Luna acquires Silixa for fiber optic sensing

Luna Innovations announced a $50 million investment by White Hat Capital Partners as well as the acquisition of Silixa, a UK-based supplier of distributed fiber optic sensing solutions. Silixa Ltd is a company specializing in fiber optic-powered data services, primarily serving sectors like alternative energy, mining, and others. They provide distributed fiber optic sensing solutions, which are used to measure temperature, strain, and acoustics,...

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Cisco to acquire Isovalent for eBPF-based open source security

Cisco agreed to acquire Isovalent, a start-up focused on open source cloud native networking and security. Financial terms were not disclosed.Isovalent holds leadership positions in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and eBPF Foundation, in addition to upstream software contributions, and has led the development of Cilium, the leading cloud native solution for networking and security. eBPF, which stands for extended Berkeley Packet Filter,”...

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Equinix allocates $4.9B in green bonds to support 172 projects

Equinix completed the allocation of $4.9 billion in investment-grade green bonds, marking a significant step towards its science-based target of achieving climate neutrality by 2030 and enhancing operational eco-efficiency. Since 2020, the company has issued six bond offerings, with full allocation achieved by June 2023. These bonds have financed 172 green building projects at 105 sites, 33 energy efficiency projects, and two Power Purchase Agreement...

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KT deploys 600G transmission route with Ciena

KT completed the construction of South Korea's first nationwide 600G transmission network.The transmission network, operational since September 2023, spans over 1,000 km and is capable of transmitting 600G per wavelength in long-distance segments, connecting major cities nationwide from Seoul to Busan, Gwangju, and even Jeju Island.The deployment uses Ciena’s 6500 flexible grid Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexer (ROADM) with WaveLogic 5...

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EIB awards €300m loan to iliad for 5G rollouts in France

The European Investment Bank issued a €300m loan to iliad SA to expand its 5G network rollout in France. This is iliad SA’s seventh loan from EIB, bringing its total amount of EIB financing granted since 2009 to more than €1.7 billion.The iliad Group is now Europe’s sixth-largest mobile operator with some 38 million mobile subscribers. the Group’s 5G coverage rate in France is now over 94.4% of the population, and it has almost 15 million mobile...

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NTT partners with TEPCO Power Grid for Tokyo data centers

NTT Global Data Centers Japan (NTT GDCJ), a subsidiary of NTT DATA Group Corporation, and TEPCO Power Grid will establish a new company to jointly develop and operate data centers in the Inzai-Shiroi area, of Greater Tokyo, Japan. The forthcoming enterprise, set to be launched in the spring of 2024, anticipates making its initial capacity available in the latter half of the 2026 fiscal year.The inaugural endeavor of this collaboration involves purchasing...

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AWS launches Canada West (Calgary) Region

Amazon Web Services (AWS) activated its second AWS infrastructure Region in Canada—the AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region. With this launch, AWS has 105 Availability Zones across 33 geographic regions, with announced plans to launch 12 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Malaysia, New Zealand, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.The AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region consists of three Availability Zones and joins the...

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Dell'Oro: AI boosts the server semiconductor and component market

Accelerators, mainly used for AI applications, drove the server semiconductor and component market to 29 percent year-over-year in 3Q 2023, according to a new report from Dell'Oro Group. The report observes that the accelerator market is on track to surpass the CPU market in revenues by nearly two-fold in 2023."The server and storage system component market is poised for an 11 percent growth for full-year 2023, primarily propelled by accelerators....

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stc expands global ambitions with acquisition of CMC Networks

center3, a wholly owned subsidiary of the stc Group, agreed to acquire CMC Networks, a global service provider across Africa and the Middle East, from the Carlyle Sub-Saharan Africa Fund. Financial terms were not disclosed.CMC Networks boasts a pan-African Layer 2/Layer 3 MPLS network, with significant presence across Africa and the Middle East. It operates more than 110 service locations, servicing 51 out of 54 countries in Africa and 12 countries...

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Nokia divests Device Management and Service Management unit

Lumine Group Inc. will buy Nokia’s Device Management (DM) and Service Management Platform (SMP) businesses FOR EUR 185 million, which includes a contingent consideration of up to EUR 35 million based on the performance of the business during the first year following close. Nokia Device Management software capabilities help communication service providers remotely manage home broadband access devices, as well as IoT sensors and devices from a...

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Arelion activates new PoP at LightEdge in San Diego

Arelion announced a new Point-of-Presence (PoP) in San Diego at the Lightwave Data Center (LWDC) operated by LightEdge Solutions, a provider of secure cloud and colocation services. LightEdge Solutions’ Lightave carrier-neutral data center site is strategically located in the Kearny Mesa area of San Diego, offering colocation, cloud services and direct connectivity to AWS and Microsoft Azure. The PoP provides enhanced access to Arelion’s number one...

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Extreme Networks names Monica Kumar as CMO

Extreme Networks named Monica Kumar as its new Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Prior to Extreme, Kumar served as CMO at Hitachi Vantara, where she  drove a product simplification strategy that brought the company’s portfolio of data storage products together into one easy-to-consume, scalable, and resilient platform. Previously, she served as SVP of Marketing and Cloud go-to-market at Nutanix and spent more than...

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Lightmatter pulls in additional $155M for photonic interconnects / processors

Lightmatter, a start-up based in Boston that is developing photonic interconnect and compute products, annouced $155 million in a Series C-2 funding round. The company has raised over $420 million to date and is now valued at over $1.2 billion. The latest funding round was led by GV (Google Ventures) and Viking Global Investors, with participation from others. Lightmatter said its full stack of photonics-enabled hardware and software solutions...

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OpenZR+ MSA tests multi-vendor interoperability

 The OpenZR+ Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) Group announced the results of two successful interoperability test events at LightRiver and featuring coherent optical transceivers from Cisco, Coherent, Fujitsu, Juniper Networks, and Lumentum operating on Cisco and Juniper routers. The testing demonstrated compatibility to the OpenZR+ specification and interoperability between optical transceiver modules from different vendors in two different...

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Data Center Architecture Spanning Edge to Cloud with AI & 5G

Check out AI and Cloud Data Center Networking videos here: https://ngi.fyi/aidcnet23ytAI is making a transformative impact on data center architecture. Yet developers know that applications must flow seamlessly from core to edge. How can these forces be resolved? Sanjay Kumar, VP of Products and Marketing from Arrcus, explains:How Arrcus' solutions optimize and maximize the utilization of GPUs in data centers, minimizing latency and loss in running...

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Arrcus joins the Ultra Ethernet Consortium

Arrcus has joined the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC), a Linux Foundation initiative dedicated to developing next-generation Ethernet technologies for AI and HPC applications.The UEC is a collaborative effort among industry leaders to address the growing demands of AI and HPC workloads on data center networks. These workloads require high performance, low latency, and scalable interconnects to efficiently move massive datasets and rapidly process...

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Comcast confirms massive breach impacting nearly 36m customers

Comcast confirmed a data security breaching involving nearly 36 million of its Xfinity broadband customers across the U.S.Comcast blamed the cyber intrusion on a zero-day vulnerability in Citrix software. Comcast claims to have patched the software promptly after Citrix issued in mitigationguidance on October 23, 2023, however, it discovered unauthorized access to its systems between October 16 and October 19, 2023.It is believed that compromised...

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Canada's Western James Bay Telecom Network selects Infinera

Western James Bay Telecom Network (WJBTN) selected Infinera to expand connectivity services to rural communities in northern Ontario, Canada. The deployment will use the Infinera XTM Series to deliver flexible, reliable, and cost-effective high-bandwidth solutions to its residential, business, and government customers. FONEX Data Systems is Infinera's integration partner.WJBTN has been bringing telecommunications services to rural communities...

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University of Stuttgart picks HPE for supercomputers

The High-Performance Computing Center of the University of Stuttgart selected Hewlett Packard Enterprise to build two new supercomputers. The total combined cost of the project is €115 million and funding will be provided through the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS), the alliance of Germany's three national supercomputing centers. Half of this funding will be provided by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), and the second...

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AI's impact on data center traffic and ZR/ZR+ optics

 How is AI impacting data center traffic and what effect will this have on inter data center links? Josef Berger, AVP Marketing from Marvell explains:The increasing demand for data center interconnect bandwidth due to upgrades in GPU clusters and the construction of new data centers. This demand is driving the need for ZR connectivity.The benefits and growing demand for their 400 ZR and upcoming 800 gig ZR and ZR plus products. These products...

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The Arms Race for AI Clusters

Check out AI and Cloud Data Center Networking videos here: https://ngi.fyi/aidcnet23ytHas the demand for AI data center spurred a new arms race in advanced semiconductors and optics? Brad Booth, Ethernet and Optical Technology Advisor, explains:The exponential growth of AI data centers in the past five years, driven by the increasing capabilities of AI and the demand from both hyperscale and cloud markets.The challenges faced in meeting the demand...

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Multi-Color Lasers and Micro Ring Resonators for DCI

Check out AI and Cloud Data Center Networking videos here: https://ngi.fyi/aidcnet23ytScaling data center interconnect bandwidth is a daunting challenge. John Jost, Co-founder and Co-CEO from Enlightra, proposes an innovative developmental path:The traditional method of moving information with a single color laser is reaching its practical limits. Enlightra's technology allows us to use many colors to scale bandwidth.Enlightra's unique approach involves...

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HellasQCI and Nokia target quantum-safe networks

Nokia completed a proof of concept (PoC) of Quantum-Safe Networks (QSN) in a complex optical network ring topology across three locations in Greece with HellasQCI, the Greek National Quantum Communication Infrastructure Consortium. The tests demonstrated hybrid key generation using both classic and quantum physics to generate and distribute Quantum-Safe keys for encrypted optical services. The goal of the PoC was to run use cases with the HellasQCI...

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Lockheed Martin, Verizon demo 5G streaming for DoD

Lockheed Martin Skunk Works and Verizon demonstrated 5G streaming for real-time visualization content on edge computing devices to advance Department of Defense (DOD) sustainment missions.The demonstration validated three things:5G at the edge for latency critical interactions of complex visualization applications such as augmented, virtual, or extended reality experiencesStreaming of real-time, complex, 3D visualization contentStreaming to edge...

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Armada raises $55M for edge data center in containers

Armada, a start-up based in San Francisco specializing in edge computing, AI, and connectivity, recently emerged from stealth with a notable capital raise exceeding $55M. The funding round was led by prominent investors including Founders Fund, Lux Capital, Shield Capital, and 8090 Industries. The company is developing dge computing solutions that are designed to be deployable on both on-premise and cloud infrastructures. The edge computing...

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Lumen appoints Satish Lakshmanan as CPO

Lumen Technologies named Dr. Satish Lakshmanan as its new Chief Product Officer, reporting to Lumen CEO Kate Johnson.Dr. Lakshmanan comes to Lumen from Amazon Web Services (AWS) where he was the global leader for Artificial Intelligence Services. At AWS, he generated and delivered new revenue streams across major industries and segments improving existing revenue channels and setting global revenue targets aligned with goals and objectives. He also held various product leadership roles at NetApp, Western Digital, QLogic, and Texas Instruments and...

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Democratizing Networking with SONiC

What key learnings from hyperscalers can be applied to enterprise data centers? Kamran Naqvi, Principal Network Architect from Broadcom, explains how they are democratizing networking for everyone:- Broadcom has taken the benefits and advantages previously only available to hyperscalers and made them accessible to all. They've done this by enabling features in SONiC, an open-source network operating system initially developed by Microsoft for their...

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Chiplet Architecture for Next Gen Infrastructure

What's driving the deep interest in chiplet architecture? How does it scale, and is there a role for open interfaces?Bapi Vinnakota, ODSA Project Lead from Open Compute Project explains:- Chiplets are currently the fastest and most efficient way to build heterogenous systems, integrating different types of compute into one package. This is essential for accommodating the ever-changing AI workloads.- The IO bandwidth, both into memory and in terms...

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Deutsche Telekom expands fiber reach

Deutsche Telekom added 2.5 million new fiber connections in 2023, reaching a total of eight million households will be able to book a fiber optic connection by the end of the year. The company is on track to reach more than ten million fiber households in 2024 "Fiber is and remains the hot topic in our industry. The fiber optic boom is really taking off in Germany right now. We are building super-fast Internet for more and more people. There...

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Nokia and Deutsche Telekom deploy multi-vendor Open RAN

Nokia and Deutsche Telekom have begun to deploy a multi-vendor Open RAN network with Fujitsu in Germany. The technology is fully integrated into DT’s live commercial network and the initial cluster will provide 2G, 4G, and 5G commercial services to customers in the Neubrandenburg area of Northern Germany. The deal marks a significant return for Nokia into DT’s commercial network and is the realization of the Memorandum of Understanding signed...

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Swisscom deploys Netcracker’s Network Domain Orchestration

Swisscom has deployed Netcracker’s Network Domain Orchestration (NDO) solution to modernize the IT landscape of the operator’s new terabit IP transport aggregation network (TITAN). This initiative is part of a large-scale OSS transformation program at Swisscom to create a more flexible, future-proof and automated modern digital architecture with lower operational costs.Netcracker NDO provides a unifying automation solution incorporating real-time...

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Bluebird Network closes $285M in financing

 Bluebird Network, a U.S. communications infrastructure provider and operator of more than 11,000 miles of fiber and two data centers,received $285 million of five-year Senior Secured Credit Facilities. The company said it has used the credit facilities to refinance its existing indebtedness and to fund ongoing capital expenditures including network upgrades, expansion into new markets, and an awarded Middle Mile grant build. TD Securities...

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Thailand’s Interlink Telecom Selects Ribbon for DCI

Interlink Telecom Public Company Ltd, (ITEL) a leading Thai network services provider, has selected Ribbon Communications to provide  a Data Center Interconnect solution using its Apollo optical networking platform."We're extremely proud to be working with ITEL and of our ability to deliver fast project execution, from delivery to service activation," added Drazen Lukic, Ribbon's SVP Global Product Management and Operations IP Optical Networks. "We look forward to building on this relationship with ITEL over the coming years."https://rbbn...

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Amazon's Project Kuiper will be an optical mesh in orbit

Following successful tests of 100 Gbps optical links between its prototype satellites, Amazon confirmed that its is now confident in the optical inter-satellite link (OISL) capabilities of Project Kuiper.These tests validated Project Kuiper’s advanced communications architecture by maintaining 100 Gbps optical links between prototype satellites, KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2, over nearly 621 miles (1,000 kilometers) for the entire test window. The...

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Intel launches its Next-Gen AI processors

Intel introduced its latest processors for the data center, cloud, network, edge and PCs, and featuring AI optimizations. Some highlights:5th Gen Intel Xeon processors (code-named Emerald Rapids) optimized for networking workloads including specialized AI and virtualized workloads.Xeon for the network1.51x higher throughput with 5G core user plane functions (UPF) vs. prior generation.1.37x performance per watt improvement with Intel Infrastructure...

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Nokia's Cloud RAN trial with In-Line acceleration with Arm and HPE

Nokia conducted a collaborative laboratory trial of Cloud RAN featuring In-Line acceleration in partnership with Arm and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). The successful trial, which saw the completion of an end-to-end Cloud RAN L3 data call, demonstrated the flexibility of Nokia’s Cloud RAN solution using In-Line accelerator architecture which works seamlessly on multiple silicon architectures. The test was held at Nokia’s Open Cloud RAN Innovation...

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ONF projects move under Linux Foundation

The following Open Networking Foundation (ONF) projects become independent projects under the Linux Foundation (LF):LF Broadband Directed Fund - supports a collection of projects that transformed broadband networks and the Passive Optical Network (PON) industry. The portfolio includes the SEBA reference design for building open broadband networks, and the VOLTHA open source project for virtualizing multi-vendor PON systems. These projects are in...

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