KT Conducts First eMTC Field Trial with Nokia

KT and Nokia announced the industry's first eMTC field trial, marking an important milestone for the Internet of Things, allowing for coexistence with the existing LTE network as well as providing extended coverage.

eMTC, which is also referred to as LTE-M with 1.4MHz bandwidth, is a feature that will be fully standardized with 3GPP Release 13, the first evolution step of LTE-Advanced to LTE-Advanced Pro. eMTC will provide data rates of up to 1Mbps and up to four times better coverage, while reducing device complexity by up to 80%, in comparison to conventional LTE. This allows for cost-effective connectivity of more data-rich sensors, such as environmental monitoring or building surveillance, on existing LTE networks located in rural areas and buildings.

The test was conducted on KT's LTE network using Nokia's Flexi Multiradio 10 Base Station. eMTC utilized only 1.4MHz of the full 20 MHz LTE system, leaving the remaining spectrum free for normal LTE traffic.

Chang Seok Seo, Senior Vice President and Head of Network Strategy Unit, KT, said: "This trial, a world-first, offers a solid platform to promote the widespread application of services powered by IoT technology by addressing limitations that are hampering its spread and reach. Together with Nokia, we will play a pivotal role in pioneering the emergence of IoT as the first-choice technology in Korea and beyond."

Andrew Cope, Head of Korea, Nokia, said: "This project underlines our position as a driving force behind the creation of a programmable world, where close to 50bn devices* will be connected in 2025. With this trial, we have successfully demonstrated the capabilities of LTE as a veritable backbone for a growing range of IoT use cases."

http://www.nokia.com

Blueprint: 2016 Predictions -- Big Guns and Long Tails

Monday, January 18, 2016  #cloud, #IoT, 3.5 GHz, 5G, Blueprint, Nokia, Predictions  1 comment

by Michael Murphy, CTO for North America, Nokia Networks In 2014, I suggested that 2015 would be an inflection point due to the start of serious 5G activity and the start of cloud based deployments , which together had the potential to fundamentally change the telecom industry. So what really happened and what’s up for 2016? Retrospection 5G did of course progress throughout the year, but perhaps the biggest news came in September. At the CTIA...

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IHS:Downtime Costs $700 Billion a Year for U.S. Businesses

Information and communication technology (ICT) downtime is costing North American organizations $700 billion per year, according to a new study from IHS.

Some highlights:

• Network interruptions are the biggest culprit of downtime and have far-reaching consequences: applications, servers and devices may all be working fine, but they can’t communicate with each other when the network is down
• On average, survey respondents experience 5 downtime events per month, and 27 hours of downtime per month
• Organizations are making changes to reduce the impact of downtime, from investing in early-detection capabilities to improving redundancy, training and hiring new people, and implementing backup processes that don’t rely on ICT systems

“Our research found that the cost of ICT downtime is substantial, from $1 million a year for a typical mid-size company to over $60 million for a large enterprise,” said Matthias Machowinski, research director for enterprise networks and video at IHS.

http://www.ihs.com

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Vendors Call of Overhaul of Federal Process to Approve Cloud Vendors

An industry advocacy group is calling on the U.S. government to overhaul the process it uses to grant FedRAMP Authority To Operate (ATO) to Cloud Service Providers.

The group says that it typically takes two years and $4 million to $5 million for industry to obtain a FedRAMP ATO . Both government agencies and CSPs have voiced concerns about the efficiency of the process, as well as its lack of transparency.

“For Uncle Sam to break with the expensive and dysfunctional legacy addiction, we need a FedRAMP Fix,” said Steve O’Keeffe, founder, MeriTalk. “Fix the program or it’ll fall under its own weight. We can’t afford to wait – it’s time for action on FedRAMP 2.0.”

FedRAMP Fast Forward is a not-for-profit industry advocacy group created to provide perspective from Federal IT providers to support, inform, and accelerate FedRAMP and broader cloud adoption across government.

http://www.fedrampfastforward.org/

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DragonWave Unveils Ultra-high capacity, Multi-service Microwave System

DragonWave introduced its Harmony Enhanced MC, an ultra-high capacity, multi-service microwave system operating in the 6-42 GHz spectrum bands that provides dual channel support and extended reach.

The company said its Harmony Enhanced MC delivers a true all-outdoor, Ethernet solution with unmatched system gain and spectral efficiency. It features integrated dual carrier and fully integrated XPIC capabilities in a single Outdoor Unit (ODU) antenna configuration. It unit boasts an integrated switch with the industry’s first 10GE port on a wireless backhaul radio.

With integrated 112 MHz channel support, 4096QAM capability, Bandwidth Accelerator+ and MIMO, Harmony Enhanced MC delivers over 4 Gbps in a single radio, with scalability to deliver 8Gbps on a single antenna.

The Harmony Enhanced MC also provides the highest systems gain in an all-outdoor microwave system, leveraging the latest RF ASIC technology to increase reach by more than 30% reducing tower costs.

DragonWave also noted that its Harmony Enhanced MC system is hardware ready to support Software Defined Networking (SDN), effectively enabling end-to-end network intelligence. Additionally, integrated Ethernet switching with a 10GE port, Carrier Ethernet services support, and upgradability to MPLS-TP, and Software Defined Networking (SDN), enables end-to-end network intelligence that doesn’t require an additional indoor switching unit.

“Through close work with operators, we understand their concerns regarding how best to cope with a growing subscriber base and the ever-increasing capacity demands on their backhaul networks,” said Greg Friesen, vice president, Product Management, DragonWave. “Harmony Enhanced MC is an important addition to the Harmony family and comes at an ideal time to help operators deploy affordable, highly scalable microwave solutions quickly, and that offer the ability to continue to meet customers’ expectations long-term.”

http://www.dragonwaveinc.com/

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Dell'Oro: Mobile Backhaul Transport Rising to $5.3 Billion Annually

The Mobile Backhaul Transport market, comprising of wireless and fiber/copper backhaul systems, is forecast to drive $5.3 billion annually over the next five years as a near term rise in wireless backhaul equipment will energize the Microwave Transmission equipment market, according to a new report by Dell'Oro Group.

Some highlights:

• Small cell backhaul is forecast to contribute approximately 25 percent of the Mobile Backhaul Transport revenue by 2020.
• Demand for Microwave Transmission radio transceivers, used in a number of applications including mobile radios, is forecast to grow at an average annual rate of 8 percent through 2020.

"Much of the expansion in mobile backhaul is behind us," said Jimmy Yu, Vice President at Dell'Oro Group.  "While we do not envision topline market expansion in the next five years, we do believe a few dynamics are underway.  Most notably, small cells have finally started to rollout, and though most are indoor units, we think operators will steadily raise deployments of outdoor small cells requiring additional backhaul links.  Another dynamic underway is a slight mix shift to wireless backhaul from fiber/copper in the near term, which should propel microwave equipment purchases for the next three years," Yu added.

http://www.delloro.com

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Western Digital Acquires 100+ Patents from IBM

Western Digital has acquired more than 100 patent assets from IBM in distributed storage, object storage, and emerging non-volatile memory. The companies also entered into a patent cross-license agreement. Financial terms were not disclosed.

"This agreement reflects our continued focus on innovation and sets the stage for even more rapid advancement and commercialization of new data storage solutions," said Mike Cordano, president and chief operating officer, Western Digital. "We are building on Western Digital and IBM's long-standing relationship and look forward to future collaborations and business opportunities."

http://www.ibm.com
http://www.wd.com

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mPrest Raises $20 Million for IoT Monitoring

mPrest, a start-up based in Israel, raised $20 million in Series A funding for its monitoring and control software for the Internet of Things (IoT).

mPrest is an established player in the monitoring and control software industry serving essential sectors, including defense and security bodies, electric and water utilities, smart cities and buildings, fleet management companies and other large organizations around the world. For the past six years, mPrest has been a strategic partner with Rafael Advanced Defense Systems to supply the command and control system for the renowned Iron Dome air-defense system, as well as many other large projects.

The round was led by GE Ventures, the venture arm of GE, and OurCrowd, one of the world's leading equity crowdfunding platforms.

“The enormous promise of the IoT relies on smoothly integrating disparate systems, sensors and disciplines while managing the exponential growth of connected devices,” said Natan Barak, CEO and founder of mPrest. “We built mPrest’s product-based platform to empower industrial and commercial organizations to autonomously adapt to these changes to strengthen performance and drive operational efficiency and cost reductions. Together with our new and existing partners we are committed to growing into a world leader in technology for the increasingly connected industrial world."

http://www.mPrest.com

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AT&T Delivers for AutoZone

AT&T landed a new multi-year, multi-million dollar agreement to provide networking services to AutoZone, the leading retailer and a leading distributor of auto parts and accessories in the U.S..

AT&T will provide a suite of mobile and broadband solutions at 5,000 AutoZone locations in the United States, its call centers, and back-end offices.  AT&T will deliver seamless connectivity with voice, Internet and mobility solutions.

"The old ways of doing business are changing, especially in the retail space.  More industry leaders, like AutoZone, are using our integrated solutions to remain competitive," said Cathy Martine, president, AT&T Enterprise Business Solutions. "Our job is to deliver solutions that are tailored to the needs of our customers and effortless for them to use."

http://www.att.com

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F5 Names Mike Convertino as Chief Information Security Officer

F5 Networks named Mike Convertino as its first Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). Prior to joining F5, Convertino was previously the Chief Information Security Officer at CrowdStrike, where he was responsible for the security of both CrowdStrike’s corporate network and its product platform. He established the CrowdStrike Security Operations Center and developed new security technologies to meld the best of traditional IT security with the latest security in DevOps models for cloud environments. Before CrowdStrike, Convertino was the senior director of network security at Microsoft, where he was responsible for protecting the company’s networks from intrusion and exploitation.

http://www.f5.com

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Blueprint: Five Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With DNS

by Shannon Weyrick, Director of Engineering for NS1

Over the past 25 years there have been dramatic shifts in how companies deliver websites and applications. The pervasiveness of globally distributed cloud computing providers like AWS and Digital Ocean, along with the rise of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and deployment automation, have dramatically reduced the costs and complexities of deploying applications. Users today can deploy servers in different parts of the world in minutes and leverage a multitude of software frameworks, databases and automation tools that all work to decentralize environments and improve uptime and performance.

The result is one of the more fundamental changes in the recent history of computing: today’s applications are distributed by default.

Unique Traffic Management Challenges for Modern Applications

While we’ve seen significant progress toward distributing applications on the infrastructure and application side, the tools website operators have at their disposal to effectively route traffic to their newly distributed applications haven’t kept pace. Your app is distributed, but how do you get your users to the right points of presence (POPs)?

Today, traffic management is typically accomplished through prohibitively complex and expensive networking techniques like BGP anycasting, capex-heavy hardware appliances with global load balancing add-ons, or by leveraging a third party Managed DNS platform.

As the ingress point to nearly every application and website on the Internet, DNS is a great place to enact traffic management policies. However, the capabilities of most Managed DNS platforms are severely limited because they were not designed with today’s applications in mind. For instance, most managed DNS platforms are built using off-the-shelf software like BIND or PowerDNS, onto which features like monitoring and geo-IP databases are grafted.

Until recently, a state-of-the-art DNS platform could do two things with regards to traffic management: first it wouldn’t send users to a server that was down, and second it would try to return the IP address of the server that’s closest to the end user making the request.

This is a bit like using a GPS unit from 1999 to get to a gas station: it can give you the location of one that’s close by and maybe open according to its Yellow Pages listing, but that’s about it. Maybe there is roadwork or congestion on the one route you can take to get there. Maybe the gas station is out of diesel, or perhaps they’re open but backed up with lines stretching down the block. Perhaps a gas station that’s a bit farther away would have been a better choice?

High-performing Internet properties face similar challenges in digital form, and they go far beyond proximity and a binary notion of “up/down.” Does the datacenter have excess capacity? What’s traffic like getting there - is there a fiber cut or congestion to a particular ISP we should route around? Are there any data privacy or protection protocols we need to take into account?

Intelligent DNS

Today’s data-driven application delivery models require a new way of managing DNS traffic. Next-gen DNS platforms have been built from the ground up with traffic management at their core, bringing to market exciting capabilities and innovative new tools that allow businesses to enact traffic management in ways that were previously impossible.

Here are five best practices to consider when implementing an advanced, intelligent traffic management platform:

1. Intelligent routing: Look for solutions that route users based on their ISP, ASN, IP prefix or geographical location. Geofencing can ensure users in the EU are only serviced by EU datacenters, for instance, while ASN fencing can make sure all users on China Telecom are served by Chinacache. Using IP fencing will make sure local-printer.company.com automatically returns the IP of your local printer, regardless of which office an employee is visiting.
2. Leverage load shedding to prevent meltdowns: Automatically adjusting the flow of traffic to network endpoints, in real time, based on telemetry coming from endpoints or applications, can help prevent overloading a datacenter without taking it offline entirely, and seamlessly route users to the next nearest datacenter with excess capacity.
3. Enact business rules: Meet your applications’ needs with filters that use weights, priorities and even stickiness by enacting business rules. Distribute traffic in accordance with commits and capacity. Combine weighted load balancing with sticky sessions (e.g. session affinity) to adjust the ratio of traffic distributed among a group of servers while ensuring that returning users continue to be directed to the same endpoint.
4. Route around problems: Identify solutions that provide the ability to constantly monitor endpoints from the vantage point of the end user and then send those coming from each network to the endpoint that will service them best.
5. Cloud burst: Leverage ready-to-scale infrastructure to handle planned or unplanned traffic spikes. If your primary colocation environment is becoming overloaded, make sure you're are able to dynamically send new traffic to another environment according to your business rules, whether it’s AWS, the next nearest facility or a DR/failover site.

 For businesses that need to deliver Internet-scale performance and reliability for high-volume, mission-critical applications, they must rethink their current DNS and traffic management capabilities. Traditional DNS technologies are fractured and rudimentary, making the industry ripe for disruption in order to accommodate today’s demanding applications.

Tomorrow’s modern distributed application delivery will be supported by converging dynamic, intelligent and responsive routing technologies. Whether you’re building the next big thing or you’ve already made it to the Fortune 500, best practices suggest that it’s time to evaluate current DNS and traffic management platforms with an eye on solving previously intractable problems and improving performance for webscale applications.

About the author

Shannon Weyrick is the director of engineering for NS1 and has been working in Internet infrastructure since 1996, when he got started at an ISP in upstate New York. He’s been programming, however, since time immemorial, and loves it to this day. Shannon can find his way around any full backend stack, but he’s focused on software development, and has created or contributed to many open source projects throughout the years. Shannon previously worked at Internap and F5 Networks architecting and developing distributed platforms for a variety of infrastructure projects.

Got an idea for a Blueprint column?  We welcome your ideas on next gen network architecture.
See our guidelines.

 

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Facebook Picks Ireland for 2nd European Data Center

Facebook has selected Ireland as the location for its 2nd data center in Europe. Ireland has been Facebook's international headquarters since 2009.

The new facility, which will be located in Clonee, County Meath, will run entirely on the renewal energy resources (wind) already available in Ireland and cooled by outside air. The data center will employ the latest designs from the Open Compute Project.  The facility is expected to come online in late 2017 or early 2018.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/clonee-data-center/hello-clonee/643756702431644

Facebook Engineering: Building a Live Video Broadcast Capability

Friday, December 04, 2015  Facebook  No comments

The Facebook Engineering team is building the ability for people to share live video on Facebook, potentially to very large numbers of viewers. In this blog post, engineers described "the thundering herd" problem - public figures with millions of followers on Facebook may suddenly start a live broadcast. Facebook needs to be able to handle the potential of more than a million people watching the broadcast at the same time, as happened recently with...

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Facebook Targets 32x100G Wedge Data Center Switch

Thursday, November 19, 2015  Data Centers, Facebook, Switching  No comments

Facebook confirmed that work is already underway on Wedge 100, a 32x100G switch for its hyperscale data centers. Facebook is also adapting Wedge to a much bigger aggregation switch called 6-pack, which uses Wedge as its foundation and stacks 12 of these Wedges in a modular and nonblocking aggregation switch. FBOSS will be used as a software stack across the growing platform of network switches: Wedge, 6-pack, and now Wedge 100. In an engineering...

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Facebook's Latest Open Compute Project Data Center

Tuesday, July 07, 2015  Data Centers, Facebook, Texas  No comments

Facebook has kicked off construction of its fifth mega data center in Fort Worth, Texas. The new site will join the other major Facebook data centers located in Prineville (Oregon), Forest City (North Carolina), Lulea (Sweden), and Altoona (Iowa). The new Fort Worth data center will feature the latest Open Compute Project hardware designs — including Yosemite, Wedge, and 6-pack — making it one of the most advanced data centers in the world. Notably,...

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Telensa Raises $18 Million for LPWA-Powered Streetlights

Telensa, a start-up based in Cambridge, UK, raised US$18 million in venture funding for its smart city solutions incorporating low power wide area (LPWA) wireless technology.

Telensa makes wireless smart city control applications, a smart streetlight solution that company says has been deployed by over 50 city and regional networks in 8 countries for a total footprint of over 1 million streetlights. The streetlights use LPWA Ultra Narrow Band (UNB) radio system, which combines low-cost, long range, long battery life and 2-way communication for massive numbers of devices.

Telensa cites strong demand growth in three areas:

• The worldwide rollout of energy-efficient LED street lights. Connecting these lights is becoming mandatory as it unlocks further energy savings, reduces maintenance costs and enables flexible lifetime control of local lighting levels.
• Streetlights are increasingly being seen as the ideal low-cost hub for smart city sensor applications, such as weather and pollution monitoring.
• New Smart City applications that connect to the city’s UNB network. The company’s smart parking solution, for example, already includes some of the world’s largest deployments such as Moscow and Shenzhen.

The funding includes equity investment from Environmental Technologies Fund and debt funding from Silicon Valley Bank.

“The smart city controls market is awash with pilot applications looking for a business case, LPWA networks waiting for a critical mass of devices, and vendors hoping for a path to profit,” said Will Gibson, CEO Telensa. “We’re different. Our networks are proven at commercial scale and our applications are sold on a sustainable business case. This investment is recognition of Telensa’s success and enables us to expand to meet the growing demand for our solutions.”

http://www.telensa.com

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MariaDB Raises $9 Million for Open Source Database

MariaDB announced $9 million in venture funding to support its open-source relational database solutions. The company also named  Michael Howard as its CEO and Michael “Monty” Widenius as chief technology officer.

MariaDB, which has offices in Finland and Menlo Park, California, offers an open-source database for SaaS, cloud, and on-premises applications. MariaDB was uilt by the founder and core engineering team behind MySQL. The database powers millions of users on sites like Booking.com and Wikipedia. Moreover, MariaDB is the “M” in LAMP, having displaced MySQL as the default database in the Red Hat and SUSE Linux distributions. MariaDB is also included in Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Rackspace and other cloud stacks, and it is the database of choice for IBM POWER8. The company claims over 550 customers in more than 45 countries.

Michael Howard most recently was CEO at C9, which he transformed into one of the leading predictive analytics companies in the CRM space, ultimately leading to its acquisition by InsideSales. Previously, Howard was CMO at Greenplum (now Pivotal), the Big Data division of EMC. He was CEO at Ingrian Networks and Outerbay, and VP of the Internet Division at Veritas and of Data Warehousing at Oracle.

Monty Widenius, the creator of both MySQL and MariaDB, has joined the company as CTO. Monty has been advocating open source throughout the industry as well as serving on the boards of MariaDB Corporation and the MariaDB Foundation, the non-profit organization charged with promoting, protecting and advancing the MariaDB codebase, community, and ecosystem. Monty developed MySQL, the most widely adopted open source relational database, which was acquired by Oracle as part of the Sun Microsystems purchase in 2010. Monty remains Founder and Open Source Advocate at the MariaDB Foundation.

Intel Capital and California Technology Ventures were among the investors in the $9 Million equity financing.

http://mariadb.com

Blueprint: What’s in Store for the Database in 2016?

Thursday, January 14, 2016  Blueprint, Databases, MariaDB, Start-up  No comments

by Roger Levy, VP of Product at MariaDB In 2015, CIOs focused on DevOps and similar technologies such as containers as a way to improve time to value. During 2016, greater attention will be focused on data analytics and data management as a way to improve the timeliness and quality of business decisions. How best to store and manage data is on the minds of most CIOs as they kick off the New Year. It’s exciting to see that databases, which unde

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Kumu Raises $25 Million for Full Duplex Wireless

Kumu Networks, a start-up based in Sunnyvale, California, raised $25 million in series C funding for its full-duplex wireless technology.

Kumu enables a radio to simultaneously transmit and receive overlapping signals using a single frequency channel.  It accomplishes this using self-interference cancellation technology.

The new round was led by Cisco with participation from Verizon Ventures and Deutsche Telekom. Existing investors include NEA, Third Point Ventures and Khosla Ventures.

http://kumunetworks.com/

Kumu Networks: Opening the Door to Full Duplex Wireless

Sunday, June 22, 2014  Kumu, Silicon Valley, Start-ups, Wireless  No comments

Born out of a class project at Stanford University, Kumu Networks is commercializing self-interference technology and full-duplex wireless. In this video, co-founder Steven Hong explains how radio self-interference has been a problem since the earliest days of wireless communications. The Kumu approach is the first to cancel out this interference by subtracting the transmitter's signal from its own receiver.

Kumu Networks, backed by top venture firms in Silicon Valley, now aims to apply its technology to applications such as small cell backhaul. In field testing, Kumu significantly boosts spectral efficiency.

See video:  http://youtu.be/VeKU5jD7i-8

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Ericsson and TeliaSonera Test 5G Use Cases

TeliaSonera and Ericsson are working jointly on 5G use-cases and service scenarios, including both communication and Internet of Things (IoT) services with the purpose to address new business opportunities. The partnership will bring 5G services to customers in 2018 by combining the TeliaSonera network with Ericsson technology.  Potential 5G applications could include e-health with real time surveillance of patients and remote treatment; connected cars including critical communication between vehicles (warnings, support to self-driving cars etc.) as well as better network performance in terms of capacity, coverage and power consumption.

"Our ambition is to be at the cutting edge - at all times - offering our customers and society at large all the possibilities that technology brings. Stockholm and Tallinn are two of the most connected cities in the world and now we'll take them to the next level. 5G will create completely new innovations, ecosystems and great services to our customers. 5G will also take connected things (IoT) to a new level. I can't wait to see how Stockholm and Tallinn will embrace 5G," stated Johan Dennelind, President and CEO, TeliaSonera.

"More and more industries tap into the value of digitalization and connectivity. 5G will amplify that as it is designed to be the industrial internet. It will not only be built for consumers, but also for digitalization of industries and the Internet of Things. Together with TeliaSonera we launched the first commercial 4G network in 2009, we will be in the forefront of 5G as well," said Hans Vestberg, President and CEO, Ericsson.

Ericsson predicts there will be 150 million 5G subscriptions by the end of 2021.

http://www.ericsson.com/news/1980613

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Blueprint: The Year of Actionable Data

by Rod Bagg, vice president of customer support at Nimble Storage

As more businesses strive to become data-driven, business leaders will rely heavily on IT teams to easily access, manage and leverage the value of that data in the coming year. In 2016, IT departments will become increasingly focused on keeping data secure and optimized in a way that not only keeps operations flowing, but delivers real value and positive results back to the enterprise.

Additionally, as seen with this year’s growth in the data-storage market, storage infrastructure, scalability and reliability will play a pivotal role in this focus on actionable data as they continue to drive growth and provide intelligence back to IT teams. In the following article, I’ve outlined the top data-focused trends that executives should keep top of mind for their organizations in 2016.

Data Transforms into Actionable Intelligence

CIOs heavily rely on operational intelligence when making strategic decisions. However, with the growing complexity of today’s data center, IT teams are often tied up managing a range of supporting applications, compute platforms, networking, storage and infrastructure. Given these many moving parts, businesses can no longer count on IT teams to gather and assess all of the massive amounts of data within organizations and derive useful actions. Instead, storage vendors who have deep knowledge of interactions across the entire infrastructure will need to take initiative in delivering intelligence to data-center teams. There will be no room for guesswork — prescriptive actions based on sound scientific data analysis will become the order of the day.

New Flash Capabilities Dominate Performance

In the last year, high-performing, flash-optimized storage solutions have become the standard for many in the space. We have now reached the point where performance in storage has been democratized, changing the way people will evaluate storage options as performance will no longer be the primary differentiating factor. Instead, as businesses increasingly generate and harness data, competitive edge will be determined by a solution’s ability to handle the mass amounts of data accumulated through various channels. This will shift the focus from performance to other capabilities such as the array’s reliability, data integrity, scalability, manageability and in-built data-protection.

The Internet of Things Weaves its Way into the Data Center

In 2016, we will see the Internet of Things (IoT) move beyond consumers and businesses and head straight to the heart of data centers. As part of this shift, infrastructure components deployed in the data center will evolve to become armed with thousands of sensors, generating immense amounts of data to support predictive analytics. Self-monitoring and self-optimizing data centers will become the norm, ultimately delivering cloud-like experiences even when customers have infrastructure on-premises or in managed service provider environments.

Data Scientists Strengthen IT Teams

With the complexity of today’s data centers and operations, IT teams face an overwhelming amount of data-related issues and failures. This is where we will see data scientists increasingly step in to help companies pinpoint the exact origin of those problems and design solutions through data analytics. By dissecting trillions of data points, data scientists are able to study the information to not only solve IT problems, but also extract strategic actions. This will make data scientists a key competitive advantage for enterprise IT teams as they face increasing workloads and intricate data infrastructures.

As volumes of data continue to rise and data science plays a more critical role in IT operations and infrastructure, 2016 will be the year of the intelligent, data-driven enterprise. This focus on actionable insight will not only drive productivity for IT teams, but also give CIOs and businesses the tools to finally unlock the real value of their data.

About the Author

Rod Bagg is the Vice President of Worldwide Customer Support at Nimble Storage and drives support automation and advanced data science initiatives. Rod joined Nimble in 2009 and designed and developed advanced remote support features within Nimble OS and went on to conceive and develop InfoSight, which is now recognized as a clear differentiator in the industry for advanced cloud-based Operational Analytics and Storage Life-cycle Management.

Prior to Nimble Storage, Rod served as Vice President of Engineering at Glassbeam, where he co-founded the Glassbeam data analytics Software-as-a-Service offering. Additionally, Rod has held senior management positions at Infloblox and at NetApp where he was responsible for product support, support automation and RAS initiatives. Rod has also held engineering management and development positions creating high-availability telephony platforms and systems.

Got an idea for a Blueprint column?  We welcome your ideas on next gen network architecture.
See our guidelines.

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Docker Acquires Unikernel Systems, Extending Containerization Continuum

Docker has acquired Unikernel Systems, a start-up focused on unikernel development. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Unikernel Systems, which is based in Cambridge, UK, is comprised of pioneers from the Xen Project, the open-source virtualization platform. Unikernels are defined by the company as specialized, single-address-space machine images constructed by using library operating systems. The idea is to reduce complexity by compiling source code into a custom operating system that includes only the functionality required by the application logic.

“We are honored to have the Unikernel Systems team, with its incredible pedigree, join the Docker family,” said Solomon Hykes, founder and CTO of Docker. “Our shared vision to take transformative technology and make it accessible to a much wider audience has made the union a natural fit and it aligns with one of our core tenets to separate applications from infrastructure constraints. Through the Docker platform, unikernels will be on a ‘continuum’ with Linux and Windows containers, enabling users to create truly hybrid applications across all formats with a uniform workflow.”

“Similar to what Docker has done for Linux containers, by combining forces, we will be able to unlock the entire Docker ecosystem for use with unikernels, including orchestration and networking," stated Anil Madhavapeddy, co-founder and CTO of Unikernel Systems. "The integration with Docker tooling will accelerate the progress of unikernels and enable users to choose how they ‘containerize’ and manage their application - from the data center to the cloud to the Internet of Things.”

https://www.docker.com

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Verizon Chalks Up 3% Growth in Q4, IoT Revenues Growing

Verizon reported revenue of $34.3 billion for Q4 2015, a 3.2 percent increase compared with fourth-quarter 2014.  Earnings came in at $1.32 per share, or 89 cents per share on an adjusted basis (non-GAAP).

“In 2015, Verizon delivered strong and balanced results in a dynamic competitive environment while returning more than $13.5 billion to shareholders. At the same time, Verizon built and acquired next-generation network capabilities that position the company to be an innovator in the digital-first mobile world in 2016 and beyond,” said Chairman and CEO Lowell McAdam.

New revenue streams from IoT are growing, with revenues of approximately $200 million in fourth-quarter 2015 and about $690 million for the full year. This is a year-over-year increase of 18 percent.

Some highlights from the quarterly report:

Wireless 

• Total revenues were $23.7 billion in fourth-quarter 2015, up 1.2 percent compared with fourth-quarter 2014. Service revenues totaled $17.2 billion, down 5.6 percent year over year. Over the same period, equipment revenues increased to $5.4 billion, up from $4.2 billion, as more customers chose to buy new devices with installment pricing.
• For the year, total revenues were $91.7 billion, a 4.6 percent increase compared with 2014.
• Verizon Wireless reported 1.5 million retail postpaid net additions in fourth-quarter 2015 and 4.5 million for the full year. These net additions do not include any wholesale or IoT connections.
• Customer retention remained high, with retail postpaid churn at a low 0.96 percent in fourth-quarter 2015, a year-over-year improvement of 18 basis points. Churn was also 0.96 percent for the year, an improvement of 8 basis points from full-year 2014.
• Verizon added 906,000 4G smartphones to its postpaid customer base in fourth-quarter 2015. Postpaid phone net adds totaled 449,000 as net smartphone adds of 713,000 were partially offset by a net decline of basic phones. Tablet net adds totaled 960,000 in the quarter, and net prepaid devices declined by 157,000.
• At year-end 2015, the company had 112.1 million retail connections, a 3.6 percent year-over-year increase, and 106.5 million retail postpaid connections, a 4.4 percent year-over-year increase.
• 4G devices now constitute more than 79 percent of the retail postpaid connections base, with the LTE network handling approximately 90 percent of total wireless data traffic in fourth-quarter 2015. Overall traffic on LTE increased by approximately 60 percent in fourth-quarter 2015, compared with fourth-quarter 2014.
• About 8.4 percent of Verizon’s retail postpaid base upgraded to a new device in fourth-quarter 2015. At year-end, there were 73 million smartphones in Verizon’s customer base.
• Wireless capital investment totaled $3.3 billion in fourth-quarter 2015 and $11.7 billion for the year, up 11.5 percent from 2014. Verizon continues to expand capacity and optimize its network, as the company prepares to pilot 5G technology in 2016.

Wireline

• In fourth-quarter 2015, consumer revenues were $4.1 billion, an increase of 2.6 percent compared with fourth-quarter 2014. Fios revenues represented 80.4 percent of the total.
• Comparing fourth-quarter 2015 with fourth-quarter 2014, total Fios revenues grew 6.8 percent, to $3.5 billion, and consumer Fios revenues grew 6.6 percent.
• Verizon added 99,000 net new Fios internet connections and 20,000 net new Fios video connections in fourth-quarter 2015. Connections totaled 7.0 million for Fios internet and 5.8 million for Fios video at the end of 2015, representing year-over-year increases of 6.3 percent and 3.2 percent, respectively.
• Fios internet penetration (subscribers as a percentage of potential subscribers) was 41.8 percent at the end of 2015, compared with 41.1 percent at the end of 2014. In the same periods, Fios video penetration was 35.3 percent, compared with 35.8 percent.
• By year-end 2015, more than 70 percent of consumer Fios internet customers subscribed to data speeds of 50 megabits per second or higher. In addition, customer interest continues to grow for Custom TV, which represented about one-third of Fios video sales in fourth-quarter 2015.

http://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-caps-transformational-year-strong-balanced-4q-results

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ForeScout Secures $76 Million for Agentless Cybersecurity

ForeScout Technologies, which specializes in agentless cybersecurity, secured $76 million in additional late-stage funding.

ForeScout provides the ability to see and control the rapidly growing population of unsecured and dark devices. ForeScout CounterACT acts as "the glue that links together previously disparate solutions",  enriching over 70 security tools with its warehouse of device context enabling deliberate security orchestration across enterprise networks.

Now valued at $1 billion, ForeScout said it has tripled its valuation over the past 18 months while also surpassing $125 million in revenue in fiscal year 2015. The company has achieved in excess of 50 percent compounded annual growth rate since 2012, having grown at that scale while operating near cash flow neutral.

The new funding was led by Wellington Management Company LLP.

“It took 25 years for the world to get to 5 billion connected devices, but with the explosion of the IoT we’ll see around 30 billion by 2020—an entirely new approach to security is required,” said Michael DeCesare, ForeScout CEO & President. “Device proliferation and IoT deployments are easy entrances for cyber criminals if not detected and protected. With agentless visibility, intuitive automated controls and a commitment to integrating with leading security and IT management solutions, ForeScout is well-positioned to own the burgeoning IoT security market.”

https://www.forescout.com

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IBM Acquires Ustream for Cloud-based Video Services

IBM has acquired Ustream, a provider of cloud-based live video streaming services for enterprises and broadcasters. The company streams live and on-demand video to about 80 million viewers per month for customers such as NASA, Samsung, Facebook, Nike and The Discovery Channel. Media reports valued the deal at around $130-150 million although financial terms were not disclosed.

Ustream, which is headquartered in San Francisco with a development office in Budapest, Hungary, and enables clients to create custom video apps to run video on any device and embed video into any application, securely and reliably. Clients can use the company’s real-time social sentiment analytics to gauge audience reactions to the live streaming content. IBM will integrate Ustream's development platform into Bluemix to allow clients to provide distinct video services to developers. In addition, the Ustream portfolio comprises several video solutions, including Ustream Demand, which enables marketers to collect and automate leads into marketing workflows and manage live and on-demand videos from a single dashboard; Ustream Align, which enables secure internal employee communications; and Ustream Pro Broadcasting which offers live video streaming at scale. The company has data centers in San Jose, Amsterdam and Tokyo.

Ustream joins the newly-formed IBM Cloud Video Services unit that combines assets from IBM's R&D labs and strategic acquisitions.  IBM said it is assembling transformational capabilities into the new Cloud Video Services unit to help clients across a wide range of industries integrate video into a strategic source of data. This includes media & entertainment, retail, education and government services. The unit combines assets from Ustream, as well as the recent acquisition of Clearleap. It will also create solutions that integrate technologies from other IBM investments, including Aspera and Cleversafe, as well as IBM R&D innovations.

“Video is the most powerful and emotional medium,” said Brad Hunstable, CEO, Ustream. “Increasingly it is becoming the favored form of communication, not just for entertainment, but also for business. We’ve built a video platform that is easy-to-use, yet incredibly scalable, secure and powerful and it is these qualities that made us an ideal addition to IBM’s portfolio.”

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/48582.wss

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