MEF publishes SD-WAN standard

MEF officially published SD-WAN Service Attributes and Services (MEF 70) -- the industry’s first global standard defining an SD-WAN service and its service attributes. The standard was officially approved by MEF members and ratified by the MEF Board of Directors at the organization’s recent Annual Members Meeting.

The SD-WAN standard describes requirements for an application-aware, over-the-top WAN connectivity service that uses policies to determine how application flows are directed over multiple underlay networks irrespective of the underlay technologies or service providers who deliver them.

MEF 70, among other things, defines:

• Service attributes that describe the externally visible behavior of an SD-WAN service as experienced by the subscriber.
• Rules associated with how traffic is handled.
• Key technical concepts and definitions like an SD-WAN UNI, the SD-WAN Edge, SD-WAN Tunnel Virtual Connections, SD-WAN Virtual Connection End Points, and Underlay Connectivity Services.

SD-WAN standardization offers numerous benefits that will help accelerate SD-WAN market growth while improving overall customer experience with hybrid networking solutions. Key benefits include:

• Enabling a wide range of ecosystem stakeholders to use the same terminology when buying, selling, assessing, deploying, and delivering SD-WAN services.
• Making it easier to interface policy with intelligent underlay connectivity services to provide a better end-to-end application experience with guaranteed service resiliency.
• Facilitating inclusion of SD-WAN services in standardized LSO architectures, thereby advancing efforts to orchestrate MEF 3.0 SD-WAN services across automated networks.
• Paving the way for creation and implementation of certified MEF 3.0 SD-WAN services, which will give users confidence that a service meets a fundamental set of requirements.

“We want to thank the SD-WAN team for the incredible job they have done in bringing this industry-first standard to market in a timely manner,” said Nan Chen, President, MEF. “Combining standardized SD-WAN services with dynamic high-speed underlay connectivity services – including Carrier Ethernet, Optical Transport, and IP – enables service providers to deliver powerful MEF 3.0 hybrid networking solutions with unprecedented user- and application-directed control over network resources and service capabilities.”

MEF already has begun work on the next phase of SD-WAN standardization – MEF 70.1 – that will be of high interest to many enterprises. This work includes defining:

• Service attributes for application flow performance and business importance.
• SD-WAN service topology and connectivity.
• Underlay connectivity service parameters.

MEF also is progressing related standards work focused on:

• Application security for SD-WAN services.
• Intent-based networking for SD-WAN that will simplify the subscriber-to-service provider interface.
• Information and data modeling standards that will accelerate LSO API development for SD-WAN services.

“We’re seeing a significant change in how customers are using SD-WAN now versus two years ago, and that evolution is what makes service standards from MEF so critical. Today, and moving forward, SD-WAN is about delivering application performance. As the underlying networks — Optical Transport, Carrier Ethernet, and IP — are under greater pressure to be more ubiquitous, easy to provision, on-demand and elastic, that is where the MEF 3.0 construct comes into play. MEF’s role is creating a standards-based, intelligent network across multiple carriers that will eliminate friction as we work with each other to deliver application performance at the level of efficiency our customers are seeking,” stated Roman Pacewicz, Chief Product Officer, AT&T Business.

“Verizon is pleased to support MEF’s industry-leading SD-WAN standardization work. SD-WAN is the way to interface policy with an intelligent software defined network, and standardization makes it easier for integration to work across multiple types of underlying transport services. What that means for our end customers is it lets them get a better overall experience relative to their applications, with support for a broader range of use cases, guaranteed service resiliency, and improved service capabilities in an always on, always connected world,” stated Shawn Hakl, Senior Vice President Business Products, Verizon.

In addition, MEF remains on track to launch its MEF 3.0 SD-WAN Certification pilot program in 4Q 2019. This certification will test a set of service attributes and their behaviors defined in MEF 70 and described in detail in the upcoming MEF 3.0 SD-WAN Certification Test Requirements (MEF 90) document.

https://wiki.mef.net/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=89003131

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Amazon offers homegrown forecasting tool on AWS

Amazon is releasing its homegrown forecasting system as an on-demand service on AWS.

Amazon Forecast is a fully managed service that uses machine learning to deliver highly accurate forecasts based on the same technology that powers Amazon.com.

“Amazon Forecast now offers the forecasting expertise from Amazon’s first 25 years of building the world’s largest ecommerce business in a managed service for any company to leverage,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President, Amazon Machine Learning. “We’ve built sophisticated, machine learning forecasting algorithms over many years that our customers can now use in Amazon Forecast without having to know anything about machine learning themselves. We can’t wait to see how our customers use the service to reduce operating expenses and inefficiencies, ensure higher resource and product availability, deliver products faster, and lower costs to delight their customers.”

Amazon Forecast can be used to build precise forecasts for business conditions, including product demand and sales, infrastructure requirements, energy needs, and staffing levels.

Puget Sound Energy (PSE), which serves 1.1 million electric customers and 825,000 natural gas customers, is using Amazon Forecast to forecast electric and gas consumption at a typical residence.
ouses forecasting to make sure that the right product is in the right place at the right time by predicting demand for hundreds of millions of products every day.

Amazon Forecast is available today in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and EU (Ireland) with more availability zones coming soon.

https://aws.amazon.com/forecast/

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Xilinx's Virtex UltraScale+ FPGA boasts 35 billion transistors

Xilinx has expanded its 16nm Virtex UltraScale+ family to now include the world's largest FPGA — the Virtex UltraScale+ VU19P.

The new VU19P FPGA boasts 35 billion transistors, the highest logic density and I/O count on a single device, according to Xilinx. The device could be used for enabling emulation and prototyping of tomorrow's most advanced ASIC and SoC technologies, as well as test, measurement, compute, networking, aerospace and defense-related applications.

The VU19P FPGA features 9 million system logic cells, up to 1.5 terabits per-second of DDR4 memory bandwidth and up to 4.5 terabits per-second of transceiver bandwidth, and over 2,000 user I/Os. It is 1.6X larger than its predecessor and what was previously the industry's largest FPGA — the 20 nm Virtex UltraScale 440 FPGA. 

"The VU19P enables developers to accelerate hardware validation and begin software integration before their ASIC or SoC is available," said Sumit Shah, senior director, product line marketing and management, Xilinx. "This is our third generation of world-record FPGAs. First was the Virtex-7 2000T, followed by the Virtex UltraScale VU440, and now the Virtex UltraScale+ VU19P. But this is more than silicon technology; we're providing robust and proven tool flows and IP to support it."

"Arm relies on Xilinx devices as part of our process for validating our next-generation processor IP and SoC technology," said Tran Nguyen, director of design services, Arm. "The new VU19P will further enable Arm, and many others in our ecosystem, to accelerate the design, development and validation of our most ambitious roadmap technologies."

The VU19P will be generally available in the fall of 2020.

https://www.xilinx.com/news/press/2019/xilinx-announces-the-world-s-largest-fpga-featuring-9-million-system-logic-cells.html

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Dell'Oro:Surging 5G deployments in APAC

Healthy LTE growth and surging 5G investments in the Asia Pacific region added fuel to the Radio Access Networks (RAN) market upswing that began in the second half of 2018, according to a new report from Dell'Oro Group.

“After several years of the Asia Pacific region being a drag on the worldwide RAN market, preliminary 2Q 2019 data points indicated positive trends extended into the second quarter, adding confidence that the tides are turning in the region,” said Stefan Pongratz, Vice President with the Dell’Oro Group. “In addition to healthy demand for low-band LTE solutions and easier year-over-year comparisons following the ZTE ban last year, surging 5G mid-band deployments in China and South Korea helped to drive the acceleration of the overall RAN market,” continued Pongratz.

Additional highlights from the 2Q 2019 Mobile RAN report:

• The Asia Pacific region, including China, comprised more than 80 percent of worldwide RAN growth between 1H 2018 and 1H 2019.
• 5G NR growth in the APAC region was 3x to 4x the size of the incremental LTE upside.
• Samsung and ZTE recorded the largest overall RAN revenue share gains between 1H 2018 and 1H 2019 – with the two vendors collectively gaining five points of revenue share in the Asia Pacific region.

https://www.delloro.com/news/surging-5g-deployments-in-asia-pacific-fueled-the-worldwide-ran-market/

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TeraPixel tapes out its 5nm AI chip

TeraPixel Technologies announced that it recently taped out its 5nm "Extrixa Processor".

The deep-learning AI processpr is the world's first chip that uses TSMC 5nm.

TeraPixel Technologies expects to tape out the second version with the same functions as the product version with SRAM and other functional blocks. The comopany is targeting commercial release in 2021.

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Zayo posts revenue of $651M, 2-3% growth rate

Zayo reported $650.6 million of consolidated revenue, including $485.4 million from the Zayo Networks segment, $66.1 million from the zColo segment and $88.0 million from the Allstream segment. This represents an annualized revenue growth rate of 2%.

Net income of $63.0 million resulting in basic and diluted net income per share during the quarter of $0.27 and $0.26, respectively. Net income was $28.3 million over the previous quarter.

During the three months ended June 30, 2019, capital expenditures were $195.8 million. As of June 30, 2019, the Company had $186.1 and $296.5 million available under its revolving credit facility.

Consolidated net installs, on a monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and monthly amortized revenue (MAR) basis, were $1.1 million, excluding the Allstream segment. This includes $1.6 million of net installs from the Zayo Networks segment, and $(0.4) million of net installs from the zColo segment.

https://investors.zayo.com/home/default.aspx

Zayo shareholders approve acquisition by Digital Colony Partners

Friday, July 26, 2019  Zayo  

Shareholders of Zayo Group Holdings approved all proposals related to the definitive merger agreement to be acquired by affiliates of Digital Colony Partners and the EQT Infrastructure IV fund.

“Today’s favorable shareholder vote supports our view that this transaction is a very good outcome for shareholders and will enable Zayo to accelerate its growth and strengthen its industry leadership,” said Dan Caruso, chairman and CEO at Zayo. “The entire Zayo team is excited to work with EQT and Digital Colony to leverage our fiber assets to continue to fuel global innovation.”

The closing of the deal is expected to close in the first half of calendar 2020.

Private investors to acquire Zayo for $14.3 billion in cash

Wednesday, May 08, 2019  Zayo  

Affiliates of Digital Colony Partners and the EQT Infrastructure IV fund will acquire Zayo Group Holdings for $35.00 in cash per share of Zayo's common stock in a transaction valued at $14.3 billion, including the assumption of $5.9 billion of Zayo’s net debt obligations. The offer price represents a 32% premium to the volume-weighted price average of the last six months of $26.44.

The Zayo Board of Directors said the sale of the company to Digital Colony and EQT Infrastructure is in the best interest of Zayo and all its stakeholders, as it delivers immediate and substantial value to shareholders, will strengthen Zayo’s financial flexibility, enabling the company to increase investments and better position itself for long-term growth and profitability.

The companies hope to conclude the deal by the first half of 2020.

Marc Ganzi, Managing Partner of Digital Colony, said, “Zayo has a world-class digital infrastructure portfolio, including a highly-dense fiber network in some of the world’s most important metro markets. We believe the company has a unique opportunity to meet the growing demand for data associated with the connectivity and backhaul requirements of a range of customers. We are excited to work alongside the management team and EQT to grow the business and expand its presence in the global market."

Dan Caruso, Zayo’s Chairman and CEO, said, “Digital Colony and EQT share our vision that Zayo’s Fiber Fuels Global Innovation. Both are experienced global investors in the communications infrastructure space, and they appreciate our extraordinary fiber infrastructure assets, our highly talented team and our strong customer base. I am confident this partnership with EQT and Digital Colony will empower Zayo to accelerate its growth and strengthen its industry leadership.”

Separately, Zayo reported consolidated revenue of $647.2 million for the three months ended March 31, 2019, including $555.2 million from the Communications Infrastructure segments and $92.0 million from the Allstream segment. Net income was $34.7 million, including $39.2 million from the Communications Infrastructure segments and a net loss of $4.5 million from the Allstream segment.

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FS ships 25G BiDi transceivers

FS introduced a 25GBASE-BX10-D SFP28 1330nm-TX/1270nm-RX 10km DOM transceiver module. Transceiver units are compatible with Cisco, Juniper, Arista, Brocade, Mellanox or generic.

The list price is $209

https://www.fs.com/products/85125.html

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Infographic: Anatomy of a Submarine Network

Infinera presents "Anatomy of a Submarine Network"

https://www.infinera.com/blog/anatomy-of-a-submarine-network-the-workhorse-of-the-internet/

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