IBM's Latest Power Servers Boast 20% Gain over Xeon Machines

IBM introduced its latest generation Power servers built with its own POWER8 processor and NVIDIA's GPU.

The servers, which are optimized for the most demanding Big Data workloads, leverage the OpenPOWER stack for runing data-intensive tasks on the POWER8 processor while offloading other compute-intensive Big Data workloads to the NVIDIA GPU accelerators.  The GPU is capable of running millions of data computations in parallel.

IBM will be tuning a number of its enterprise applications for this model, including the IBM DB2 database software with BLU Acceleration. Additionally, IBM is working to optimize Power versions of widely used GPU-accelerated applications for bioinformatics, defense, finance, molecular dynamics, weather modeling – including SOAP3, NAMD, GROMACS, FFTW library, and Quantum Espresso.

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/45006.wss

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VMware Hires Big Switch's Guido Appenzeller and Cisco's Dominick Delfino.

Guido Appenzeller, co-Founder of Big Switch Networks and CEO from 2010-2013, is headed to VMware, where he is expected to help direct the company's networking strategy. Previously, Appenzeller was an entrepreneur in residence at Morgenthaler and Consulting Professor at Stanford University.

VMware also recently hired Dominick Delfino as Vice President, WW Systems Engineering.  Previously, he was VP of Systems Engineering at Cisco and Senior Director of its Global Data Center & Virtualization Systems Engineering & Technology Strategy.

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Google to Take Over Juniper's Old Sunnyvale Campus

Google will assume the leases for Juniper's old 3-building campus on Mathilda Avenue in Sunnyvale, California.

Juniper recently moved into a new headquarters across the street.

In an SEC filing, Juniper calculates that transferring the leases on the old buildings to Google will help it avoid $112 million in future rent obligations.

Google has been expanding rapidly in Sunnyvale and nearby Mountain View, in the heart of Silicon Valley.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1043604/000129993314001330/htm_50397.htm

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Sprint Commences October Layoffs

Sprint has begun a new round of layoffs and will take a charge of approximately $160 million in the second fiscal quarter of 2014 for severance and related costs.  In an SEC filing, Sprint said the workfouce reduction is expected to be largely completed by October 31, 2014 and will include certain management and non-management positions.  

http://investors.sprint.com/Cache/c25515509.html

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AT&T's NetBond Extends to AWS

AT&T and Amazon reached a deal to extend AT&T's MPLS-based NetBond service to AWS. The new integrated solution is expected to be available next year. 

AT&T Virtual Private Network (VPN) customers can use AT&T NetBond to connect their IT infrastructure to AWS.

The companies cited the following customer benefits:

• · Simple: Seamlessly works with existing AT&T VPN through APIs, creating an automated experience. Customers don’t need to order or manage any other equipment or access lines.
• · Savings: Network elasticity that automatically flexes with the needs of the cloud service. Companies can save as much as 60 percent on networking costs.
• · Performance: Delivers as much as 50 percent lower latency and three times the availability when compared with the public Internet.
• · Security: Isolates traffic going directly to cloud platforms using the AT&T private global network, providing more protections from risks such as DDoS attacks.

http://www.business.att.com/enterprise/Family/cloud/network-cloud/

AT&T has previously announce NetBond cloud partnerships with:

• IBM Softlater
• Box
• VMware vCloud
• HP Helion
• Salesforce.com
• Equinix data centers

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Oracle Adds Virtual Networking OpenStack Neutron plug-in

Oracle announded a Virtual Networking OpenStack Neutron plug-in based on the OpenStack Icehouse release.  This enables Oracle’s SDN and network fabric capabilities to be created, provisioned and managed by the OpenStack framework.

Oracle said its SDN implementation virtualizes the SAN and LAN infrastructures by defining connectivity in software, giving users the flexibility and agility needed for cloud-enabled Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service deployments. By consolidating both SPARC and x86 systems on a single fabric, Oracle Virtual Networking can reduce infrastructure complexity by 70 percent and cut capital expenditures by up to 50 percent.

The new plug-in allows OpenStack-based cloud deployments to virtually eliminate VLAN exhaustion. The Oracle SDN is able to dynamically deploy thousands of completely segregated L2 networks on the fabri.

OpenStack is fully integrated into Oracle Solaris 11.2, Oracle Linux, and Oracle VM.

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/2321794?rssid=rss_ocom_pr



Earlier this year, Oracle acquired Corente, a start-up developing software-defined WAN virtualization technology, for an undisclosed sum.  Oracle already offers a LAN virtualization platform, so the deal extends its SDN portfolio for cloud services covering both the enterprise data center LAN and the WAN.

Corente, which is based in Bernardsville, New Jersey, offers a virtualization platform that accelerates the deployment of distributed and cloud-based applications services.  Key components of the offering include:

• Corente Cloud Services Exchange:  A cloud-based service delivery platform that establishes trusted network services between public or private cloud data centers and any location over any IP network
• Corente Services Gateway: An integrated virtual appliance that provides secure endpoints for private networks that are connected over global IP networks with zero-touch installation and service activation
• Corente Services Portal: Secure, role-based access to service life cycle management tools for both service operators and service subscribers.

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DEC-CIX Upgrades Frankfurt Exchange with ALU 7950 XRS-40 Routers

DE-CIX has upgraded its flagship Apollon Internet exchange in Frankfurt with Alcatel-Lucent's 7950 XRS-40 routing systems.

The XRS-40 system combines two XRS-20 chassis back-to-back. One XRS-40 currently delivers up to 160 x 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) ports or 1600 x 10 GE ports. DE-CIX deployed the first XRS-40 system on October 1, 2014, and will expand this setup to multiple data centers in the Frankfurt metropolitan area.

DE-CIX said this deployment enable it to aggregate more customers on a single edge router and to keep Internet exchange (IX) traffic local within the data center. It will also reduce the amount of traffic that needs to be routed through the Apollon core nodes, which are based on XRS-20 platforms, keeping latency low and data flow manageable in a marketplace that is growing rapidly.

Alcatel-Lucent confirmed that this installation by DE-CIX is the first deployment of the XRS-40 outside of North America .

DE-CIX has already added more than 80 new customers to its Apollon platform this year, with the number of exchange customers and ports growing.

“We are pleased to see these powerful XRS-40 systems fulfill such a critical role in the delivery of global Internet traffic at the world’s leading Internet exchange,” said Basil Alwan, president of Alcatel-Lucent’s IP Routing and Transport division. “This is the first XRS-40 implementation in Europe, one that is designed to deliver expanded capacity, simplify management and maintain high availability for the DE-CIX team. The XRS-40 will allow DE-CIX to grow for years to come.”

https://www.de-cix.net/news-events/latest-news/news/article/de-cix-frankfurt-to-operate-worlds-largest-ixp-node/
http://www.alcatel-lucent.com


In December 2013, DE-CIX, which operates the world’s largest Internet exchange in Frankfurt am Main (Germany), completed a major upgrade to its flagship DE-CIX Apollon platform and successfully migrated all of its nearly 600 customers to the next system.

DE-CIX Apollon consists of four fully implemented Supernodes and six edge nodes spread across the Frankfurt metro, with the platform’s deployment having begun in April 2013. In ten scheduled maintenance windows, 580 customers with a total of 928 ports were successfully migrated to the new DE-CIX Apollon platform.

DE-CIX Apollon uses ADVA Optical Networking and Alcatel-Lucent as its technology vendors. Specifically, the platform leverages ADVA Optical Networking's flagship FSP 3000 platform for optical transport capacity of up to 2 Terabits/sec per fiber pair. The switching layer is powered by Alcatel-Lucent's Core Router 7950 XRS, which supports port density of up to 80 100 Gigabit Ethernet ports per chassis. The core of the DE-CIX Apollon network is based on four supernodes that are built from the Alcatel-Lucent 7950 XRS and which are fed by customer-facing switches, both located at secure locations spread throughout the Frankfurt metro.

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Lantiq’s VDSL2 Chipset Supports 300 Mbps at up to 200m

Lantiq began shipping its new VINAX dp chipset optimized for Fiber To The distribution point (FTTdp) applications.

The Lantiq VINAX dp chipset enables aggregated 300 Mbps over VDSL2 at distances up to 200m between a customer premise gateway and the fiber network distribution point.

Lantiq said uts new chip set operates in industrial temperature ranges and with low power consumption, enabling installation in outdoor boxes with passive cooling. Since it can be line-powered from the customer premise, the FTTdp unit can be placed conveniently in carrier managed locations, while on the subscriber end, the standard VDSL CPE and power feeder is self-installed.

Key features:

• Tightly integrated Lantiq carrier-class VDSL2 and GPON (FALC ON) solution
• 300 Mbps aggregated data rate with G.INP (retransmission) downstream and upstream
• Based on mature, future proof (VINAX CO platform) technology with demonstrated interoperability on both ends for GPON and VDSL links. 
• Typical power consumption is 2.7 Watt for the VINAX dp chipset. 
• The entire system consumes less than 6 Watts – including VDSL, GPON, DC/DC converter and all other active and passive components.  

Lantiq said it has partnered with several leading equipment manufacturers including Alcatel Lucent, ZTE, T&W, Aethra Telecommunications and others for successful field trials of its FTTdp solution.

http://www.lantiq.com

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Canadian Researchers Develop Photon Pair Source

An international team of researchers led by professor Roberto Morandotti of INRS-EMT in Canada announced a new method to achieve a different type of photon pair source that fits into a computer chip. To generate the cross-polarized photons, Caspani and colleagues used two different laser beams at different wavelengths —one vertically polarized and another horizontally polarized.

The researchers said their innovation could form the core of the next-generation of quantum optical communication and computing technology.

The research will be presented at The Optical Society's (OSA) 98th Annual Meeting, Frontiers in Optics, being held Oct. 19-23 in Tucson, Arizona, USA.

“While several efforts have been devoted to develop on-chip sources of polarization-entangled photons, the process typically used to generate these photons only allows the generation of photons with the same polarization as the laser beam used to pump the device — either both horizontal or vertical — after which entanglement can be achieved by accurately mixing these states. Now, we have found a way to directly generate cross-polarized photon pairs,” says Lucia Caspani, a postdoctoral fellow at INRS-EMT and co-author of the Frontiers in Optics paper.

http://www.frontiersinoptics.com/home/?r=true
http://www.osa.org/en-us/about_osa/newsroom/news_releases/2014/a_new_approach_to_on-chip_quantum_computing/

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Red Hat Storage Now Scales to Multi-Petabytes

A new release of Red Hat Storage Server optimized for Big Data applications can now support up to 60 drives per server, up from 36, and 128 servers per cluster, up from 64.  This provides a usable capacity of up to 19 petabytes per cluster.

Red Hat is also adding data protection and control capabilities to its storage clusters.  In addition, support for a Hadoop File System Plug-In that enables running Apache Hadoop workloads on the storage server, as well as tight integration with Apache Ambari for management and m

http://www.redhat.com

In May 2014, Red Hat acquired Inktank, provider of Ceph and Inktank Ceph Enterprise open source storage solutions. Red Hat’s Inktank Ceph Enterprise delivers object and block storage software to enterprises deploying public or private clouds, including many early adopters of OpenStack. The addition of Red Hat’s Ceph Enterprise to Red Hat’s storage product portfolio gives customers a comprehensive offering of open software-defined storage solutions across object, block and file system storage.

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ADTRAN Trims Q3 Guidance Citing Weaker Conditions in Europe

ADTRAN announced updated financial guidance for Q3 2014 say it now expects revenue to range from $162.0 million to $163.0 million. GAAP earnings per share for the quarter, assuming dilution, are expected to range from $0.19 to $0.20. Non-GAAP earnings per share for the quarter are expected to range from $0.23 to $0.24. Non-GAAP earnings per share exclude the effect of acquisition related expenses, amortizations and adjustments, and stock compensation expense.

ADTRAN Chief Executive Officer Tom Stanton stated, “Although we did see a sequential increase on our domestic carrier business, that increase was not enough to overcome the more than expected sequential decrease in our European business and a softer enterprise spending environment. We expect a material improvement in results beginning in 2015 as we see a re-acceleration in carrier spending both in Europe and the US. We believe the shortfall in enterprise spending was influenced by inventory corrections which we expect to be resolved as we enter 2015.”

http://www.adtran.com

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Ericsson Releases WebRTC Browser as Open Source

Ericsson Research has released its its web browser called Bowser, and the underlying framework OpenWebRTC, as free and open source.

Ericsson said it made the decision to quicken the pace of innovation in the WebRTC community.

WebRTC provides a very simple way to build real-time voice, video and data applications. It consists of a set of API's and protocols that are being standardized within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and  the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

OpenWebRTC is built on the belief that the WebRTC standard will transcend the pure browser environment and that native apps, implementing the same protocols and API's, will become an important part of the WebRTC ecosystem.  This is especially true on mobile platforms where native app distribution is often preferred over pure web apps.

http://www.ericsson.com

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Interoute to Acquire Vtesse for UK Network and Data Center

Interoute Communications has acquired the UK Vtesse group. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Vtesse operates an extensive fiber network connecting 55 data centres and 48 major towns and cities in England, Scotland and Wales.  The company provides metropolitan and Wide Area Network (WAN) solutions to some of the largest companies in the world both directly and via leading global system integrators, such as IBM, ARUP, Redstone and Logicalis. Its enterprise customers including Lloyds TSB, Poundland, Friends Provident, Invesco, DEFRA and the AA, will now have access to Interoute’s advanced Unified ICT portfolio of services.

Vtesse also operates a Tier 3 data center, situated 25 minutes from central London, with 2,700m² space, capable of accommodating 877 racks at 5kW each via a 5MW power supply.  The companies said this is an ideal site for colocation, disaster recovery back-up for Interoute’s London City data centers.

Interoute said the acquisition enables it to bring its VDC cloud service and its Enterprise Unified ICT portfolio of advanced Computing, Connectivity and Unified Communications solutions to businesses across the UK.

“When you look at the options for European businesses wanting to take advantage of flexible, scalable cloud infrastructure, they are often limited to the public cloud providers who think Europe can be served by one European data centre location connected by the public internet. With this acquisition Interoute is adding its twelfth data centre in Europe and over 7000km of UK network to its 60,000km pan-European global Cloud services platform. This provides a highly resilient, secure low latency Cloud platform that businesses everywhere can benefit from,” stated Gareth Williams, Interoute CEO.

http://www.interoute.com/
http://www.vtesse.com/

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Google Trims Cloud Compute Pricing In Step with Moore's Law

Google announced a 10% price reduction in all Google Compute Engine instances types, across all regions, effective immediately.

Earlier this year, Google said it would price cloud computing in accordance with Moore’s Law, setting a new standard for economics in the public cloud. The latest price cuts are attributed to a decrease in Google's underlying cost of hardware and efficiency gains in running its service and managing its data centers.

https://atmosphere.withgoogle.com

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HP Intros 64-bit ARM-based Servers

HP introduced two ARM-based servers, including the first enterprise-class 64-bit ARM-based server, as part of its  HP ProLiant Moonshot portfolio.

HP describes the launch as a major milestone in next-generation infrastructure.

The HP ProLiant Moonshot servers deliver high-density, ARM-based systems for hyperscale, data center environments to help customers improve application performance, drive business innovation and deliver breakthrough data center economics.

“ARM technology will change the dynamics of how enterprises build IT solutions to quickly address customer challenges,” said Antonio Neri, senior vice president and general manager, Servers and Networking, HP. “HP’s history, culture of innovation and proven leadership in server technology position us as the most qualified player to empower customers with greater choice in the server marketplace.”

HP is also extending the reach of the growing ARM ecosystem to enable developers to test and port code stacks and solutions to the ARM architecture with the launch of an ProLiant Moonshot Discovery Lab.

http://www.hp.com

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China Huaxin Acquires Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise

China Huaxin Post & Telecommunication Economy Development Center has acquired Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise for EUR 202 million. Alcatel-Lucent will retain a 15% minority stake in the divested business, as well as maintaining a commercial relationship with it in support of its growth ambitions under new ownership.

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, which has its headquarters in Paris, has over 2,700 employees worldwide and operations in more than 80 countries.

Alcatel-Lucent said the divestment of this division follows The Shift Plan, launched in June 2013, to refocus itself as a specialist in IP, Cloud and Ultra-Broadband Access, while realigning its balance sheet, implementing cost savings of Euro 1 billion and generating at least Euro 1 billion through selective asset sales by the end of 2015.

China Huaxin Post & Telecommunication Economy Development Center (“China Huaxin” ) is an industrial investment company that seeks long-term commercial growth opportunities in the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) sector.

YUAN Xin, President, China Huaxin said: “We are really excited by the acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. Our long-term investment approach will help Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise deliver on its ambition while enabling us to strengthen our strategic position in the enterprise communications arena. Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise has very strong assets and a recognized leadership in many markets across the globe. We are looking forward to leveraging our investment capabilities and experience to bring this business to the next level, both in size and market outreach.”

http://www.sinohx.com/en/news_content.aspx?id=128
http://enterprise.alcatel-lucent.com/

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Compass-EOS Introduces SDN Forwarding Plane

Compass-EOS introduces its SDN Forwarding Plane, a new networking element that aims to replace expensive and complex routers used in service provider networks.

The Compass-EOS said key attributes of its SDN Forwarding Plane include:

• A scalable, high-capacity, low-latency, programmable secure packet forwarding  platform
• Support for SDN/NFV-based open-standard protocol
• The Compass-EOS AnyFLOW Architecture, a unique, hybrid SDN architecture that combines network topology resolution and packet forwarding on multiple levels
• Compass-EOS icPhotonics technology for scalability and low-latency

Compass-EOS has also joined the Open Daylight open-source SDN community and is planning to contribute code and expertise for WAN-centric SDN applications.

Compass-EOS also disclosed a new chip on its product roadmap that will enable its routers and SDN Forwarding Plane solution to grow from its current total capacity of 1.34 Terabits/sec to higher than 10 Terabits/sec.

“With the world’s first commercial technology combining high-capacity inter-chip optical interconnect and digital processing in the same silicon chip, Compass-EOS’ icPhotonics™ technology gives us the unique opportunity to completely transform the  information and communications technology industry as we know it, unleashing a new generation of devices and innovation that disrupts the current network equipment paradigm," said Matt Bross, Compass-EOS Chairman and CEO.

“This gives birth to a new network element – an SDN Forwarding Plane that takes its instructions from processes in the cloud and defines in detail what each flow in the plane is doing in a packet-by-packet basis,” Bross continued. “This type of technology capability simply doesn’t exist in legacy platforms. The SDN Forwarding Plane is more powerful yet less complex and power hungry. More importantly, it can also incrementally scale through the simple addition of more devices, just like servers are used to scale data centers today.”

http://compass-eos.com/

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Pica 8 Raises $12.5 Million for its Open-vSwitch SDN

Pica 8, a start-up based in Palo Alto, California with R&D in Beijing, China, secured $12.5 million in Series B funding for its open SDN system.

Pica 8 leverages commodity bare metal switches for its Open-vSwitch (OVS) SDN solution aimed at high-end data centers. PicOS provides extensive support for traditional switching and routing protocols.  Pica8 can provide PicOS, switching hardware or both in a fully integrated package as part of an end-to-end data center SDN solution.

The new funding came from a group of investors led by VantagePoint Capital Partners, Cross Head and Pacific Venture Partners (PVP), bringing its total funding to date to over $20 million.

http://www.pica8.com/

• Pica 8 is headed by James Liao, who previously led product strategy for switching and data center products at original device manufacturer Quanta.

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StackEngine Delivers Manageability & Automation for Docker Containers

StackEngine, a start-up based in Austin, Texas, unveiled its platform to simply and massively deploy, manage, and scale resilient Docker applications.

The company says tools like Chef and Puppet were built to automate systems, not containers.  Its solution specifically targets Docker containers, providing tools to discover, visualize, and manage small- to large-scale Docker deployments. The goal is to intelligently automate change and configuration management for containers.

StackEngine also announced $1 million in seed funding from Silverton Partners and LiveOak Venture Partners.

"We deeply believe that automation is the answer to an emergent problem in Docker and container technologies," said StackEngine CEO and Co-founder Bob Quillin. "We also believe a new and radically different approach is needed. Containerization instantly shifts the problem up the stack. StackEngine bridges that gap and gives enterprises the ability to deliver product faster, deploy more frequently, operate more reliably and run wherever is most optimal."

http://www.stackengine.com

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Ericsson Acquires Ambient for Smart Grid Techologies

Ericsson has acquired Ambient Corporation, a provider of smart grid communications technology for utilities. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The Ambient smart grid communications platform, which includes hardware and software elements, features an open IP network architecture. The platform supports multiple communications technologies in parallel, including cellular, Wi-Fi, radio frequency (RF) and power line communications (PLC), and also provides serial and Ethernet connections. The platform enables the integration of various smart grid applications, such as smart metering, demand response, distribution automation and monitoring, and direct load control into a common infrastructure.

Ambient will be integrated into Ericsson's Global Services organization, which employs 64,000 services professionals based in 180 countries.

"At Ericsson we are increasingly using our experience in communications and providing managed services for networks that serve more than 1 billion subscribers worldwide to assist partners and customers in the utilities sector. We're helping utilities to adopt new types of applications and enable new business models, and I believe Ambient could make a big contribution to that effort," stated Magnus Mandersson, Executive Vice President and Head of Business Unit Global Services at Ericsson.

http://www.ericsson.com/news/1859937

Ambient was founded in 1996 and is based in Newton, Massachusetts.

In July 2014, Ambient filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

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