The opportunity that lives at the edge is not just about speed and performance, but the consistent, unwavering delivery of that performance.
Sunday, October 18, 2020
Guarantee Speed & QoE at the EDGE and Beyond
Vendors demo O-RAN network infrastructure
The O-RAN ALLIANCE conducted its second worldwide plugfest and proof of concept to demonstrate the functionality as well as the multi-vendor interoperability of O-RAN based network equipment. The plugfest attracted a total 55 companies and was hosted at several facilities across the globe.
“Testing and integration are crucial for developing a commercially available open RAN ecosystem and that’s why the O-RAN ALLIANCE provides its member companies with an efficient global plugfest framework, which complements the O-RAN specification effort as well as the O-RAN Software Community,” said Andre Fuetsch, Chairman of the O-RAN ALLIANCE and Chief Technology Officer of AT&T. “The joint, open, and coordinated effort greatly accelerates the technical evaluation of O-RAN solutions and effectively avoids duplication of efforts for all involved parties whether network operators or solution providers.”
Asia
The O-RAN plugfest/PoC in East Asia was conducted in various operator and vendor labs in Japan and China. Activities in Japan were hosted by NTT DOCOMO, KDDI and SoftBank Corp., and activities in China were hosted in China OTIC labs. One set of scenarios focused on multi-vendor interoperability using O-RAN’s open interfaces: Open Fronthaul (OFH), Fronthaul Multiplexer (FHM), X2, A1, E2, F1 and E1. Other set of scenarios also involved RAN virtualization and RAN Intelligent Controllers (RIC). The East Asian plugfest was supported by 16 companies. Apart from the hosts there were: Altran, Astri, CIG, Fujitsu, JMA Wireless, Keysight Technologies, Kyocera, Mavenir, NEC, NXP, Radisys, Samsung and Toshiba.
In India, Bharti Airtel hosted the plugfest at its Gurgaon and Bengaluru locations. Demonstrations showcased OFH multi-vendor interworking, O-DU system validation, X2 interface and RIC use cases compliant with O1 and E2 interfaces for network performance optimization. 10 companies performed the scenarios, including: Altiostar, Altran, ASOCS, Mavenir, NEC, STL, VIAVI Solutions, VVDN and Xilinx.
Europe
Deutsche Telekom, TIM, Telefónica, Orange, and BT have teamed up together with the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) to host the first Joint O-RAN & TIP plugfest at the OTIC and TIP community labs in Berlin, Madrid and Torino. The plugfest focused primarily on Open Fronthaul, associated transport options, and multi-vendor interoperability. In total 34 companies took part at the European branch of the plugfest. With EANTC as the system integrator, supported by engineers from highstreet technologies and the hosting operators, there were: Altran, Astri, Baicells, Benetel, Calnex, Ciena, Cisco, CommScope, Delta, EXFO, Foxconn, Fujitsu, JMA Wireless, Juniper Networks, Keysight Technologies, Mavenir, MTI mobile, ng4T, QCT, Radisys, Rohde&Schwarz, VIAVI Solutions, Wind River, Wiwynn, WNC and Xilinx.
North America
The joint O-RAN & O-RAN Software Community (OSC) Plugfest/PoC hosted by AT&T and Verizon took place at the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research in New York City and in Salt Lake City. The primary focus was to demonstrate the evolution of key O-RAN specifications in conjunction with the enhancements and new capabilities being delivered by the O-RAN Software Community “Bronze” release. 10 companies joined forces at the North American plugfest, including Accelleran, Cisco, Ericsson, highstreet technologies, Kumu Networks, Mavenir, Nokia and VMware.
Naoki Tani, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of NTT DOCOMO, commented: "We believe widespread availability of O-RAN compliant solutions will enable building highly flexible 5G networks, and are pleased with the expansion and enhancement of multi-vendor RAN activities observed in this 2nd O-RAN plugfest. The Japan venue, co-hosted with KDDI and SoftBank Corp., also saw growing participation and demonstration of new capabilities. We will strengthen such joint activities, including to set up Open Test and Integration Centre in Japan and to coordinate with other regions across the globe, to further accelerate the development of O-RAN multi-vendor ecosystem."
“It is heartening to note that the O-RAN ALLIANCE continues to build the momentum towards open RAN. The successful plugfest this year is a testimony of a maturing ecosystem. Airtel remains committed to build community of open RAN partners in India, to scale our 4G network initiatives based on O-RAN and getting ready for deployment of 5G networks,” said Randeep Sekhon, CTO, Bharti Airtel. “I would like to compliment O-RAN ALLIANCE, its Test and Integration Focus Group, all hosts and participating companies for putting up excellent demonstrations despite challenges of a global Covid-19 pandemic.”
http://www.o-ran.org
Oracle's X8M Exadata Cloud Service scales to 4,600 CPU cores
Oracle introduced its latest iteration of Exadata Cloud Service, promising the highest performance for challenging transaction processing and data analytics projects via its own infrastructure in 26 global cloud regions.
Oracle says its latest generation Exadata Cloud Service, called X8M, supports relational databases that are 20X bigger than possible to run on AWS today with RDS or Aurora—and bests both AWS RDS and Aurora by 25 times in CPU scaling.
With Exadata Cloud Service X8M, Oracle Databases deployed on Exadata Cloud Service X8M can scale up to 4,600 CPU Cores, 44 TB DRAM, 96 TB persistent memory, 1.6 PB flash, and 25 PB of database capacity.
“As an increasing number of organizations shift their important workloads to the cloud, they have found that many cloud databases have performance, availability and scaling limitations,” said Juan Loaiza, executive vice president, mission-critical database technologies, Oracle. “With today’s announcement, Oracle enables customers to run any business-critical database workload—including the largest and most compute and memory-intensive workloads—with dramatically faster performance, higher scalability and elasticity, and lower costs than any other cloud provider. The new generation of Oracle’s Exadata Cloud Service is based on the proven Exadata platform that is already in use by 86 percent of the Fortune Global 100 to run their most demanding workloads.”
Oracle Exadata X8M, the new platform for Exadata Cloud Service, features Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) from databases to Intel Optane Persistent Memory in smart storage servers, completely bypassing the OS, IO, and network software stacks. This enables 2.5 times higher transaction processing IOs, and 10 times better IO latency than the previous industry-leading Exadata Cloud Service release. Database IOs are 50 times faster than Amazon AWS Relational Database Service (RDS) using all-flash storage. RDMA runs over a new, ultra-fast, 100Gbs RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) network fabric for the highest analytics throughput. Exadata Cloud Service X8M also features a new generation of Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) that delivers greatly enhanced application transparent database scale-out and high availability for all types of database workloads. In addition, fully-active Oracle Data Guard database replicas offload SQL reads and writes while providing cloud-automated disaster protection within and across regions.
https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/oracle-introduces-exadata-cloud-service-x8m-101520.htmlNTT reports quantum transport phenomena in thin film
Researchers at NTT in Japan, in collaboration with the Tanaka Research Group at The University of Tokyo, reported the first observation of a quantum transport phenomena occuring in a thin film substance.
The material exhibited an an exotic state called “magnetic Wey semimetal". The researchers also revealed the existence of the exotic state in SrRuO3 by theoretical calculation as well, which was carried out in collaboration with the Das Research Group at the Tokyo Institute of Technology .
This research was reported in Nature Communications on October 9, 2020.
https://www.ntt.co.jp/news2020/2010e/201009a.html
GTT sells infrastructure division for $2.15 billion
GTT Communications will sell its infrastructure division to I Squared Capital, an independent global infrastructure investment firm, for $2.15 billion.
- The infrastructure division sale consists of selected network and data center assets accumulated from several GTT acquisitions, including Interoute, Hibernia, and KPN International, that comprise:
- A 103,000 route kilometer fiber network with over 400 points of presence, spanning 31 metro areas and interconnecting 103 cities across Europe and North America.
- Three transatlantic subsea cables, including GTT Express, the lowest latency route between Europe and North America.
- Fourteen Tier 3 data centers and over 100 colocation facilities.
- Offering a full suite of telecom and data infrastructure solutions to marquee clients.
Gautam Bhandari, managing partner at I Squared Capital stated, “Now more than ever, digital infrastructure is an essential asset class as societies across the globe rely heavily on high-speed digital bandwidth. This acquisition builds upon I Squared Capital’s overarching global digital infrastructure strategy and experience with complex carve-outs to expand the reach of our platforms across Asia, Europe and North America.”
GTT names Ernie Ortega as interim CEO
GTT Communications named Ernie Ortega as interim CEO while the board continues its search for a permanent CEO. Ortega currently serves as GTT’s Chief Revenue Office. GTT's Board of Directors also announced that Don MacNeil has joined the GTT leadership team as chief operating officer (COO). Mr. MacNeil will lead GTT’s network operations, service delivery, assurance and vendor management teams, as well as GTT’s product organization. “I am delighted...
GTT looks to sell subsea cables and European fiber network
GTT Communications has retained Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs as financial advisors in connection with the potential sale of the Infrastructure Division, which includes its terrestrial pan-European fiber network, subsea transatlantic fiber and data centers. This infrastructure was part of GTT's acquisition of Interoute and of Hibernia. “The appointment of Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs is an important step in our process to explore the sale of...
GTT to Acquire Global Capacity, Building its SD-WAN
GTT Communications agreed to acquire Global Capacity, a provider of enterprise network connectivity solutions, for $100 million in cash and 1.85 million shares of GTT common stock, to be issued to the sellers at closing. Global Capacity, which is based in Waltham, Mass., addresses a range of enterprise network issues including difficulty in load sharing traffic across a mix of access connections, complex, static and manual network configurations...
GTT's acquisition of Interoute would add 72K km of European fiber to its transatlantic cables
GTT Communications agreed to acquire Interoute, operator of one of Europe’s largest independent fiber networks and cloud networking platforms, for approximately €1.9 billion ($2.3 billion) in cash. Interoute's European fiber backbone spans 72,000 route kilometers connects nearly 200 data centres and colocation facilities. Interoute also owns 15 of its own data centers and 33 colocation facilities. Its customers include international enterprises,...
GTT to acquire KPN International for EUR 50 million
GTT Communications agreed to acquire KPN International for approximately €50 million in cash, on a cash and debt-free basis. KPN International, which is headquartered in the Netherlands and is a division of KPN N.V., operates a global IP network serving enterprise and carrier clients. GTT said the acquisition augments its the scale and reach of its Tier 1 global IP network in Europe. KPN International's network spans 21 countries, including long-haul...
GTT acquires Accelerated Connections, expanding across Canada
GTT Communications has acquired Accelerated Connections (ACI), a Toronto-headquartered provider of managed networking, voice-over-IP (VoIP) and colocation services,
SpaceX completes 14th Starlink launch
On Sunday, SpaceX successfully completed its 14th Starlink launch mission, delivering a further 60 satellites to orbit, bringing the total number of Starlink satellites launched to date to over 830. The number of Starlink satellites currently in ordit may be a bit lower, as media reports indicate that the company could have de-orbited a small number of its earliest satellites.
Following Sunday's launch, the booster rocket successfully landed on a drone ship off the Florida coast.
SpaceX confirmed that public beta testing of the Starlink network will begin soon. Private tests of the service have achieved download speeds of 100 Mbps with "super good latency" capable of supporting the fastest online video games.
ECTA denounces any bans of Chinese 5G suppliers
ecta, the European Competitive Telecommunications Association, issued a call denouncing any bans of Chinese 5G suppliers for geopolitical reasons. It says the 5G Toolbox provides a suitable EU framework for responding to security issues affecting the networks of the future while respecting European and national sovereignty.
