications.  Terminals will be upgradable to the next speed class, Iridium Certus 700 (352/704 Kbps), with a firmware update once available. Initial activations of the service occurred in December of 2018 with excellent system performance.

Terminals are being built by Cobham (maritime), Thales (maritime, aviation and land-mobile), Collins Aerospace (aviation), L3 (aviation), Gogo (aviation) and Satcom Direct (aviation).

So far, 35 service providers have been authorized by Iridium to provide the service around the world. The company estimates Iridium Certus will reach an approximately $100 million yearly run rate by year end 2021.

"The debut of Iridium Certus is the start of a new chapter in the Iridium story, one that is set to catapult us and our partners forward.  At its core, Iridium Certus is an innovation engine for the future. It will enable us to provide broadband connections to teams, vehicles and the important IoT "things" that are in the 80-plus percent of the world that lacks cellular coverage," said Iridium CEO Matt Desch. "Adoption of this new service by our partners has already begun, and it has been eagerly anticipated by every target industry. The launch of this service is a huge achievement, and it is already disrupting the status-quo through our smaller, faster, lighter and more cost-effective terminals and service."

Iridium completes its LEO constellation, 75 satellites in orbit

The final 10 Iridium NEXT satellites were successfully launched into orbit aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

This was the eighth and final launch for Iridium's historic launch campaign with SpaceX, seeing a total of 75 new satellites deployed over less than two years.

The Iridium network is comprised of six polar orbiting planes, each containing 11 operational crosslinked satellites, for a total of 66 satellites in the active constellation. Once all the satellites from the Iridium-7 mission are operational, plane 5 will be the fourth orbital plane to be comprised entirely of Iridium NEXT satellites.  In total, 81 Iridium NEXT satellites are being built, with 66 in the operational constellation, nine serving as on-orbit spares and six serving as ground spares.

Iridium NEXT is the company's $3 billion, next-generation, mobile, global satellite network scheduled for completion in 2018.  Iridium NEXT is replacing the company's first generation global constellation in one of the largest technology upgrades ever completed in space.  It represents the evolution of critical communications infrastructure that governments and organizations worldwide rely on to drive business, enable connectivity, empower disaster relief efforts and more.

Iridium has invested approximately $3 billion to replace its original satellite system with a new, state-of-the-art network, ushering in an era of financial and technological transformation for the company. At the core of this transformation is the dramatic change in cash flows as construction capital expenses end and a decade or longer "capex holiday" allows significant cash generation from existing and new services. These include Iridium CertusSM, which will provide the world's fastest and only truly global specialty L-band broadband connectivity, enabling highly mobile internet access using smaller and more cost-effective terminals, and the AireonSM aircraft surveillance system, extending real-time visibility of aircraft for air traffic controllers and airlines to the entire planet for the first time.

To date, new satellites make up 60 of the 66 satellites in operation, with the final six scheduled for activation in the coming weeks. Iridium NEXT satellites were designed by Thales Alenia Space, which serves as system prime contractor, and are being integrated by Thales' subcontractor, Northrop Grumman.  The production process features an 18-station, state-of-the-art assembly line system for all 81 Iridium NEXT satellites being built.

NTT Com interconnects its data centers with major Internet Exchanges

NTT Communications will expand the interconnection of its Nexcenter data centers in Tokyo and Osaka to three major internet exchanges (IXs) in Japan: BBIX's IX Connect Service, Japan Internet Exchange's JPIX service, and Internet Multifeed Co.’s JPNAP service. The data centers will include the Tokyo No. 1 to No. 10 data centers, Yokohama No. 1 Data Center and Saitama No. 1 Data Center in the Tokyo area and the Osaka 1 to 3 data centers, Osaka 5 Data Center and the coming Osaka 6 and 7 data centers in the Osaka area. The IXs will offer an expanding range of services that NTT Com clients will access by connecting to specific data centers via the Nexcenter Connect™ service, which is offered for a flat, low-cost fee.

NTT Com said the enhanced connectivity will help clients to pursue digital transformation.


Photonic memory research at Eindhoven University of Technology

Researchers of the Institute of Photonic Integration of the Eindhoven University of Technology are developing a hybrid memory that combines photonic properties and magnetic hard drives.

The idea is to use femtosecond light pulses to write data directly in a magnetic memory.

"The switching of the magnetization direction using the single-pulse all-optical switching is in the order of picoseconds, which is about a 100 to 1000 times faster than what is possible with today's technology. Moreover, as the optical information is stored in magnetic bits without the need of energy-costly electronics, it holds enormous potential for future use in photonic integrated circuits," states Mark Lalieu, Ph.D. candidate at the Applied Physics Department of TU/e.

https://www.tue.nl/en/news/news-overview/10-01-2019-next-generation-photonic-memory-devices-are-light-written-ultrafast-and-energy-efficient/



Amazon announces centralized AWS Backup

Amazon Web Services introduced a fully-managed, centralized backup service for data across AWS services and on-premise.

AWS Backup gives customers a single service to configure and audit the AWS resources they backup, automate backup scheduling, set retention policies, and monitor recent backups and restores in one place. Initially, AWS Backup is integrated with Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and AWS Storage Gateway.

“As the cloud has become the default choice for customers of all sizes, it has attracted two distinct types of builders. Some are tinkerers who want to tweak and fine tune the full range of AWS services into a desired architecture, and other builders are drawn to the same breadth and depth of functionality in AWS, but are willing to trade some of the service granularity to start at a higher abstraction layer, so they can build even faster,” said Bill Vass, VP of Storage, Automation, and Management Services, AWS. “We designed AWS Backup for this second type of builder who has told us that they want one place to go for backups versus having to do it across multiple, individual services. Today, we are proud to make AWS Backup available with support for block storage volumes, databases, and file systems, and over time, we plan to support additional AWS services."

http://aws.amazon.com/backup

Equinix to open data center in Seoul

Equinix opened a new International Business Exchange data center in Seoul.

The carrier-neutral data center, called SL1, will provide more than 18,000 square feet (approximately 1,680 square meters) of colocation space, offering an initial capacity of 550 cabinets in the first phase, and is scheduled to open in Q3 2019. The facility is located at Sangam, known as Digital Media City, near Seoul's central business district.

Equinix notes that it has invested more than $800 million over the past three years to organically build and expand its presence in the Asia-Pacific region. Equinix now has 200 IBX data centers across 52 markets and 24 countries, providing data center and interconnection services for more than 9,800 businesses. Equinix currently has 40 IBX data centers across 12 markets in Asia-Pacific.

Molex targets 56 Gbps NRZ and 112 Gbps PAM-4 Signaling

Molex is highlighting its 56 Gbps NRZ and 112 Gbps PAM-4 solutions. The company has a portfolio of five different solutions that are capable of reaching speeds up to 112 Gbps. These product lines include:

  • Quad Small Form Factor Pluggable Double Density (QSFP-DD) System
  • BiPass I/O and Backplane Cable Assemblies
  • NearStack High-Speed Connector System and Cable Jumper Assemblies
  • Mirror Mezz High-Speed System
  • Impulse Backplane Connector and Cabling System

Molex will showcase these product at the upcoming DesignCon 2019 in Santa Clara, California.

“Data centers must evolve to meet the rising demand for faster data rates. Molex delivers highly scalable technologies equipped with advanced features to achieve the speed, signal integrity, EMI containment and thermal efficiencies they need to ramp up to next-generation equipment and networking platforms,” said David Brunker, Molex technical fellow, who serves on the DesignCon 2019 Technical Program Committee.

In addition to the booth demos, Molex will lead a technical session, “Exploring 56/112 Gbps Copper Interconnect Metrics Comparing Classic Methods with COM” on January 30th at 2:00 p.m. in Ballroom C.

Rambus acquires memory patents of Diablo Technologies

Rambus acquired the assets of Diablo Technologies, a start-up developing flash memory technology. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Rambus said the acquired patents augment the existing Rambus NVDIMM portfolio and complement its high-bandwidth, low-power memory technologies. Specific terms of the deal are not disclosed.

“Adding these breakthrough innovations from Diablo Technologies will continue to grow Rambus’ leadership in non-volatile and hybrid DRAM and Flash memory technologies with foundational patents,” said Kit Rodgers, SVP of Technology Partnerships and Corporate Development, Rambus. “Diablo Technology’s patented innovations were ahead of their time and nicely complement our offerings for existing and new customers.”


  • Diablo Technologies developed a Memory Channel Storage (MCS) technology that provides tens of terabytes of ultra-fast NAND flash storage in a DIMM form factor, and enables it to interface with the CPU via DDR3 at near-DRAM speeds. The company says its Memory Channel Storage allows for extremely large "big data" sets to be placed entirely within the NUMA system architecture, resulting in real-time processing and analytics. MCS significantly minimizes storage latency and provides a level of predictability that cannot be attained with pre-existing flash storage technologies. With the MCS architecture, systems in big data clusters, such as Hadoop, have access to terabytes of deterministic, ultra-low latency persistent memory.

WSJ: Huawei Targeted in U.S. Criminal Probe

More trouble for Huawei in the United States. The Wall Street Journal reports that U.S. federal prosecutors are pursuing a criminal investigation of Huawei Technologies regarding a robotic phone testing technology developed by T-Mobile US. The investigation reportedly stems from a civil lawsuit in which T-Mobile was awarded $4.8 million in damages.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/federal-prosecutors-pursuing-criminal-case-against-huawei-for-alleged-theft-of-trade-secrets-11547670341

Juniper turns to IBM Services to manage infrastructure, IT, apps

IBM Services announced a $325 million agreement with Juniper Networks in which IBM will assist in managing Juniper's existing infrastructure, applications and IT services to help reduce costs and enhance their journey to the cloud.
As part of the seven-year agreement, IBM will use the IBM Services Platform with Watson to help manage Juniper's support systems including data centers, help desks and data and voice networks.

"A key element of our digital transformation is to manage the complexities of our global operation and to get the most out of our current investments," said Bob Worrall, Chief Information Officer, Juniper Networks. "In working with IBM Services, we will be able to collaborate with them on innovative solutions for our cloud-first business model."

"Our work with thousands of enterprises globally has led us to the firm belief that a 'one-cloud-fits-all' approach doesn't work and companies are choosing multiple cloud environments to best meet their needs," said Martin Jetter, Senior Vice President of IBM Global Technology Services. "Working with Juniper, we are integrating cloud solutions with their existing IT investments via the IBM Service Platform with Watson. This gives them the opportunity to generate more value from existing infrastructure, along with helping them manage strategic services that are critical to their business."

Veeam Software raises $500M for Intelligent Data Mgt

Veeam Software, which offers backup solutions for "Intelligent Data Management", announced a US$500 million investment from Insight Venture Partners and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB).

Veeam is one of the largest privately held software companies in the world, with approximately $1 billion in sales and more than 325,000 customers, adding 50,000 new customers every year.

“We have a long-standing relationship with Jeff Horing and Michael Triplett from Insight Venture Partners, having worked with them since 2002 when Insight invested in our first company, Aelita Software,” said Ratmir Timashev, Co-Founder and Executive Vice President (EVP), Sales and Marketing, at Veeam. “Back then, we relied on Insight to provide strategic counsel and support, and after we sold that company to Quest Software in 2004, we continued our relationship. Over the years, Insight has been a trusted advisor to Bill Largent, Andrei Baronov and me, even acquiring a minority share in Veeam back in 2013. Today, Veeam is leading the data management space, with more than 325,000 customers, 60,000 partners, 82 percent of the Fortune 500 relying on our solutions, and with industry analysts heralding us as Leaders across all sectors; with Insight and CPPIB’s, investment I know we will take this to the next level.”

https://www.veeam.com

Telco Systems supplies 100GE metro for Kenya Education Network

Telco Systems completed an upgrade of the carrier Ethernet network of Kenya Education Network (KENET), the National Research and Education Network (NREN) of Kenya, from 10GE to 100GE.

KENET provides high-speed Internet access and data center services to member university campuses and research facilities across the country and interconnectivity with other NRENs around the world. KENET also provides shared cloud-based services, including co-location of servers, dedicated virtual servers for e-learning systems and video and web conferencing.

Three years ago, Telco Systems supplied KENET with its IP/MPLS technologies that were used to build KENET's 10GE carrier Ethernet network, which was managed and fully orchestrated by an aggregation and demarcation solution.

For this 100GE network upgrade, Telco Systems delivered its T-Metro 8100 service aggregation platform and cloud gateway. T-Metro 8100 provides carrier Ethernet 2.0, MPLS, IP (Layer 3) and SDN capabilities.

"More and more service providers around the world are upgrading their network capacities to 100GE in order to better serve their customers and grow their businesses and we are proud to be supporting KENET in this important move," said Ariel Efrati, CEO at Telco Systems. "We are experiencing strong traction in the education vertical and our T-Metro 8100 solution is well-positioned to help network operators serving this market space, especially the government E-Rate projects in the United States, to upgrade their networks and improve the performance of their services."