TeliaSonera International Carrier Expands its North American Network

TeliaSonera International Carrier (TSIC) has added  11,500 fiber miles (18,400 km) to its North American network.  The addition adds fiber routes from Chicago to Miami and then back up the eastern seaboard to Reston, Virginia.

TSIC said its network expansion plans will enable it to reach to 44 American cities while providing diverse connection into South America.  The company cited 50 new enterprise accounts this year. Key customer segments include major Internet properties, gaming companies, content delivery networks, and large enterprises needing high-bandwidth across the TSIC global fiber network.

"Today’s end users want everything, anywhere, instantly. This expansion is about supporting that and the increasing interest for our offering in the Americas," says Erik Hallberg, President, TeliaSonera International Carrier. "In fact, it’s our largest network build-out in the Americas since our first US fiber investment in 2000. It strengthens our global backbone and demonstrates our commitment to be ready to carry the big ideas of tomorrow."

TSIC offers a full portfolio of transport, IP, international voice and IPX- based services with customers in 85 countries around the world.

“This build is a significant step and our customers will be able to take advantage of new opportunities that come from the expanded reach, increased diversity and optimized performance it delivers. It’s especially exciting for our fast-growing Latin American business” says Ivo Pascucci, Sales Director, Americas, TeliaSonera International Carrier Inc.

http://www.teliasoneraic.com/

• TeliaSonera International Carrier (TSIC) is using Infinera's DTN-X platform with Instant Bandwidth capability for its North American network.  TeliaSonera International Carrier was the first to deploy the DTN-X with Instant Bandwidth.  The DTN-X platform enables TSIC to offer its customers up to 100G bandwidth-on-demand across its North American fiber network, which spans 18,000 km and connects 35 PoPs in 23 cities.
  
• In November 2011, TeliaSonera International Carrier and Infinera performed the world's first terabit trial in California based on DTN-X equipment.

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NTT's Dimension Data Launches SaaS Suite

Dimension Data, which is a division of NTT, launched a set of software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions that includes hosting and application management services for independent software vendors (ISVs).  In a SaaS model, the user only pays for the software when they are using it, rather than buying a perpetual license.

Dimension Data SaaS Solutions include:

• Managed Hosting – Combines highly scalable infrastructure and technical expertise to deliver a scalable, flexible and reliable platform for mission-critical hosted applications
  
• Public and Private CaaS – Public and private cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) with enterprise-class SLAs and self-service provisioning and controls
  
• Application Operations – Complete management services for custom SaaS and web applications including application deployment, application management, database management, compliance and performance optimization
  
• Technical Operations – Minimizes operational risk while saving time and money with high-touch, 24x7 global support, including patch management, system monitoring, operating system support and backups of all production servers

Steve Nola, Cloud Solutions CEO at Dimension Data said, "With analysts estimating the worldwide SaaS market in 2015 at more than $20 billion, software vendors will continue to transition their applications to SaaS to remain competitive. We have helped transition hundreds of software vendors to SaaS and, by leveraging our secure and reliable cloud infrastructure, in addition to our deep experience in SaaS hosting and global systems integration, we can offer a full lifecycle of IT solutions for SaaS providers."

http://www.dimensiondata.com/en-US

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Salesforce.com and HP Announce Strategic Cloud Partnership

Salesforce.com and HP announced a strategic partnership in cloud computing.

The companies will create a new "Salesforce Superpod" --  a dedicated instance in the Salesforce multi-tenant cloud, running on HP's Converged Infrastructure. The companies plan to jointly develop and market the Salesforce Superpod to large enterprises. HP intends to be the first customer to be deployed on a Salesforce Superpod.

"The salesforce.com and HP partnership is a breakthrough in cloud computing," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. "The Salesforce Superpod will allow individual customers to have a dedicated instance in the Salesforce multi-tenant cloud, powered by HP's technology and fully managed within salesforce.com's world-class data centers."

http://salesforce.com/live
http://www.hp.com

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Riverbed Values Application Performance Infrastructure Market at $11 Billion

At its annual Analyst Day conference in San Francisco, Riverbed Technology said the addressable market for Application Performance Infrastructure now reaches $11 billion on an annual basis. The company has four product lines competing in this market:

• Riverbed Steelhead is in the WAN Optimization market, sized by some at about $1 billion and shrinking in the view of some analysts – when looked at from the traditional perspective. But, Riverbed sees elasticity and some resurgence in the market driven by the cloud and growing demand by companies who find they have to optimize SaaS apps, such as Microsoft Office 365 and SFDC, or they simply won’t work.
  
• Riverbed Granite is in the Branch Converged Infrastructure market, sized by IDC at about $4B, growing at 5.2 percent CAGR.
  
• Riverbed Stingray is in the ADC market, sized at about $2B, growing at a CAGR of 4.2 percent.
  
• In the Riverbed Performance Management space, the lines between the NPM market (Riverbed’s Cascade product line) and APM market (the OPNET products) are blurring, as companies discover they need both NPM and APM to optimize performance of applications across networks, applications and end-user experiences. The combined Performance Management market is sized at about $4 billion, growing at a 7 percent CAGR.

“We started Riverbed 11 years ago to eliminate distance and location as variables in delivering applications by solving the problems of latency and bandwidth limitations in wide area networks,” said Jerry M. Kennelly, chairman and CEO, co-founder of Riverbed. “Over the last four years, we’ve made the journey from a single product to four major product sets that add up to something much bigger — the industry’s most complete application performance platform to enable a concept we call: Location-Independent Computing,”

Riverbed also announced a milestone in the integration of its Steelhead wide area network (WAN) optimization product family and its Cascade network performance management (NPM) product family with the introduction of Cascade Profiler and Shark 10.5.

The integrated Cascade 10.5 solution provides application intelligence and network visibility with control across their Steelhead WAN optimized environments. Key features include:

• Visibility into critical applications with deep packet inspection
• Enterprise wide quality of service (QoS) and Path Selection technology to help prioritize the delivery of mission-critical applications over faster networks, while delivering less critical applications over less expensive commodity Internet links
• Centralized monitoring of QoS policies to visualize under or over-provisioning of bandwidth
• Critical real-time collaboration and unified communication visibility and monitoring
• Fully integrated Cascade Shark packet capture software into Steelhead.

http://www.visualwebcaster.com/RiverbedAnalystDay
http://www.riverbed.com

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Compass-EOS Raises $42 Million for Silicon-Photonic Routers

Compass-EOS, a start-up based in Netanya, Israel, raised $42 million in a new round of venture funding for its next-gen silicon-to-photonics-based routers.

The company's silicon-to-photonics implementation, which it calls icPhotonics, simplifies router design by bringing the entire backplane on-chip.   The on–chip optical integration ensures QoS routing at high utilization rates and congestion-free multicast packet handling.

The company's first product, r10004, is a carrier-grade, modular platform offering 800 Gbps Capacity in a 6U enclosure.  It offers 2 x 100G ports or 20 x 10G ports with full Layer 3 routing functionality for core, peering or aggregation deployments. Compass-EOS launched its r10004 router in March 2013, announcing the commercial shipment of its icPhotonics-based routers.  NTT Communications and major research and education organizations, including CERNET, have successfully deployed the company’s routers.

The new funding round included participation of existing investors Comcast Ventures, Cisco, Pitango Venture Capital, Benchmark Capital, Northbridge Venture Partners and Marker LLC with a US-based Private Equity Fund and RUSNANO joining the round as new investors.  This brings the total of capital raised by Compass-EOS to $160 million, a record for total funds raised by an Israeli startup.

"Compass-EOS has an enormous market opportunity with the rapid growth of data services and online devices," said Gadi Bahat, CEO of Compass-EOS. "Our initial success with global network service providers has enabled Compass-EOS to raise considerable capital from leading investors around the world. We will continue to innovate while investing in customer support, sales and marketing, all of which are key elements for our future.”

http://compass-eos.com

• Compass-EOS was founded in 2006 by Michael Laor, who previously was a Director of Engineering and Architecture of Cisco Systems, and Dr. Michael Mesh, who had been a co-founder and CTO of PacketLight Networks.

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Verizon Launches its Isis Mobile Wallet

Verizon Wireless officially launched its Isis Mobile Wallet is available nationwide, allowing customers to securely store virtual versions of their credit and debit cards on their smartphones.

At launch, Verizon Wireless claims more than 200,000 retail locations across the U.S., including Toys 'R' Us, Jamba Juice, and Coca-Cola vending machines, are equipped with tap-to-pay terminals compatible with Isis.

"Isis Mobile Wallet is the next revolutionary feature for your smartphone, changing how you shop in the same way camera apps forever changed how you snap and share pictures, or how Google Maps changed how you navigate in your car," said Jerry Fountain, president for Verizon Wireless in Carolinas and Tennessee. "But Isis is more than just a convenient way to pay. Security and identity theft are major concerns for most consumers, and Isis builds an extra layer of protection around your transactions."

http://www.PayWithIsis.com
http://www.verizonwireless.com

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Savvis Plans New Toronto Data Center

CenturyLink's Savvis division announced plans for a new data center in the Toronto region.

The 100,000-square-foot TR3 data center will support up to five megawatts of IT load. The data center, now reserving pre-orders, will also receive Tier III certification from the Uptime Institute, signifying high availability through redundancy.  The launch date is expected in mid-2014.

TR3 will be Savvis' second data center in the Toronto region and fourth in Canada. Savvis currently operates 55 data centers worldwide, with more than 2.4 million square feet of gross raised floor space throughout North America, Europe and Asia.

Savvis said it expects that up 70 percent of Canadian IT leaders will outsource a majority of their infrastructure to colocation, managed hosting and cloud services within five years.

"As we expand our global data center footprint, experience shows our clients expect more than one type of infrastructure service," said David Meredith, senior vice president and general manager, Savvis. "We have designed a broad portfolio to drive greater business value through carrier diversity, interconnectivity and our Savvis ClientConnect service, which lets organizations promote services, drive efficiencies and generate new opportunities with others inside the data center ecosystem."

http://www.savvis.ca

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Zayo and Infinera Deliver 1 Terabit Super-Channel for Super Computing 2013's SCinet

Infinera and Zayo are delivering a one terabit per second (1Tb/s) super-channel transmission capacity in support of the SCinet network at this week's Super Computing 2013 (SC13) in Denver.

This is the first time 1Tbos of super-channel transmission capacity will be deployed on SCinet’s network, delivered with the Infinera DTN-X platform.

Zayo will bedemonstrating the rapid provisioning of 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) services from the show floor in Denver to Chicago. Zayo offers 100GbE services to high-bandwidth customers including research and education institutions, Internet content providers, and government agencies. Infinera is a supplier of multi-terabit transport capacity for Zayo’s 100GbE services.

"The delivery of terabit service on SCinet demonstrates how fast Zayo can deploy capacity for our customers," said David Dunn, vice president of wavelength product at Zayo. "Through our collaboration with Infinera on this deployment, we are demonstrating our ability to expand our 100GbE services to accommodate the bandwidth-driven needs of our customers.”

http://www.sc13.supercomputing.org
http://www.zayo.com
http://www.infinera.com

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Deutsche Telekom Launches Wholesale LTE Diameter Signaling

Deutsche Telekom's International Carrier Sales & Solutions (ICSS) division announced its new LTE Diameter Signaling service, which gives customers the ability to roam over 4G networks while travelling internationally.

The LTE Diameter Signaling service was made possible through the dedicated IP eXchange (IPX) platform from ICSS. The Diameter protocol solves the interoperability problems caused by the broad range of technologies and infrastructures within the telecommunications landscape and allows seamless roaming across differing mobile standards. Via its IPX network, ICSS can connect its LTE roaming customers with more than 800 mobile networks and over 1 million hotspots for global signaling roaming connectivity.

"Our state-of-the-art LTE Diameter Signaling service delivers extremely high-quality signaling services, consistent access to 2G, 3G, and LTE mobile networks, and more than one million WiFi hotspots around the world,” said Holger Magnussen, Senior Vice President, Deutsche Telekom International Carrier Sales & Solutions. “In fact, we are the only global Tier 1 provider that offers an integrated portfolio of cellular and WiFi technologies."

http://www.telekom-icss.com/home

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VimpelCom Russia Joins DT's Internetwork Packet Exchange

VimpelCom Russia has established a peering interconnection with Deutsche Telekom's IPX (Internetwork Packet Exchange), a next generation network service for the transfer of various IP-based services between operators and different types of service providers (mobile, fixed network, Internet access), both domestically and internationally.

DT said its exchange give VimpelCom's Beeline service the technical ability to connect to other operators faster, thus ensuring Beeline's consumers of worldwide interoperability, reliability, and guaranteed quality of service.

http://www.vimpelcom.com
http://www.telekom-icss.com

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NTT DOCOMO Achieves 1.2 Gbps with Smart Vertical MIMO for LTE-A

NTT DOCOMO has achieved downlinks exceeding 1.2 Gbps in a field test using a single-size antenna incorporating a new transmission technology, Smart Vertical MIMO, for LTE-Advanced.

DOCOMO has developed a unique Smart Vertical MIMO transmission technology that uses adaptive grouping of vertical antenna components according to the reception quality for mobile devices in the transmission area.  The technique enables a single-size antenna to achieve throughput equivalent to that of a four-antenna system.

DOCOMO said Smart Vertical MIMO could play a key role in its planned deployment of LTE-Advanced.  The technology reduces the cost and space of installing antenna equipment and improves spectrum utilization efficiency. Space reduction is particularly beneficial for deployments in congested urban areas.

The company tested Smart Vertical MIMO in July 2013 in the suburban environment of Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture, and again this month in the urban environment of Sagamihara.  The tests used 100 MHz of spectrum in the 3.9GHz band.

http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/info/news_release/2013/11/13_01.html
http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/info/media_center/pr/2013/1113_00.html

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NTT Creates Quantum Buffer in Optical Waveguide

Researchers at NTT have developed a quantum buffer on an optical waveguide that takes advantage of the "slow light effect:, where the propagation speed of a pulsed light in a special optical waveguide slows significantly compared with the speed of light in vacuum.

The company said this innovation facilitates the precise synchronization of photons, thereby creating a buffer that could be used to create quantum computers.  Experiments have shown that the buffer can slow down the speed of pulsed photons to 1/60 of the speed of light in vacuum while faithfully preserving its quantum state. The device used for this demonstration was created by NTT Basic Research Laboratories fabricated by coupling nanocavities with a total length of 840 μm using a silicon photonic crystal.

The research was published in the UK science journal “Nature Communications”.

http://www.ntt.co.jp/news2013/1311e/131112a.html

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Department of Energy Funds Research in Next-Gen SuperComputer Interconnects

The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) have awarded $25.4 million in research and development contracts to five leading companies in high-performance computing (HPC) to accelerate the development of next-generation supercomputers.

Under DOE’s new DesignForward initiative, AMD, Cray, IBM, Intel Federal and NVIDIA will work to advance extreme-scale, on the path to exascale, computing technology. The contracts, which cover a two-year performance period, will support the design and evaluation of interconnect architectures for future advanced HPC architectures. Such interconnects will tie together hundreds of thousands or millions of processors, as building blocks of supercomputers to be used in studying complex problems in unprecedented detail.  Intel will focus on interconnect architectures and implementation approaches, Cray on open network protocol standards, AMD on interconnect architectures and associated execution models, IBM on energy-efficient interconnect architectures and messaging models and NVIDIA on interconnect architectures for massively threaded processors.

“Exascale computing is key to NNSA’s capability of ensuring the safety and security of our nuclear stockpile without returning to underground testing,” said Robert Meisner, director of the NNSA Office of Advanced Simulation and Computing program. “The resulting simulation capabilities will also serve as valuable tools to address nonproliferation and counterterrorism issues, as well as informing other national security decisions.”

“In an era of fierce international HPC competition, the development of exascale computing becomes critical not only to our national security missions but to the nation’s economic competitiveness in the global marketplace,” said William Harrod, FastForward Program Manager and Research Division Directorfor DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research program. “This partnership between industry, the DOE Office of Science and NNSA supports the development of technology to overcome the obstacles on the road to exascale systems.”

http://www.nersc.gov/news-publications/news/nersc-center-news/2013/department-of-energy-awards-25-4-million-in-contracts-for-extreme-scale-supercomputer-interconnect-design/

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ADVA, Juniper and University of Michigan Demo OpenFlow for Massive Data Transport

ADVA Optical Networking, Juniper Networks and the University of Michigan are showcasing a demo at SC13 that uses OpenFlow to transport multiple petabytes of data.

The demo features Juniper Networks' PTX Series Packet Transport Routers, including their integrated 100G coherent transponder, and ADVA Optical Networking's 100G Core technology. The ADVA FSP 3000 and its 100G Core transponder can talk directly to the Juniper Networks' PTX router and its 100G coherent transponder over an error free long haul circuit.

“We live in an era of mass collaboration, an era of sharing data, resources and knowledge, an era defined by global interworking,” said Niall Robinson, vice president, PLM, Packet Optical Solutions, ADVA Optical Networking. “This trend will continue to increase and will continue to demand a supporting network that can transport enormous volumes of data. Research and education organizations are acutely aware of this. To be a part of global scientific conversations demands a network that can scale, a network that can meet the petabyte era. That's the very essence of this demo. We're not just showing an isolated technology here, we're showcasing a fully realized global network; one based on a seamless interworking of optical layer and Supercore routing technology. This isn't just a vision, it's a reality.”

“Through our partnership with ADVA Optical Networking and the University of Michigan, we’re doing our part to advance the research community’s ability to stay ahead of the relentless pace of modern scientific breakthrough and discovery. Without a strong supporting network infrastructure to transport huge amounts of scientific information, these discoveries would likely be much more limited,” commented Paul Obsitnik, vice president, Service Provider Marketing, Juniper Networks. “Together, we've built a live network that is successfully transporting huge amounts of data, error-free, on a global scale. This demonstration underscores our commitment to an open ecosystem where scientific organizations can migrate from their existing networks to a multi-vendor infrastructure that can accommodate the demands of big data and the demands of future scientific collaboration.”

http://www.advaoptical.com
http://www.juniper.net

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FCC Chairman Calls on Industry to Act on Mobile Phone Unlocking

Mobile network operator must act now on setting voluntary policies to allow consumers to unlock their mobile wireless devices once their contracts are fulfilled, according to a open letter from FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler to CTIA president Steve Largent.

Wheeler notes that the FCC has been working with CTIA for eight months with results on an amendment to the CTIA Consumer Code in which the industry would address consumers' rights to unlock their mobile wireless devices once their contracts are fulfilled.

The Commission indicated that any such policy must contain five parts: (a) provide a clear, concise, and readily accessible policy on unlocking; (b) unlock mobile wireless devices for customers, former customers, and legitimate owners when the applicable service contract, installment plan, or ETF has been fulfilled; (c) affirmatively notify customers when their devices are eligible for unlocking and/or automatically unlock devices when eligible, without an additional fee; (d) process unlocking requests or provide an explanation of denial within two business days; and (e) unlock devices for military personnel upon deployment.

Wheeler said the industry should resolve this matter expeditiously or the FCC will take regulatory action.

http://www.fcc.gov

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DOCOMO Partners with Pioneer for Automotive Cloud in Japan

NTT DOCOMO and Pioneer are partnering to launch a mobile telematics service in Japan beginning in mid-December.  The service, which runs on Android smartphones mounted on a cradle attached to a car dashboard, will provide navigation and mobile concierge information.

Pioneer is developing an "automotive cloud" to process data from large numbers of vehicles equipped with its devices.

http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/info/news_release/2013/11/14_00.html

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AT&T U-verse Internet Hits 10 Million Customer Milestone

AT&T passed the 10 million customers milestone for its U-verse High Speed Internet service.  The company credits its multi-billion dollar Project Velocity IP with boosting the business. AT&T said that since announcing Project VIP one year ago, it has added about 2.5 million broadband customer locations. The plan calls for expanding IP broadband to reach about 57 million customer locations by the end of 2015. The plan also calls for Internet speed upgrades. Earlier this year, AT&T rolled out U-verse High Speed Internet Power with up to 45 Mbps download speeds in 79 markets.  And the company plans to raise speeds up to 75 and 100 Mbps in the future.

"This latest milestone shows how U-verse is helping transform AT&T into a premier IP broadband company," said Lori Lee, senior executive vice president, AT&T Home Solutions. As of 3Q 2013, total U-verse high speed Internet subscribers represented about 60 percent of all wireline broadband subscribers, compared with 43 percent in the year-earlier quarter.

http://www.att.com

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KT to Launch Mobile Content Acceleration in LTE Network Q1 2014

KT will be the first commercial mobile content acceleration service in its LTE network in Q1 2014 based on Ericsson's Mobile Cloud Accelerator (MCA) solution.

Ericsson said trials of its Mobile Cloud Accelerator showed that web page download times could be reduced by more than 50 percent.  The solution works by guaranteeing traffic transmission quality of certain categories of data, such as premium content and application traffic in the radio access area.

Heekyoung Song, Head of Enterprise IT Business Unit, KT commented: "We're pleased to announce that KT will be the first operator in the world to provide a commercial mobile content acceleration service, thanks to our strong partnership with Ericsson. It means that we can expand the connectivity of our premium CDN service from the fixed network, which we launched last year, to the mobile network. MCA deployment in our network will enable us to offer our subscribers a differentiated and higher quality of service. Downloading content in a much shorter time may well be one of the exceptionally good reasons why subscribers choose our network."

Jan Signell, Head of Region North East Asia, Ericsson says: "The explosion of connected mobile devices has opened a whole new world of possibilities, and LTE in South Korea is moving faster than in any other market. That's why our partnership with KT is important to us, because it allows us to be in the very frontline of developing future innovative mobile services."

http://www.ericsson.com

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AWS Intros Kinesis - Real-Time Processing of Streaming Big Data

Amazon Web Services introduced Kinesis, a fully managed service for real-time processing of high-volume, streaming data.

The idea with Amazon Kinesis is to direct the flow of real-time data into cloud-hosted analytic applications and then display desired real-time intelligent via online dashboards.

The new service interoperates with other AWS big data services, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (Amazon EMR) or Amazon Redshift. It scales elastically to support applications that process data streams of nearly any size, while replicating all data across multiple Availability Zones to help ensure high durability and availability. Amazon said Kinesis can allow a customer to store and process terabytes of data an hour from hundreds of thousands of real-time data sources, such as web site click-streams, marketing and financial transactions, social media feeds, logs and metering data and location-tracking events.

“Database and MapReduce technologies are good at handling large volumes of data,” said Terry Hanold, Vice President of New Business Initiatives, AWS. “But they are fundamentally batch-based, and struggle with enabling real-time decisions on a never-ending—and never fully complete—stream of data. Amazon Kinesis aims to fill this gap, removing many of the cost, effort and expertise barriers customers encounter with streaming data solutions, while providing the performance, durability and scale required for the largest, most advanced implementations.”

“Exchange order data peaks at tens to hundreds of megabytes per second, and we have to accurately record and process every single transaction,” said Ann Neidenbach, Senior Vice President of Global Software Development, NASDAQ OMX. “Amazon Kinesis is designed to handle market order data in real-time, durably and reliably, without data loss, enabling continuous analysis and auditing of this stream of market data. This lets us focus on building the next generation of innovative financial tools and services.”

http://aws.amazon.com/kinesis

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AWS Boosts Compute I/O Performance Via SSD

At the AWS re:Invent! show in Las Vegas, Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels announced the I2 instances are optimized for high performance random I/O.  

AWS said the greater performance is achieved using 2.5 GHz intel Xeon E5-2670v2 processors with Turbo mode enabled. EC2's new enhanced networking, and SSDs.  At the high-end,  i2.8xlarge instances will be able to deliver 350,000 random read IOPS and 320,000 random write IOPS. 

Instance Name	vCPU Count	RAM	Instance Storage (SSD)
i2.large	2	15 GiB	1 x 360 GB
i2.xlarge	4	30.5 GiB	1 x 720 GB
i2.2xlarge	8	61 GiB	2 x 720 GB
i2.4xlarge	16	122 GiB	4 x 720 GB
i2.8xlarge	32	244 GiB	8 x 720 GB

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/amazon_ec2/

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