Reuters: Commerce Department to grant 90-day extension

Reuters reported that the U.S. Commerce Department will grant a 90-day extension allowing U.S. vendors to continue shipping to Huawei Technologies under certain conditions. In May, the U.S. Department of Commerce issued a 90-day, temporary general license allowing U.S. vendors to continue delivering products and services to Huawei Technologies and its affiliates. This first Temporary General License runs from May 20, 2019 through August 19, 201...

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VMware to acquire Veriflow for network visibility/assurance

VMware announced its planned acquisition of Veriflow, a start-up offering tools for network verification, assurance, and troubleshooting. Financial terms were not disclosed. Specifically, Veriflow provides: Network modeling in software; Verifying network connectivity and application availability as well as segmentation assurance; and, Preflight modeling and What-If capabilities to analyze proposed network changes, thus reducing network outages...

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Microsoft launches Azure Ultra Disk Storage

Microsoft announced the general availability (GA) of Azure Ultra Disk Storage — a new, high-performance managed disk promising sub-millisecond latency for the most demanding Azure Virtual Machines and container workloads. The new storage service is aimed at applications like SAP HANA, top tier SQL databases such as SQL Server, Oracle DB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL, as well as NoSQL databases such as MongoDB and Cassandra. Ultra Disk Storage specs Sizes...

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Telstra posts declining sales/profits, focuses on T22 strategy

Citing negative headwinds from nbn, Telstra last week reported total FY 2019 income of A$27.8 billion, down 3.6 percent year over year. EBITDA decreased by 21.7 percent to $8.0 billion. Regarding the impact of the nbn, Telstra absorbed around $600 million of negative recurring EBITDA headwind in the period. Underlying EBITDA decreased approximately 4 percent excluding the in-year nbn headwind. To date, Telstra estimates the nbn has adversely impacted...

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Telstra creates property trust to monetize assets

Telstra has created an unlisted property trust that will own 37 existing exchange properties. A Charter Hall-led consortium will acquire a 49 percent stake in the new property trust for $700 million, reflecting a capitalisation rate of 4.4 percent and valuing the entire property trust at $1.43 billion. Telstra will retain ownership of a 51 per cent controlling interest in the property trust and retain operational control of the properties. Telstra...

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Telstra sells 3 data centers, exits Ooyala

Telstra announced the sale of three international data centres for $160 million,  yielding a nine times EBITDA multiple and $110 million gain on sale.  Media reports identified the buyer as I-Squared Capital, a private equity fund. Telstra also announced the sale of its Edison Exchange in Brisbane for $57 million. The company has also restructured its Telstra Ventures arm and exited its Ooyala business. In 2014, Telstra acquired Ooyala,...

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DOCOMO invests in Light Field Lab for holographic displays

NTT DOCOMO Ventures has made an equity investment in LIGHT FIELD LAB, Inc. (LFL), a start-up developing display technology that enables a holographic objects to float in space without head-mounted accessories. LFL’s projection technology is a new advancement in 3D holographic displays, enabling the control of billions of rendered photons of light which intersect in air to form real looking objects with full color and motion. LFL has been developing...

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MIT researchers target “risk-aware” cloud traffic engineering

Researchers at MIT, working in collaboration with Microsoft, have developed a “risk-aware” mathematical model for improving the performance and resiliency of cloud infrastructure. The model takes into account failure probabilities of links between data centers worldwide and then allocates traffic through optimal paths to minimize loss, while maximizing overall usage of the network. The researchers believe their model can deliver three times the...

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