Arista intros Multi-Domain Macro-Segmentation Service

Arista Networks introduced a Multi-Domain Macro-Segmentation Service ifor integrating security policy with the network through an open and consistent network segmentation approach across network domains. 

The service, which is enabled through Arista EOS (Extensible Operating System) and CloudVision capabilities, includes a new group segmentation approach, MSS-Group, intended to simplify access control for users and IoT devices in enterprise workspaces. Available on EOS-based switches, MSS-Group implements security policy enforcement based on logical groups rather than traditional approaches based on interfaces, subnets or physical ports. 

Arista said the implicit trust associated with network location needs to be replaced with continuous, proactive network monitoring with behavioral-based situational analysis for asset visibility and rapid incident response. Arista’s zero trust security approach is designed to address this evolution, combining network-based multi domain segmentation, situational awareness and visibility for all network resources, and AI-driven network detection and response.

https://blogs.arista.com/blog/time-for-zero-trust-networking-is-now

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Pacific Gas and Electric sells tower rights for $973 million

Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), the leading electric utility in northern California, agreed to its license agreements with wireless providers that attach their equipment to certain electric transmission towers and other utility structures to SBA Communications for $973 million. 

The sale of these licenses applies to over 700 towers. PG&E is not selling any transmission towers as part of this transaction.

PG&E is also entering into a strategic relationship with SBA, through SBA's wholly owned subsidiary, to sublicense and market equipment at additional attachment locations on up to 28,000 transmission towers across PG&E's extensive network. Through this arrangement, PG&E will receive a portion of future revenues from these sublicensed equipment attachment locations.

"This transaction adds a significant portfolio of high quality, exclusive locations to our outstanding existing US macro tower portfolio and SBA expects these assets to generate approximately $39.5 million in Tower Cash Flow in their first full year in our portfolio," said Jeff Stoops, President and Chief Executive Officer of SBA Communications. "As 5G network deployments are now a reality, we are excited to use our vast experience and industry leading position in order to facilitate the future additional use of these assets by wireless service providers for the collective benefit of the wireless industry, PG&E and SBA. We are also particularly pleased about the opportunity to work closely with PG&E over the coming years to maximize wireless deployments across their extensive network of transmission towers."

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OIF publishes results of Transport SDN API interoperability demo

OIF published the results of its 2020 Transport SDN Application Programming Interface (API) Interoperability Demonstration, which was a ten-week long interoperability testing exercise that was held in Telefonica’s lab in Madrid.

The interoperability testing involved three phases over ten weeks, Sept – Nov 2020:

• Phase 1: Open Networking Foundation (ONF) T-API NBI testing, Scope: ONF T-API v2.1.3 reference implementation agreement TR-547
• Phase 2: Open terminals testing including discovery, provisioning, service de-activation and streaming telemetry
• Phase 3: End-to-end disaggregation demo, Scope: evaluation and demonstration of end-to-end use cases

Findings and results of the testing include:

• Vendor products demonstrate a high level of maturity and support of operator-favored use cases, based on T-API version 2.1.3 and OpenConfig APIs. Vendors have adopted the ONF 2.1.3 Reference Implementation Agreement (ONF TR-547) rapidly and with few deviations.
• Inconsistent interpretation of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) RESTCONF standard was one interoperability issue identified, especially standard authentication. Clarification to RESTCONF provisioning behavior and implementation scalability were also identified as issues.  
•  A particularly good level of compliance to the OpenConfig models was demonstrated by implementations, however, some areas such as key exchange algorithms for IETF NETCONF and complex use cases for device provisioning and commissioning did generate issues.

Participating vendors included ADVA, Ciena, Cisco Systems, Infinera and Nokia. Network operator Telefónica hosted the demo. China Telecom, Telia Company and TELUS participated as consulting network operators.

“Interoperable transport SDN APIs are essential capabilities to enable open optical networks,” said Mauro Costa, Head of planning, strategy & architecture, Telia Company, a consulting network operator for this year’s demo. “International co-operations, like this one with OIF, allow the industry to progress at a high pace and Telia Company welcomes the opportunity offered by this interoperability demo. It reinforces that we are advancing in the right direction and that the maturity of the APIs implementation for optical SDN architecture is improving.”

The whitepaper is posted here:

https://www.oiforum.com/documents/oif-2020-transport-sdn-api-interop-demo-white-paper/

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Cloud pioneer Andy Jassy to take over as CEO of Amazon

 Andy Jassy will take over as Chief Executive Officer of Amazon in Q3 2021, replacing Jeff Bezos who will transition to the role of Executive Chair.

Jassy, who currently serves as CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS), has played a key role in the development of cloud services.

Some highlights for AWS for Q4 2020:

• AWS announced new commitments and migrations spanning major industries, including financial services with JPMorgan Chase, Itaú Unibanco (Latin America’s largest bank), Standard Chartered Bank, and Nationwide; media and entertainment with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Thomson Reuters, and ViacomCBS; technology with Arm and Twitter; travel with Boom Technology, Inc. (Boom Supersonic) and Star Alliance (the world’s largest airline alliance); retail and e-commerce with Mercado Libre (Latin America’s largest online commerce and payments provider) and Zalando (Europe’s largest online fashion and lifestyle platform); power and utilities with Siemens Smart Infrastructure (a Siemens AG business group that focuses on energy distribution and intelligent buildings); and automotive with The BMW Group, as well as a multi-year, global agreement to develop and market BlackBerry’s Intelligent Vehicle Data Platform, IVY.
• AWS continued to expand its infrastructure footprint around the world, announcing the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region, available by mid-2022, and the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region and AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Regions, available in the second half of 2022. 
• AWS provides 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones in six more AWS Regions, including regions in Indonesia, Japan, and Spain, as well as the recently pre-announced regions in India, Switzerland, and Australia.
• New AWS Local Zones in Boston, Houston, and Miami place AWS infrastructure close to end users in metropolitan centers, so customers can access low-latency compute, storage, and database services without needing to provision or maintain datacenter space. AWS also announced the availability of AWS Local Zones in 12 additional cities (Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, and Seattle) coming in 2021.
• AWS announced two new smaller AWS Outposts form factors (1U and 2U servers) that give customers access to AWS on-premises in space-constrained locations, such as branch offices, factories, hospitals, cell towers, or retail stores.
• Introduced first cloud-based Mac instances (EC2 Mac instances for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud).
• Introduced five new EC2 compute services, including Graviton2-powered C6gn instances that provide 40% better price performance for networking and compute-intensive workloads over comparable current generation x86-based instances, AMD-powered G4ad Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) instances that offer the industry’s best price performance for graphics-intensive applications, M5zn instances that deliver the fastest Intel Xeon Scalable processors in the cloud, Intel-powered D3/D3en instances that offer the highest storage capacity for local HDD storage in the cloud, and memory-optimized R5b instances that deliver the fastest block storage performance available for Amazon EC2.
• Introduced nine new capabilities for Amazon SageMaker that make it even easier for developers and data scientists to prepare, build, train, deploy, and manage machine learning models.
• Introduced five new services for industrial customers that use machine learning to improve operational efficiency, quality control, security, and workplace safety. Amazon Monitron and 
• Introduced Amazon EBS io2 Block Express volumes, which deliver the first storage area network (SAN) built for the cloud, with up to 256,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS), 4,000 MB/second throughput, and 64 TB of capacity.
• Introduced four new container services to help customers develop, deploy, and scale modern applications in the cloud and on-premises: Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Anywhere and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Anywhere enable customers to run Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS in their own data centers, AWS Proton automates container and serverless application development and deployment, and Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) Public provides developers an easy and highly available way to share and deploy container software publicly.
• The next version of Aurora Serverless, Aurora Serverless v2, scales to hundreds of thousands of database transactions in a fraction of a second, delivering up to 90% cost savings compared to provisioning infrastructure for peak capacity.
• Introduced AWS announced the general availability of Amazon EC2 P4d instances, the next generation of accelerated computing instances powered by NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs and AWS petabit-scale networking. P4d instances provide up to 3x faster time to train and 60% lower cost than previous generation instances for machine learning training and high-performance computing in the cloud. EC2 P4d instances are also the only instances in the cloud to feature UltraCluster capability, enabling customers to scale to 2x the computing power as any other cloud provider.
• AWS announced AWS Trainium, an AWS-designed machine learning training chip that will deliver the most cost-effective training in the cloud. AWS Trainium will deliver the most teraflops of any machine learning training instance in the cloud, support all major frameworks (including TensorFlow, PytTorch, and MXnet), and use the same Neuron SDK used by AWS Inferentia (an AWS-designed chip for machine learning inference acceleration), making it easy for customers to get started training quickly with AWS Trainium. AWS Trainium is coming to Amazon EC2 and Amazon SageMaker in the second half of 2021.

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Google Cloud topped $13B in 2020 revenue, $5.6B loss

Alphabet disclosed the following financial metrics for Google Cloud.

Google Cloud includes Google’s infrastructure and data analytics platforms, collaboration tools, and other services for enterprise customers. Google Cloud generates revenues primarily from fees received for Google Cloud Platform services and Google Workspace (formerly known as G Suite) collaboration tools.

https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2020Q4_alphabet_earnings_release.pdf?cache=9e991fd

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Lumentum reports record revenue, strength in telecom and lasers

Lumentum Holdings reported net revenue for its fiscal second quarter of 2021 of $478.8 million, with GAAP net income of $83.2 million, or $1.06 per diluted share. Net revenue for the fiscal first quarter of 2021 was $452.4 million, with GAAP net income of $67.1 million, or $0.86 per diluted share. Net revenue for the fiscal second quarter of 2020 was $457.8 million, with GAAP net income of $49.1 million, or $0.63 per diluted share.

"Combining the positive momentum from the prior quarter, with strengthened demand in Telecom and Lasers, we achieved new record revenue and non-GAAP gross margin, operating margin, and earnings per share in the second quarter," said Alan Lowe, President and CEO. "We are well positioned to grow revenue and earnings into the future. We have developed a broad portfolio of new products that address upcoming growth catalysts, completed our exit of low margin product lines that would have been a headwind to future growth, and lowered our fixed costs to enable stronger operating leverage and profitability as we grow."

https://www.lumentum.com/en/media-room/news-releases/lumentum-announces-fiscal-second-quarter-2021-financial-results

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Viavi posts sales of $299.9 million, down 4.4%

Viavi Solutions reported net revenue of $299.9 million for its second fiscal quarter ended January 2, 2021, down $13.8 million or 4.4% year-over-year.

“Fiscal Q2 delivered better than expected revenue and profitability, exceeding our guidance, with non-GAAP operating margin at 22.3% and non-GAAP EPS at $0.23. OSP experienced stronger than expected demand from both Anti-Counterfeiting and 3D Sensing products. NSE revenue rebounded sequentially, driven by the continued recovery of service provider activities and the continued strength in Lab & Production demand,” said Oleg Khaykin, VIAVI’s President and Chief Executive Officer.

“For Q3, we expect OSP demand to remain unseasonably strong, reflecting stronger demand for 3D Sensing products and especially strong demand for Anti-Counterfeiting products. NSE revenue is expected to be higher year-on-year, driven by continued recovery in Field Instruments demand and continued strength in Lab & Production.”

Khaykin added, “Calendar 2021 is expected to be a revenue recovery year driven by the secular demand strength in 5G Wireless, Fiber, 3D Sensing and Anti-Counterfeiting.”

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Comcast Business leverages Cisco Meraki for teleworker VPNs

Comcast Business is using Cisco Meraki to expand its Comcast Business Teleworker VPN solution for enterprises.

Comcast Business Teleworker VPN with Cisco Meraki is an enterprise-class, cloud-native platform, which can be paired with Comcast’s Managed VPN Aggregation service to provide an enterprise-grade VPN gateway at business locations or hosted in Comcast's Secure Gateway Service centers. These are paired with remote, all-in-one devices, that provide cloud security and wireless and wired connectivity options at home locations – all centrally managed on the Cisco Meraki cloud platform. With these components in place, enterprises can securely connect home-based devices, including laptops, desktops, VoIP phones, printers and more to the corporate network.

The centrally managed remote access VPN solution enables enterprises to provide remote employees the same corporate network experience and service they have in the office. 

“The global pandemic has fast-tracked secure, remote workforce connectivity to the top of the priority list for today’s enterprise IT decision makers,” said Amit Verma, Vice President Solution Engineering and Technology, Comcast Business. ”When combined with our Teleworker Broadband solution, the Comcast Business Teleworker VPN solution with Cisco Meraki allows enterprises to gain peace of mind while providing their employees with a secure, independent Internet connection that does not interfere or compete with their at-home Internet – freeing up home bandwidth for remote learning, entertainment and more.”

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Windstream Enterprise gains MEF 3.0 SD-WAN Certification

Windstream Enterprise (WE) has attained MEF 3.0 SD-WAN services certification for its VMware-powered SD-WAN, validating conformance to the industry’s first global standard defining SD-WAN and its service attributes. This recognition from MEF entrusts Windstream Enterprise with shaping the direction and growth of the SD-WAN services market through industry standardization and certification of services, technologies and professionals.

“We congratulate Windstream Enterprise on its MEF 3.0 SD-WAN certification,” said Nan Chen, president of MEF. “End-users who purchase SD-WAN from a certified MEF 3.0 service provider can have confidence they will receive services that conform to MEF’s industry-leading global standard. MEF certification is an important step in advancing SD-WAN market growth and driving adoption of productivity-enhancing services and technologies that will progress digital transformation.”

The acknowledgment from MEF via this certification, performed by Spirent, assures that Windstream Enterprise customers are receiving an SD-WAN solution that meets the highest standard for maximum agility and integrity possible.

“We are proud to be recipients of MEF’s 3.0 SD-WAN services certification as resounding validation of Windstream Enterprise’s best-in-class SD-WAN offerings,” said Mike Frane, vice president of product management. “Industry standardization of SD-WAN is making it easier to integrate work across multiple types of underlying services. Ultimately, the combination of standardized and orchestrated overlay and underlay services will help deliver exceptional experiences, improved service capabilities and guaranteed resiliency to our customers.”

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FireEye posts Q4 sales of $248 million, up 5% yoy

FireEye reported Q4 2020 revenue of $248 million, up 5% yoy. Non-GAAP net income was $0.12 compared to $0.07 a year earlier.

During Q4, FireEye uncovered the supply chain compromise in the SolarWinds Orion platform. 

“Our record fourth quarter and 2020 results demonstrated that we are gaining momentum in our Platform, Cloud Subscription, Managed Services and Professional services categories. The combined revenue from these two categories accounted for 55% of total revenue in 2020 and increased 23% from the full year 2019,” said Kevin Mandia, FireEye chief executive officer.

“We continue to transform our business and believe we are well-positioned as organizations shift to intelligence-led security focused on security effectiveness. Our vision is to become a seamless extension of our customers’ security operations by delivering our threat intelligence and expertise gained on the frontlines through the Mandiant Advantage platform,” added Mandia.

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UNH-IOL tests multivendor NVM Express and NVMe over Fabrics

The University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab (UNH-IOL) completed its second virtual multi-vendor plugfest focused on NVM Express (NVMe) and NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) technology test cases across eight unique devices and companies.

UNH-IOL said its NVMe technology plugfest events are designed to test against NVMe specifications to qualify them for the NVMe Integrator's List. The NVMe Integrator's List currently consists of configurations that have proven to be interoperable and conformant to NVMe specifications. The most recent of which included NVMe architecture testing for E1.S and E1.L form factor devices, sanitize testing, security, fused command and endurance group testing.

"The completion of the second virtual NVMe Plugfest has allowed companies to stay on schedule with their own internal testing and development,” said Kerry Munson, Operations Manager, Datacenter Technologies, UNH-IOL. “Being able to continue hosting our test events has posed to be a major accomplishment to the IOL and our members, as devices continue to be tested against NVMe technology conformance standards.”

“We are pleased to see the UNH-IOL continue their proven NVMe technology conformance and interoperability testing in a virtual format,” said Amber Huffman, NVM Express President. “With the shift to virtual testing, companies can easily take advantage of the robust testing services the UNH-IOL provides. This testing remains crucial to ensuring vendor products are conformant to the NVMe specifications, providing end-users with confidence that the purchased products successfully operate and allow them to reap all the benefits NVMe technology has to offer.”

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