Google Advances its Cloud Platform

Google is accelerating its push into enterprise cloud services.

At an event in San Francisco, Google announced important updates to its Cloud Platform. Here are some highlights.

Google Container Engine -- provides the ability to run Docker containers in Google compute clusters, powered by Kubernetes. Docker containers bring workload mobility, making it easier to move applications between development machines, on-premise systems, and the public cloud.

Google Cloud Interconnect via three new connectivity options:

• Direct Peering - a fast network pipe directly to Google in over 70 points of presence in 33 countries around the world.
• Carrier Interconnect - connect to Google through 7 new carrier partners including Verizon, Equinix, IX Reach, Level 3, TATA Communications, Telx, and Zayo. 
• VPN Connectivity - Google is planning to introduce VPN-based connectivity for customers to create a secure line directly to Google over the public Internet.
  (more networking news expected on Wednesday)

Firebase Mobile Solution -- Richer Realtime Queries is generally available. Mobile Developers can now sort and filter their Firebase data by arbitrary fields, making Firebase apps faster and easier to build.   Triggers, which will be available later this year, enables developers to define webhooks that are sent to external APIs when certain conditions are met.

Price reductions -- Network egress (47%), BigQuery storage (23%), Persistent Disk Snapshots (79%), Persistent Disk SSD (48%), and Cloud SQL (25%). These are in addition to the 10% reduction on Google Compute Engine that we announced at the beginning of October and reflect our commitment to make sure you benefit from increased efficiency and falling hardware prices.

Google Cloud Debugger -- making it easier to troubleshoot cloud applications.

Google Compute Engine Autoscaler -- uses the same technology that Google uses to seamlessly handle huge spikes in load and gives developers the ability to dynamically resize a VM fleet in response to utilization and based on a wide array of signals, from QPS of a HTTP Load Balancer, to VM CPU utilization, or custom metrics from the Cloud Monitoring service.

Bitnami announced its Launchpad for Google Cloud Platform -- almost 100 additional apps and development environments.

Fastly announced a collaboration with Google Cloud Platform, that improves content delivery and performance at the edge.

https://plus.google.com/s/%23GCPLive

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SDN Open Network Operating System Launches from On.Lab

The Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab) launched an open source SDN Open Network Operating System (ONOS) for Service Providers that enables agile service creation and deployment at scale on any hardware, including white boxes.

ONOS, which will be released on December 5th, delivers a highly available, scalable SDN control plane featuring northbound and southbound open APIs and paradigms for a diversity of management, control, and service applications across mission critical networks.

On.Lab said ONOS allows providers to gradually migrate their existing networks to SDN without requiring instant forklift upgrades by supporting a diversity of southbound devices and interfaces in addition to OpenFlow. Initial use cases for ONOS focus on new, innovative services and applications for service provider and WAN networks. These include examples such as: multi-layer optimization and traffic engineering over packet optical core; seamless peering of SDN islands with the Internet; SDN-based WAN control with segment routing; bandwidth calendaring; bandwidth and network provisioning; and a variety of configuration applications.

Another really important ONOS use case is Network Functions as a Service (NFaaS) – this is a scalable, easy to deploy and manage NFV where the smallest unit of provisioning is a “service.” These services can be managed easily, scaled up or down and composed together to create new value-added services. NFaaS truly enables service innovation, network optimization and cost reduction. Examples of NFaaS include caching, deep packet inspection, load balancing and security applications.

Founding members who are funding and contributing to the ONOS initiative include AT&T, NTT Communications, Ciena, Fujitsu, Huawei, Intel, NEC; and members who are collaborating and contributing to ONOS include Infoblox, SRI, Internet2, CNIT and Create-Net.

"Software-defined networking can radically reshape the wide area network,” said John Donovan, senior executive vice president, AT&T Technology & Operations. “The introduction of ONOS provides another open source SDN option designed for service provider networks with the potential to deliver the performance, scale, availability and core features that we value.”

“ONOS is built from scratch, from the ground-up, to be highly available, fast and extensible. It can be used to control existing equipment or new white boxes, allowing service providers to gain more control of their networks and reduce costs,” said Nick McKeown, professor of CS and EE at Stanford and faculty director of the Open Network Research Center.

"By now, SDN is deployed in data centers worldwide, based on proprietary software,” said Scott Shenker, professor of CS at UC Berkeley and faculty director of the Open Network Research Center. “The next frontier for SDN is service provider networks, where large network operators need to program their networks to create new, differentiated services. To enable this, we need a highly available, scalable control plane such as ONOS upon which new services can be instantiated and deployed.”

“NTT Communications and ON.Lab are well aligned in our goals for developing SDN for service provider networks,” said Yukio Ito, senior vice president and board member at NTT Communications. “We have been at the forefront of deploying SDN in carrier networks. We recognize the need for an open source network OS that provides carrier grade features to deliver carrier grade services. With ONOS’ northbound abstractions we now have an opportunity to develop control, management, and configuration applications quickly. We are excited to pilot use cases on ONOS in 2015.”

http://onlab.us/

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Riverbed Boosts its WAN Optimization for Hybrid Enterprise Clouds

Riverbed rolled out significant enhancements to its flagship products – Riverbed SteelHead 9.0 and Riverbed SteelCentral AppResponse 9.5 – with a focus on visibility, control, and optimization to accelerate performance of on-premises, cloud, and SaaS applications. The company sees enterprises moving rapidly to hybrid cloud architectures, where business traffic flows over both predictable WAN trunks and myriad Internet links between mobile users and their favorite cloud services. The new challenge is not only to handle congestion, but to ensure security, control and visibility of these new "Shadow IT" resources.

“Riverbed is now poised to do for cloud and SaaS applications what we’ve done for more than 1100 applications across the wide area network for the last decade,” said Jerry M. Kennelly, Riverbed Chairman and CEO, speaking at its Riverbed FORCE 2014 conference in San Jose, California.  

Riverbed customers have now deployed over 750,000 SteelHead appliances, giving the company a deeply embedded platform upon which to build further innovations in network management.

To accelerate the transition to global, hybrid enterprise networks, the company is also kicking off a Riverbed-Ready Technology Alliance program with 17 charter program members. Partners can leverage Riverbed open APIs and additional development tools to help with customization, integration, and automation.

Some highlights of the coming enhancements to the Riverbed platforms:

SteelHead 9.0 integrates with SteelCentral AppReponse 9.5 to provide visibility of on-premises, cloud, and SaaS apps.

• SteelCentral AppResponse 9.5 can measure end-user experience for both SteelHead-optimized and non-optimized enterprise web and SaaS applications for faster, more effective monitoring, and troubleshooting
  .
• SteelHead 9.0 can group applications according to their type and business priority to automate SLA activation for different types of apps.
   
• SteelHead 9.0 brings centralized, application-driven control of hybrid networks with “business intent”-based policies that make it easy to configure and manage path selection, quality of service (QoS), and secure transport.
   
• With Path Selection, SteelHead 9.0 intelligently derives all network paths and, based on business needs then prioritizes, secures and delivers business-critical applications over the fastest networks, while less critical applications are sent over the Internet. For example, Microsoft Lync voice traffic can be delivered over MPLS, while Lync video traffic is directed to the Internet.
  
• SteelHead 9.0 identifies over 1,100 applications – on-premises, cloud, and SaaS – which can be optimized for maximum productivity. Riverbed is rapidly expanding the number and type of applications that SteelHead recognizes, with a particular focus on SaaS apps.
• 
  
• Geo IQ for Microsoft Office 365 – The latest release of SteelHead 9.0 also offers Geo IQ for Microsoft Office 365, which ensures users are always connected to the native mailbox for optimal performance no matter where the Office 365 mailbox or the user is located.

http://www.riverbed.com/

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Brocade Expands its Campus Switching Line-up, Adds OpenFlow 1.3

Brocade unveiled a number of new campus network products, including the Brocade ICX 7750-based distributed chassis, the new Brocade ICX 7450 enterprise campus stackable switch, and the availability of OpenFlow 1.3 support for emerging campus SDN applications.

Highlights of the Expanded Brocade Campus Strategy:

Brocade ICX 7750

• a 1U fixed form factor 10/40 GbE switch with up to 32 40 GbE or 96 10 GbE ports per unit, 
• Delivers a scale-out architecture enabling up to 12 Brocade ICX 7750 switches to be stacked across the campus in a more flexible topology for network aggregation and core layers
• Provides consolidated management touch points and support for SDN to automate network configuration tasks

Brocade ICX 7450 Switch

• Up to 12 switches can be stacked for 160 Gbps of stacking bandwidth, and long-distance stacking using open-standards QSFP+ ports to enable single-point management across the campus
• Modular design with three expansion slots for a choice of 1, 10, or 40 GbE uplinks
• Power over HDBaseT (PoH), to power video surveillance and video conferencing equipment, VDI terminals, and HD displays directly from the switch

OpenFlow 1.3 Support for the Brocade ICX Product Family

• Brocade OpenFlow Hybrid Port Mode supports both OpenFlow forwarding and normal routing traffic forwarding, enabling a seamless transition to real-world SDN deployment
• OpenFlow is universally supported in Brocade ICX switches whether deployed individually, in mixed stacks, or in distributed stacks for SDN implementation flexibility across wiring closets
• Campus customers can build a reliable SDN network that has been certified with the OpenDaylight-based Brocade Vyatta Controller and emerging SDN applications

In addition, Brocade and Aruba are working together on open standards-based unified wired and wireless network access. The collaboration is expected to yield new product releases of Brocade Network Advisor 12.3, Aruba Airwave 8.0, and Brocade FastIron 8.0.20 with Aruba ClearPass CoA support.


http://newsroom.brocade.com/press-releases/brocade-expands-the-effortless-network-strategy-wi-nasdaq-brcd-1156057#.VFlgCPmjOM7

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Wind River Partners on HP Helion OpenStack Solutions for NFV

HP and Wind River have entered into a partnership to develop solutions with HP Helion OpenStack technology to enable carrier grade network functions virtualization (NFV) capabilities.

HP Helion OpenStack solutions with carrier grade capabilities will be available in calendar year 2015.

Key benefits of the HP Helion OpenStack-Wind River integrated solutions will include:

• Reliability – Carrier grade Linux and kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) hypervisor, advanced self-healing, and high availability add-ons for OpenStack Control Plane to enable service availability levels that carriers and CSPs demand
• Performance – Carrier grade accelerated vSwitch for high performance networking, advanced NFV workload placement to maximize the number of subscribers supported per server, utilization of system topology to optimize Virtual Network Function (VNF) performance, and an availability and affinity model designed to ensure VNF service availability while providing max performance with the lowest latency
• Manageability – Scheduling and orchestration of workloads, security features to meet carrier needs, and open, standards based applications programming interfaces (APIs)

“The telecom industry is eager to tap into the vast potential of NFV. By taking advantage of a virtualized or cloud environment, service providers can easily and quickly introduce new high-value services while reducing costs. In every case, maintaining carrier grade reliability is critical,” said Jim Douglas, senior vice president and CMO, Wind River. “By partnering with a leader like HP, we’re enabling a new generation of carrier grade, cloud-enabled NFV deployments for our customers in this changing market.”

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/hp-news/press-release.html?id=1830185#.VFmzRvmjOM4

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Microsoft Partners with Dropbox

Microsoft announced a partnership with Dropbox that will allow Office applications to work better with Dropbox folders.

Over 1.2 billion people use Office. Dropbox has more than 300,000,000 users and has become home to more than 35 billion Office files.

“In our mobile-first and cloud-first world, people need easier ways to create, share and collaborate regardless of their device or platform,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. “Together, Microsoft and Dropbox will provide our shared customers with flexible tools that put them at the center for the way they live and work today.”

http://www.microsoft.com
http://www.dropbox.com

• Dropbox is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Austin, New York, Dublin, and Sydney.  The service is now available in 19 languages.

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Stratoscale Raises $32M for Data Center OS

Stratoscale, a start-up based in Herzeliya, Israel, raised $32 million in Series B funding for its distributed data center operating system.

Stratoscale’s rack-scale architecture aims to transform standard x86 servers into a hyper-converged infrastructure for cloud services while supporting both containers and virtualization on the same platform.  Stratoscale’s true “plug and play” architecture supports OpenStack and Docker.

The funding round was led by Intel Capital, with participation by Cisco® Investments and SanDisk, as well as other investors including the original series A investors, Battery Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP).

http://www.stratoscale.com/

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Nuage Networks Gains Oracle Exastack Ready

Nuage Networks announced that its Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) has achieved Oracle Exadata Ready, Oracle Exalytics Ready, Oracle Database Appliance Ready, Oracle Big Data Appliance Ready, Oracle Linux Ready and Oracle VM Ready statuses through Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN).

Nuage Networks said it is committed to supporting enterprise-grade Oracle environments to accelerate moving enterprises toward cloud architectures that meld application-driven virtualization and software-defined networking (SDN) technology using open technology platforms.

“We’re pleased to work with Oracle and to receive seven new Oracle Exastack Ready statuses to date. The Oracle Exastack program and Oracle PartnerNetwork have helped us to provide customers with the confidence that our Virtualized Services Platform is supported and ready to run with Oracle products and solutions,” said Sunil Khandekar, CEO of Nuage Networks.

http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/press/2014/nuage-networks-press-release-nuage-networks-achieves-oracle-exadata-ready-oracle-exalytics-ready

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AT&T and Verizon Work toward VoLTE Interoperability

Verizon and AT&T are working to establish VoLTE interoperability between their networks.

The companies are working through a full set of requirements, beginning with extensive testing in lab environments and then moving to field trials.  This approach ensures customers will have a seamless experience making VoLTE HD Voice calls between networks and lays the foundation for interoperability of other Rich Communications Services (RCS) such as video calls, rich messaging, and more in the future.


VoLTE interoperability between Verizon and AT&T customers is expected in 2015.  

"Interoperability among all VoLTE providers takes connectivity to the next level with HD quality voice and additional features that customers want," said Tony Melone, chief technology officer at Verizon. "We're pleased to be working with AT&T as our first interoperating carrier, and we look forward to working with other operators as VoLTE continues to grow."

"Interoperability of VoLTE between wireless carriers is crucial to a positive customer experience," said Krish Prabhu, president, AT&T Labs and Chief Technology Officer, AT&T.  "Customers expect to be able to connect anywhere, anytime– and as LTE technology continues to evolve, it's imperative that we provide a seamless experience between carriers. We are pleased to work with Verizon on this initiative.  We continue to work with others in the industry on similar collaborative arrangements and hope to see similar collaboration across the industry in the near future."

Verizon introduced its Advanced Calling 1.0 services across the United States in September, and will continue to make Advanced Calling-capable smartphones available to its customers, further expanding the reach of the technology.

AT&T introduced VoLTE services in its initial markets earlier this year, and will continue to expand to more devices and more markets across the United States.  


http://www.verizonwireless.com/news/article/2014/11/verizon-and-att-move-toward-voice-over-lte-volte-interoperability.html

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Video: Why OPNFV?

Why OPNFV? Prodip Sen, CTO for Network Functions Virtualization at HP and Reino Tammela, Head of Nokia's Technology Center in Espoo, discuss the reasons for a new industry initiative outside of ETSI's ISG for NFV.

The new project aims to accelerate deployments. The jump-start does not aim to replace on-going standards development but to take a pragmatic approach to market demands.

http://youtu.be/XoOPhcSr4Z0

At the end of September, The Linux Foundation launched the Open Platform for NFV Project (OPNFV) with the goal of accelerating the commercial introduction of NFV products and services.

OPNFV will establish a carrier-grade, integrated, open source reference platform that industry peers will build together to advance the evolution of NFV and ensure consistency, performance and interoperability among multiple open source components. Because multiple open source NFV building blocks already exist, OPNFV will work with upstream projects to coordinate continuous integration and testing while filling development gaps.

The initial project objectives are to:

• develop an integrated and tested open source platform that can be used to investigate and demonstrate core NFV functionality;
• include proactive participation of leading end users to validate that OPNFV meets the needs of the end user community;
• contribute to and participate in relevant open source projects that will be leveraged in the OPNFV reference platform;
• establish an open ecosystem for NFV solutions based on open standards and open source software; and
• promote OPNFV as the preferred open reference platform.

While not developing standards, OPNFV will work closely with ETSI’s NFV ISG, among others, to drive consistent implementation of standards for an open NFV reference platform. When open source software development is aligned with standards development, it can root out issues early, identify resolutions and become the de facto codebase, resulting in a far more economical approach to platform development.

OPNFV will license new components under the Apache License Version 2.0 and will work within the licensing requirements of upstream projects in order to contribute code back to these projects. A Board of Directors and Technical Steering Committee (TSC) will govern the initiative. The Board will be made up of representatives from member companies and will set the business direction and scope of the project. The TSC will also provide technical governance and leadership for the project.

Board officers for OPNFV include:

• Prodip Sen, board chair  (HP)
• Margaret Chiosi, president (AT&T)
• Wenjing Chu, secretary (Dell)
• Hui Deng, treasurer (China Mobile)

Platinum founding members of IPNFV include AT&T, Brocade, China Mobile, Cisco, Dell, Ericsson, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, NEC, Nokia Networks, NTT DOCOMO, Red Hat, Telecom Italia and Vodafone. Silver-level founding members include 6WIND, Alcatel-Lucent, ARM, Broadcom, CableLabs, Cavium, CenturyLink, Ciena, Citrix, ClearPath Networks, ConteXtream, Coriant, Cyan, Dorado Software, Ixia, Metaswitch Networks, Mirantis, Orange, Sandvine, Sprint and Wind River.

A 21-page whitepaper on OPNFV is here:
https://www.opnfv.org//sites/opnfv/files/pages/files/opnfv_whitepaper_092914.pdf

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Siaras' cloudScape Straddles Cloud/WAN Divide

Siaras, a start-up based in Silicon Valley and Burnaby, BC, unveiled its cloudScape software platform for enabling intercloud WAN connectivity by leveraging SDN WAN orchestration from a wide variety of equipment suppliers with direct, dedicated connectivity offerings available from many public cloud operators.

Siaras' cloudScape enables network service providers to integrated their own public or managed private cloud assets with third-party public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, IBM SoftLayer, and others.  Specifically, cloudScape allows service providers to build “overclouds” with multiple heterogeneous data center and WAN “underclouds” provides the following functions:

1. Automatic orchestration of open intercloud WANs in response to real time needs between virtual data centers.
2. On demand intercloud WAN connectivity, or WAN-as-a-service (WANaaS), enabling connections to be spun up and torn down in a matter of minutes.
3. Traffic-engineering-as-a-service (TEaaS) allowing per-app, policy-based sharing of WAN connectivity.
4. Virtual points-of-presence (POPs) inside third-party public clouds facilitating the on-demand establishment of virtual data centers along with requisite WAN connectivity. This is especially important for cloud bursting, data base back up, and disaster recovery scenarios.

Working in partnership with KVH in Tokyo, Siaras recently completed a proof of concept that enables KVH enterprise customers are able to spin up workloads in multiple dissimilar data centers via a single cloud and WAN orchestration interface. The PoC, which utilized the Siaras cloudScape platform, enables KVH to substantially broaden the range of cloud services it offers

http://www.siaras.com/

• Siaras was founded in 2013 by Vivek Ragavan and Sig Luft.
• Siara Systems was a developer of metro area networking technology acquired by Redback Networks in 1999 in a deal valued at $4.3 billion in stock at the time. Vivek Ragavan was CEO of Siara Systems and Sig Luft was Director of Software Development.

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Midokura Adopts Open Source Model for OpenStack Network Virtualization

Midokura has moved to an open source model for its MidoNet network virtualization solution designed for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds.

MidoNet is a highly distributed, de-centralized, multi-layer software-defined virtual network solution for the OpenStack Community. It replaces default OVS plugin from OpenStack deployments and offers a much more scalable and efficient networking solution for highly virtualized and cloud environments. MidoNet also provides L2-L4 services that are distributed at the network edge.

All of the code behind MidoNet is now available under the Apache 2.0 license, letting anyone in the popular and rapidly growing OpenStack community use, distribute and build on the technology, as well as submit back to the project. Midokura said it is committed to building a non-vendor driven community around the project and has dedicated resources to building and supporting a community of MidoNet users, including new staffing, a website and community infrastructure.

“We’ve been hard at work building our MidoNet solution for the past four years, well ahead of the competition,” said Dan Mihai Dumitriu, co-founder and CEO of Midokura. “The OpenStack Neutron community is quite fractured because multiple vendors are trying to sell proprietary solutions and thus have little incentive to invest in the default, which remains unfit for production. We decided to resolve the cognitive dissonance by open sourcing MidoNet, and making it a truly community driven project. We are giving the OpenStack community a stable, scalable, easy to deploy and fully open virtual networking solution.”

http://www.midokura.com/press-releases/midokura-open-sources-complete-iaas-network-virtualization-solution-openstack-community/

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Akanda Debuts Open Source NFV Platform

Akanda, a start-up incubated with DreamHost since 2012, launched out of stealth mode to deliver an open source Network Function Virtualization (NFV) platform for cloud service providers.  The platform is already in use by 500+ tenants at Dreamhost and supporting 1,000s of VMs in its cloud compute service. DreamHost is now spinning-off the solution into Akanda, a start-up whose mission will be to accelerate open source NFV for cloud operators.

Akanda NFV implementation provides OpenStack integrated L3 network virtualization on a VMWare NSX L2 overlay. It interfaces with the OpenStack Neutron REST APIs and includes a sophisticated management and orchestration platform to monitor, configure, and manage virtualized routers. In the future, Akanda will be extended to virtualize additional network functions, including load balancing and firewalls, and will feature pluggable backends to alternative L2 overlays.

The company said intends to work collaboratively with all emerging open source communities and NFV projects including OpenStack Neutron, OPNFV and OpenDaylight.

DreamHost is providing $1.5 million in seed capital to Akanda. The team includes key former stakeholders in Inktank (now part of RedHat), the company that transformed the future of storage with the Ceph open source storage system. Henrik Rosendahl has been appointed Akanda's CEO. Simon Anderson, DreamHost’s CEO, will Chair the Akanda Board, and Jonathan LaCour, VP Cloud at DreamHost, will serve as a Director and technical advisor.

“Open Source is again proving to be the best way to tackle large, integrated software projects,” said Henrik Rosendahl, CEO of Akanda, Inc. “There is huge demand for open solutions up and down the networking software stack, and Akanda is well placed to garner new contributors and wider adoption given its roots as a core production-grade NFV platform at DreamHost.”

“DreamHost is excited to be co-founding and backing a new open source venture in Akanda,” said Simon Anderson, CEO of DreamHost. “We’ve been running Akanda in production with thousands of compute instances for over a year, and we’re confident the platform will be incredibly flexible and useful to cloud service providers worldwide as it develops and matures.”

http://www.akanda.io/

• DreamHost currently proudly hosts over 1.5 million websites, WordPress blogs, and applications.

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Ruckus Wireless Posts Q3 Revenue of $85 Million, up 23% YoY

Ruckus Wireless posted third quarter 2014 revenue of $85.0 million, an increase of 23.3% from the third quarter of 2013. GAAP net income was $3.6 million for the third quarter of 2014, compared with $0.1 million for the third quarter of 2013. GAAP operating income was $6.1 million for the third quarter of 2014, compared with an operating loss of $0.5 million for the third quarter of 2013.

"Our enterprise and service provider business remained strong, fueled by rising demand for public Wi-Fi access in consumer facing enterprises and public venues. To drive long-term growth, corresponding with our long history of innovation, we introduced a new product line that expands our addressable market," said Selina Lo, president and chief executive officer, Ruckus Wireless. "We are also pleased with the progress we made in operating leverage, reporting record operating margins for the quarter."

http://www.ruckuswireless.com

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Procera Posts Q3 Revenue of $16.1 Million

Procera reported Q3 2014 revenue of $16.1 million, compared with $21.3 million in the third quarter of 2013.  GAAP net loss for the third quarter of 2014 was $15.7 million, or $0.77 per diluted share, which includes a $12.4 million impairment charge to write-down the goodwill and purchased intangible assets related to an acquisition, and compared with a GAAP net loss of $3.0 million, or $0.15 per diluted share, for the third quarter of 2013.

"Our results for the quarter reflect our previously announced expectations, and although they are below our initial plans, we believe we have laid a solid technology and customer foundation to improve the financial fundamentals and drive shareholder value," said James Brear, president and chief executive officer of Procera Networks. "With the recent customer wins and successes in R&D, we are achieving our strategic goals in the areas of analytics and virtualization, and are focused on returning Procera to a long term growth trajectory."

http://www.proceranetworks.com/press-releases/procera-networks-announces-third-quarter-2014-financial-results

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Internap Expands its OpenStack-Powered Public Cloud to Amsterdam

Internap is taking its OpenStack-powered AgileCLOUD footprint to Amsterdam, furthering its positioning as a leading OpenStack public cloud provider.

The Amsterdam facility includes Internap’s bare-metal services.  In addition to Amsterdam, Internap offers its OpenStack-powered next-generation AgileCLOUD out of its Dallas, Texas and Montreal data centers.

AgileCLOUD is backed by all-SSD storage with guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) and Internap’s Performance IP™ bandwidth to deliver consistently higher network performance and lower latency to end users when compared to other public clouds. AgileCLOUD also offers two server tiers to match customers’ specific
performance requirements, each with configurable memory, CPU and SSD storage options.

The company is also announcing new OpenStack management capabilities in AgileCLOUD via an integrated OpenStack Horizon dashboard.

http://www.internap.com

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Internet2 Launches Full-Production OpenFlow Capability

The Internet2 last week marked a major milestone in its network architecture by demonstrating the first nationwide, multi-tenant SDN-powered virtualized network capability.

The announcement was made at the 2014 Technology Exchange held last week in Indianapolis.

Conceptually, the virtualization enables the physical Internet2 Network to operate in isolated “slices” by leveraging innovations native to the Internet2 Network, including its 100G interfaces. The new SDN capability is driven by “FlowSpace Firewall” software installed in the Internet2 production network.  This allows slices of OpenFlow capabilities to be partitioned across nearly forty 100G-attached access nodes throughout the country. The software protects each network slice from overconsumption of resources by other slices.

The Internet2 says this first-in-class capability is now available to support the important work of the research and education (R&E) community’s data-intensive science and academic operations.

During the 2014 Technology Exchange conference, several initiatives were announced to build large-scale production cloud computing, next-generation IP and peering fabrics in virtual slices of the Internet2 Network.

These include two $10 million projects, called Chameleon and CloudLab, underwritten by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

“By connecting CloudLab to Internet2's nationwide SDN network, we can give researchers a level of end-to-end network programmability that is unprecedented in a cloud platform, said Robert Ricci, a research assistant professor of computer science at the University of Utah and principal investigator of CloudLab. Having this level of control, programmability, and visibility into the network will enable the research community to push the boundaries of cloud networking and explore the future of network architectures for the cloud.

http://www.internet2.edu/news/detail/7257/

More on FlowSpace Firewall:
http://globalnoc.iu.edu/software/sdn.html

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IBM Teams with Tencent to serve Enterprise Cloud in China

IBM and Tencent Cloud announced an alliance to collaborate on providing public cloud with Software-as-a-Service solutions for enterprises in China.

The partnership will focus on emerging small and medium enterprises that are using mobile, cloud computing and big data tools to transform internal processes and operations.

As part of the pact Tencent Cloud and IBM will jointly promote industry innovation and gain from each company's resources and global capacity.

“Tencent has a stable and reliable cloud computing platform, while IBM has abundant industry expertise aimed at the enterprise. We will work together to bring ‘Internet mode’ to more enterprise-level clients through cloud computing,” stated Mr. Taosang Tong, President of Social Network Group, Senior Executive Vice President of Tencent.

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/45281.wss

• In August, China Telecom and IBM announced a three-year agreement to help small and medium businesses (SMBs) implement secure, cost-effective and scalable SAP cloud-based applications.

• In July, IBM announced a 10-year initiative to support China in transforming its national energy systems and protecting the health of citizens.  IBM's "Green Horizon" project seeks to address three areas critical to China's sustainable growth: air quality management, renewable energy forecasting and energy optimization. The project will be led by IBM's China Research laboratory and tap into the company's network of 12 global research labs and create an innovation ecosystem of partners from government, academia, industry and private enterprise.

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AT&T: Mobile Data Usage at Stadiums Soars to 1000s of GBs

In-stadium mobile data usage at college and professional football games is soaring to hundreds or thousands of gigabytes, according to newly published data usage statics from AT&T.   The data is derived from the more than 75 different stadiums where AT&T provides coverage via Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS).

So far this football season across 333 games where it had DAS coverage, AT&T customers used more than 104.9 Terabytes of mobile data via the in-venue cellular networks. Data usage at professional football games outpaces college games.  Mobile users in Miami use the most data.

More stats are on the AT&T blog:

http://about.att.com/newsroom/were_halfway_there0.html

Data on mobile data usage at baseball games is here:

http://about.att.com/newsroom/going_going_gone_mobile_data_flies_out_of_ballparks_this_season.html

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CyrusOne Pre-Leases New Virginia Data Center

In an indication of the strong market for prime data center space, CyrusOne pre-leased more than 12,000 square feet of colocation space (CSF) at its new data center in Sterling, Virginia to a Fortune 50 company.  The tenant also secured first right of refusal on another 8,000 square feet at the facility.

Pre-sale represents a third of the 30,000 square feet of colocation space that will come online for the first phase of the 124,000 square foot building the company broke ground on in April.

“This is a current tenant in one of our other data center facilities that appreciates the scalability and flexibility we can deliver, and has chosen to expand their footprint with us in Northern Virginia. CyrusOne’s scalable Massively Modular® engineering design approach, with its ability to support future infrastructure growth, as well as our exceptional service delivery levels were key contributors to the decision,” said Tesh Durvasula, chief commercial officer, CyrusOne.

http://www.cyrusone.com

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