Wednesday, April 27, 2022

Disaggregation across the Network Stack is Here to Stay

In this video, Arpit Joshipura, GM/SVP Networking + Edge/IOT at The Linux Foundation, looks at the role disaggregation plays across the network stack and the importance of a network operating system that is independent of hardware.

Download the 2022 SmartNICs and Infrastructure Acceleration Report: https://ngi.how/ia-2022


Do customers want to program their SmartNICs?

https://youtu.be/0XlSXN1r5Lk

In this video, Mike Bushong, Group Vice President, Cloud-Ready Data Center at Juniper Networks, looks at the bifurcation between the hyperscalers and the rest of the market around programmable SmartNICs and the challenges that need to be solved.

Download the 2022 SmartNICs and Infrastructure Acceleration Report: https://ngi.how/ia-2022



Comcast Business adds Cisco SD-WAN powered by Viptela

Comcast Business has begun offering Cisco SD-WAN powered by Viptela under its managed SD-WAN solutions portfolio. The collaboration expands Comcast Business’s ability to provide enterprise customers with comprehensive, global secure networking solutions with Ethernet, SD-WAN and security solutions – regardless of their existing infrastructure or vendor relationships.

Cisco SD-WAN powered by Viptela integrates cloud optimization, security, and advanced analytics. The solution enables micro-segmentation and identity-based policy management, extended end-to-end visibility into network health and performance, and integrated 4G LTE and 5G connectivity functionality.

“The expansion of our strategic partnership with Cisco to include Cisco SD-WAN allows us to offer our enterprise customers a broad portfolio of secure network solutions aligned to their unique needs and infrastructure requirements,” said Amit Verma, Vice President, Solutions Engineering and Technology, Comcast Business. “Our open, vendor-agnostic strategy combined with our access to affordable, reliable broadband technology, allows us to craft a solution that leverages the right mix of access technologies to help enterprises meet their objectives and simplify network management operations.”

“As businesses evolve their hybrid work models, IT leaders are being asked to extend the enterprise network to employees anywhere and ensure delivery of consistent application experiences to any location,” said JL Valente, Vice President, Product Management, Enterprise Routing and SD-WAN at Cisco. “Working with Comcast Business to offer advanced managed SD-WAN services based on Cisco technology demonstrates our continued commitment to help customers simplify their goal of providing secure access and the best user experience when connecting to cloud applications.”

In addition, the Comcast Business and Cisco managed services portfolio includes Cisco SD-WAN powered by Meraki and Comcast Business Teleworker VPN with Cisco Meraki.


Redefining the Perimeter with SD-WAN and SASE

 https://youtu.be/Zi1WGo58_xoWith the hybrid work environment, the convergence of security and networking has never been more present. In this video, Jeff Lewis, Vice President, Software Defined Networking – Products, Solutions and Operations at Comcast Business, discusses the evolution in the SD-WAN space and how the edge perimeter is being redefined with SA...


BT and Toshiba test quantum secured communication services

BT and Toshiba, along with EY launched the trial of a world first commercial quantum secured metro network. The infrastructure will be able to connect numerous customers across London, helping them to secure the transmission of valuable data and information between multiple physical locations over standard fibre optic links using quantum key distribution (QKD). 

The network’s first commercial customer, EY, will use the network to connect two of its sites in London, one in Canary Wharf, and one near London Bridge. 


BT will operate the network, providing a range of quantum-secured services including dedicated high bandwidth end-to-end encrypted links, delivered over Openreach’s private fibre networks, while Toshiba will provide quantum key distribution hardware and key management software. 

In the network, QKD keys will be combined with the in-built ethernet security, based on public-key based encryption, which will enable the resultant keys to be used to encrypt the data.

 George Freeman, Minister for Science, Research and Innovation, HM Government, commented: “I am very pleased to see the first trial by BT and Toshiba of a commercial quantum secured metro network, which represents significant progress towards achieving our ambition to make the UK a quantum-enabled economy. This is the kind of innovation that helps cement the UK as a global innovation economy in the vanguard of discovering, developing and commercially adopting transformational technology with real societal benefits.”

BT and Toshiba to build quantum-secured metro network across London

BT and Toshiba are to build a quantum-secured metro network linking sites in London’s Docklands, the City and the M4 Corridor.  The two companies’ initial focus will be to provide trials for enterprise customers who are carrying sensitive traffic (such as database backups) between sites, and to explore potential future offerings such as encrypted links and “quantum keys-as-a-service."  A timeline has not been disclosed.BT will provide data...

BT tests Quantum Key Distribution over hollow core fibre 

 BT has conducted a trial of Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) over hollow core fibre cable developed by Lumenisity, a spin out from Southampton University.Testing of Nested Anti-Resonant Nodeless Fibre (NANF) hollow core fibre kicked off this summer at the BT Labs in Ipswich.BT researchers operated a state-of-the-art QKD system using commercial equipment over a 6-kilometre-long Lumenisity CoreSmart cable with a hollow, air-filled centre, revealing...

ADVA supports Quantum-Secure VPN (QuaSiModO) project

ADVA is playing a key role in a unique research initiative extending post-quantum security to VPN networks. The company has supplied its ADVA FSP 150 with ConnectGuard Ethernet encryption for the Quantum-Secure VPN Modules and Operation Modes (QuaSiModO) project, which is being conducted by the Fraunhofer Institute of Applied and Integrated Security, the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and genua GmbH. Funding is provided by the German Federal...

Orange Business links Siemens in 94 countries with SD-WAN

Orange Business Services has successfully migrated 1,168 of Siemen's locations in 94 countries to a secure SD-WAN infrastructure. 

Overcoming potential implementation challenges during the pandemic, Orange Business Services, with its technology partner Cisco, has been able to now fully deliver one of the biggest SD-WAN deployments in the world across 94 countries.

“Siemens is a global company with offices and production sites all over the world, and we need a reliable and future-proof communications network. It’s a critical business enabler that has to be agile enough to evolve with our business,” emphasized Hanna Hennig, CIO, Siemens AG. “As a pioneer in innovation and technology, we set the highest standards for our transformation project. With the global capabilities, expertise and orchestration of Orange Business Services, we were able to successfully complete the massive deployment of Flexible SD-WAN, which delivers decisive advantages for our business and users alike, including a streamlined user experience with dynamic traffic routing for applications as well as dynamic bandwidth allocation.”

The seamless and secure SD-WAN coverage provides the foundation for a flexible Siemens security framework. This approach further increased Siemens’ abilities to effectively mitigate, detect and respond to risks.

"We are so pleased that Siemens chose Orange Business Services to be its trusted partner. Deploying, migrating and implementing this huge digital transformation project for Siemens and managing their critical global communications infrastructure underlines our end-to-end integrator expertise in delivering large-scale global projects. We have delivered on Siemens' objectives by combining SD-WAN technology with cloud-based services and solutions,” commented Aliette Mousnier-Lompre, Interim CEO at Orange Business Services.

VMware targets Sovereign Cloud opportunity

VMware has established a Sovereign Cloud initiative to help governments and regulated industries to identify and engage with trusted national or regional cloud service providers to meet their unique sovereign cloud requirements. 

The newest VMware Sovereign Cloud designated partners are IONOS SE, Saudi Telecom Company (STC), Sopra Steria AS, and TDRA. This brings the total to 14 participants in the VMware Sovereign Cloud initiative in distinct sovereign regions covering Canada, Mexico, Sweden, Norway, United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Italy, New Zealand, Australia, Saudi Arabia, UAE, India, and the United States.

“We are pleased to welcome new partners to our Sovereign Cloud initiative and see existing partners demonstrate momentum in meeting the sovereign cloud requirements of customers around the world,” said Rajeev Bhardwaj, vice president of product management, cloud infrastructure business group, VMware. “New data services from Tanzu will enable all our VMware Cloud Provider partners, particularly, sovereign cloud-focused partners, to expand their data and application transformation portfolios and accelerate cloud adoption. This will allow customers to remain within sovereign regions and jurisdictional control while achieving cutting edge transformation at scale.”

Through VMware Cloud Director and its technology ecosystem, VMware said it helps ensure that sovereign cloud providers have a wealth of solutions to augment their offerings. Some key capabilities:

  • Integrated Self-Service Sovereign Object Storage: Sovereign clouds require local Object Storage capabilities to meet the needs of data residency, a key pillar in sovereign clouds. Cloudian provides an integrated Object storage service that meets growing data volumes of national data and innovation in application development.
  • Ransomware protection, backup, and recovery: Data protection is another critical aspect of Sovereign cloud as all applications and workloads can be targets for cybercrime. Ransomware protection from Veeam and Cloudian uses immutable storage and instant workload recovery to help protect sovereign environments and critical national data from being changed or encrypted.
  • Key management services: Sovereign cloud environments require the highest levels of protection, with a core requirement for encryption and key management. Fortanix delivers an integrated data security platform that provides VMware Cloud providers’ customers more control over their security-sensitive workloads and simplifies partner key services with encryption, tokenization, and secrets management.
  •  Additionally, Fortanix provides VMware Sovereign Cloud customers full control and ownership of the keys within the VMware Sovereign cloud boundary. Fortanix DSM complements this with FIPS 140-2 level 3 certified hardware security modules and key management with regional level isolation and enables full compliance with specific data privacy/transfer regulations including Shrems II and GDPR.


NETGEAR cites COVID-induced lockdowns in China for sales dip

NETGEAR reported Q1 net revenue of $210.6 million, a decrease of 33.8% from the comparable prior year quarter.

First quarter 2022 GAAP operating loss of $58.5 million impacted by non-cash impairment charges of $44.4 million, or (27.8)% of net revenue, as compared to operating income of $31.3 million, or 9.9% of net revenue, in the comparable prior year quarter. First quarter 2022 non-GAAP net loss per diluted share was $0.28, as compared to net income per diluted share of $0.99 in the comparable prior year quarter.

Patrick Lo, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of NETGEAR, commented, “We ended the first quarter with net revenue of $210.6 million and non-GAAP operating margin of (4.4)%, within the range of our recently revised guidance. We continued to experience strong demand for our SMB products, especially on our ProAV switches; however, our ability to deliver meaningfully higher revenue was constrained by COVID-induced lockdowns in China which impacted supply of components to our supply chain partners. On the CHP side, we saw the continued year over year and sequential growth in end user sales of our super-premium mesh products represented by our Orbi 8 and Orbi 9. Meanwhile overall CHP sales were negatively impacted by the U.S. consumer WiFi market contracting from approximately 15% above 2019 levels entering the first quarter to roughly flat to 2019 exiting the first quarter. The lower top line performance negatively impacted our operating leverage and resulting margin performance in the quarter.”

Mr. Lo continued, “In spite of these challenges, it’s clear that our core long-term strategy of focusing on the premium, higher-margin segments of the WiFi mesh market and the ProAV revolution remains intact. As the pioneer of the Tri and Quad band WiFi segment we are seeing great reception of our $1,500 Quadband WiFi 6E Orbi. Buoyed by the success of our premium WiFi products, we ended the quarter with 627,000 paid subscribers for our services business and remain encouraged by this progress towards our full year target of 750,000 subscribers.”

https://investor.netgear.com/events-and-presentations/events-calendar/default.aspx

MaxLinear posts record net revenue of $263.9m, up 26% year-over-year

MaxLinear reported Q1 net revenue of $263.9 million, up 6% sequentially and up 26% year-over-year. GAAP diluted earnings per share was $0.42, compared to diluted earnings per share of $0.35 in the prior quarter, and diluted earnings per share of $0.05 in the year-ago quarter. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share was $1.00, compared to diluted earnings per share of $0.86 in the prior quarter, and diluted earnings per share of $0.55 in the year-ago quarter.

“In the first quarter, revenue was up 6% sequentially and up 26% year-over-year, driven by strong growth across all our markets, and in particular, our connectivity market, which grew 14% sequentially. Our Wi-Fi growth has continued to be robust as we continue to win market share based on our leading differentiated feature set. We are confident in our ability to more than double this business in 2022, and are on a firm trajectory to deliver at least $200 million of Wi-Fi revenue in 2023. Along with the market share wins, we are also making tremendous progress in continued innovation for next generation Wi-Fi 7, which will drive future growth opportunities. Cash flow from operations was approximately $134.2 million, and non-GAAP gross margin for Q1 improved to 62.8%. We are excited about our prospects for continued future growth driven by our comprehensive product portfolio, and the accelerating pace of new product launches particularly in connectivity, fiber-to-the home broadband, optical, and wireless infrastructure markets,” commented Kishore Seendripu, Ph.D., Chairman and CEO.

https://investors.maxlinear.com

Ribbon posts Q1 sales dip to $173 million due to supply chain issues

Ribbon Communications reported Q1 revenue of $173 million, compared to $193 million for the first quarter of 2021. Product and service bookings-to-revenue was 1.20x in the first quarter of 2022, with IP Optical Networks at 1.27x.

"The Ribbon team delivered financial results directly in-line with our guidance for the quarter despite continued supply chain constraints. Our continued growth in IP Optical sales in North America, strong RFP activity, and new product pipeline provide confidence that our financial performance will continue to improve throughout the year," noted Bruce McClelland, President and Chief Executive Officer of Ribbon Communications. 

McClelland continued, "The increased investment we are making in product development is accelerating the pace of new product and service introductions in order to deliver on our strategy to generate both near-term and longer-term revenue growth. Partnerships such as our recent Cloud & Edge announcement with Microsoft to accelerate deployment of Teams further differentiate our solutions and expand our market reach."