Facebook's Terragraph Accelerates WiGig for City Access

Facebook took the wraps off of two terrestrial connectivity technologies for fast wireless access.

Terragraph is a 60 GHz, multi-node wireless system for dense urban areas and that uses radios based on the WiGig standard. Facebook said Terragraph will deliver gigabits of data capacity. IPv6-only Terragraph nodes will be placed at 200m intervals. Terragraph will incorporate commercial off-the-shelf components and aim for high-volume, low-cost production. Facebook noted that up to 7 GHz of bandwidth is available in the unlicensed 60 GHz band in many countries.  U.S. regulators are considering expanding this to a total of 14 GHz.

Facebook Terragraph will also leverage an SDN-like cloud compute controller and a new modular routing protocol that Facebook optimized for fast route convergence and failure detection. The architecture also tweaks the MAC layer to solve shortcomings of TCP/IP over a wireless link. The company says the TDMA-TDD MAC layers delivers up to 6x improvement in network efficiency while being more predictable than the existing Wi-Fi/WiGig standard.

Terragraph is already in operation at the Facebook campus in Menlo Park, California, where it delivers 1.05 Gbps bidirectional (2.1 Gbps total throughput per distribution node) in P2P mode, up to 250 meters away. A wider trial is planned for San Jose, California.

Facebook also released details on Project ARIES, a transmission technology that is a) spectrally efficient and allows for higher throughput in even the smallest bandwidths, and b) energy efficient, allowing for extended coverage range.

The proof-of-concept system features a base station with 96 antennas and can support 24 streams simultaneously over the same radio spectrum. Researchers have demonstrated 71 bps/Hz of spectral efficiency. The target is aiming for an unprecedented 100+ bps/Hz of spectral efficiency. Facebook said ARIES is an embodiment of Massive MIMO — by using “spatial multiplexing,” the antenna array at the base station can serve a multiplicity of autonomous user terminals on the same time-frequency resource. This opens up possibilities such as resource sharing as an alternative not only to the need for spectrum licensing.

Facebook already has an ARIES testbed delivering 10x spectral and energy efficiency gains in point to multi-point deployments.

https://code.facebook.com/posts/1072680049445290/

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MEF Sets Ethernet Interconnect Point Agreement for Carriers

The MEF published the Ethernet Interconnect Point (EIP) ENNI Implementation Agreement – MEF 54, which streamlines the interconnection of operator networks to support end-to-end Carrier Ethernet (CE) services.

The IA provides practical guidance so operators can evolve their networks to meet full CE 2.0 E-Access interconnection capabilities. The IA gives operators the steps involved to create these new interconnections either all at once or in a series of steps. The  IA represents the completion of Phase 1 of the MEF EIP project, which includes the most basic interconnection possible: an Ethernet Private Line created using two E-Access EPL services from different operators with an ENNI interconnect between them.  Phase 2 – which currently is in progress – will add test cases with greater complexity and new use cases focused on EVPL and E-Transit (EPL and EVPL). Additional considerations include color awareness, Class of Service, end-to-end service OAM, and LSO (Lifecycle Service Orchestration).

“The purpose of the EIP project is to produce a series of implementation agreements/ guidelines to create a more efficient marketplace of interconnected operators offering standardized CE 2.0 services that interoperate effectively over two or more networks,” said Nan Chen, President of the MEF. “EIP progress is key to future industry growth and innovation because widely deployed and interconnected CE 2.0 networking fabrics will form the foundation upon which to build agile, assured, and orchestrated Third Network services. “More than a dozen MEF member companies participated in Phase 1 of the EIP project that included Rapid Prototype testing at the University of New Hampshire’s Interoperability Lab,” said Chen. “We want to thank these companies for contributing to move the industry forward: AT&T, Verizon, Windstream, CenturyLink, Frontier, TelePacific, Accedian, Alcatel-Lucent (Nokia), Canoga Perkins, Ciena, Cisco, Juniper, RAD, and Veryx Technologies.”

https://www.mef.net/

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NTT: Petahertz Frequency Observed in Gallium Nitride

Researchers at NTT and Tokyo University of Science  observed electronic oscillation (dipole oscillation) with attosecond (as: 10-18 of a second) periodicity using gallium nitride (GaN) wide-bandgap semiconductor. The experiment marks the first time the petahertz frequency barrier has been exceeded with a semiconductor. NTT said this shows the potential of future petahertz signal processing technology based on ordinary wide-bandgap semiconductor devices.

Previously, the maximum operational frequency was in the terahertz (1012 Hz) range, which was limited by the response time of band energy modulation with RF electric fields. To observe the ultrafast electron motion with petahertz frequency, extremely high temporal resolution was required.

http://www.ntt.co.jp/news2016/1604e/160411b.html

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CWA: Verizon Strike is On

Nearly 40,000 Verizon workers from Maine to Virginia, represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), went on strike as of Wednesday morning at 6am. The parties have been unable to resolve differences since the last contract expired on August 1st, 2015.

The union cited the following unresolved issues:

• Offshoring Jobs – Verizon has already contracted out work to more than 5,000 employees in the Philippines, Mexico, the Dominican Republican and other overseas locations. These offshore workers handle customer service calls originating in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern states. 
• Outsourcing Work to Low-Wage Contractors – the union is concerned about the amount of outside line work, particularly vital work installing and maintaining telephone poles, that is being assigned to non-union workers.
• Contract for Wireless Workers – namedly, a fair first contract for Verizon Wireless retail workers who formed a union in 2014, and for the 100 wireless technicians who maintain the network in downstate New York.
• Call-Center Closings – hundreds of Verizon workers are at risk of losing their jobs or being forced to commute as much as three hours more each day because of the company's plan to close and consolidate call centers. 
• Out of State Assignments – long assignments of up to two months at a time

http://standuptoverizon.com/

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Verizon Comments on Strike

In a press statement, Verizon said it remains committed to its negotiation objectives and seeks to bring negotiation to a closure after ten months at the bargaining table.

The company said 36,000 employees covered under these contracts currently have a wage and benefit package that averages more than $130,000 a year.  Over 99 percent of these employees support the wireline business which in 2015, contributed about 29 percent of Verizon's revenue but less than 7 percent of the company's operating income.

Verizon also said its wireline proposal offers a 6.5 percent wage increase over the term of the contract.

"We have trained thousands of non-union Verizon employees to carry out virtually every job function handled by our represented workforce – from making repairs on poles to responding to inquiries in our call centers.  We know the unions' strike order will be a hardship and pose challenges for our employees, but as a 24x7 customer service company, our contingency plans are in place and our company will continue to serve those who rely on us," stated Bob Mudge, president of Verizon's wireline network operations.

http://www.verizon.com

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Windstream Connects Data Centers with Infinera

Windstream has deployed the Infinera Cloud Xpress to provide pre-provisioned high speed connections between data centers in Chicago. The initial deployment connects two data center locations within the Lakeside Technology Center at 350 East Cermak.

Infinera said its Cloud Xpress enables Windstream to leverage its unique photonic integrated circuit technology to support up to one terabit per second (Tbps) of input and output capacity in just two rack units. The Cloud Xpress delivers a full 500 Gbps super-channel of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) line-side bandwidth over 150 kilometers (km) without additional multiplexers or amplifiers, and up to 600 km with an amplified line system. Cloud Xpress also enables efficient scaling with simple provisioning and open interfaces to plug into existing cloud provisioning systems using open software defined networking (SDN) application programming interfaces (APIs). Instant Bandwidth allows the activation of WDM bandwidth in 100 Gbps increments with a few clicks of a mouse enabling rapid scale to meet continued customer demand.

“We selected the Infinera Cloud Xpress to provide data center interconnect services to our customers because it is an extremely simple and highly scalable plug-and-play solution,” said Art Nichols, Vice President of Engineering Architecture & Planning at Windstream. “Windstream is working actively with Infinera and several other key technology partners to employ SDN for creation and management of optical services across its metro and long-haul transport network in 2016.”

http://www.infinera.com

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Everspin Samples Highest Density MRAM Non-Volatile Memory

Everspin Technologies has begun sampling a 256Mb ST-MRAM Storage Class Memory (SCM) - the highest density commercial MRAM currently on the market. The expects to sample a 1Gb product based on its proprietary perpendicular magnetic tunnel junction (pMTJ) spin torque technology (ST-MRAM) later this year.

Everspin cited the following advantages for it ST-MRAM:

• Supports 100,000 times faster write speeds than NAND flash
• Operates on the DDR3/DDR4 DRAM memory interface
• Requires no wear leveling
• Provides the highest endurance of currently available non-volatile memories
• Delivers low power operation
• Enables instant on/off functionality

“We continue to bring the fastest non-volatile products to our customers, expanding our offering with a high density 1Gb DDR4 pMTJ ST-MRAM. This will provide new and innovative approaches to the way non-volatile memory solutions can be architected,” said Everspin CEO Phill LoPresti.

http://www.everspin.com

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Facebook Delivers 60 Billion Messages per Day

Mark Zuckerberg kicked off Facebook's annual F8 develop conference in San Francisco by saying he is worried by the growing number of people and countries that are turning inward, wishing to build walls instead of bridges, and seeking to limit global communications. Facebook stands for connecting all people in a global community, he said, and it takes courage to choose hope over fear. A big theme of this year's event is bringing people together with new platforms and services.

Some highlights from Day 1 of F8:

• Zuckerberg presented Facebook's roadmap for the next ten years.
  
• Artificial intelligence will power new services with better than human perception.  
• The next big platforms are Virtual and Augmented Reality.
  
• The main Facebook website connects over a billion people.
  
• Messenger and WhatsApp together are now handling 60 billion messages a day - about 3X the volume of SMS worldwide
  
• 900 million people are using Messenger each month
  
• Launching M, an AI-powered chat-bots on Messenger - for businesses, this lets customer interact with sales tools and support systems in an more automated, user friendly format.  Beta launch is underway with APIs being released for the Facebook Bot engine.
  
• Launching Facebook Surround 360 - a professional-grade, 17-camera system for 360-degree VR viewing at 8K 60fps.  The system minimizes required post-processing by implementing custom software and codecs. Eight SSDs are used to capture content at 32 GB/s.  With RAID0 there is up to 2 hours of continuous raw capture. Facebook will open source the project on Github this summer.
  
• Released Live API - letting apps to stream live video from any device directly to Facebook.
  
• Facebook continues to work on drones, satellites, laser communication systems. The Aquilla solar-powered, drone plane will fly at 60,000 feet for months at a time, delivering Internet access to those below.
  
• The first Facebook-backed satellite will launch later this year, bringing Internet access over Africa
  
• Aries and Terragraph are two new systems that Facebook has developed to improve connectivity on the ground in urban and rural areas.
  
• Reducing data consumption is a priority -  FB continues to improve its Lite applications and is introducing an Augmented Traffic Control tool to help developers simulate data conditions in other countries
• Telecom Infra Project - the idea is to make it cheaper for telcos to operate their network, in the hope that they pass these savings on to consumers in the form of cheaper data plans
  
• Free Basics - this program subsidizes the cost of basic mobile data services. So far, it has connected 25 million people in 37 countries

The keynote video is online.

https://www.fbf8.com/

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Perspica Emerges from Stealth with Incident Replay Time Machine for Apps

Perspica, a start-up based in San Jose, California, emerged from stealth with a solution that delivers application infrastructure intelligence across hybrid-cloud environments.

Perspica describes its Incident Replay subscription-based service as a time machine for performance data, logs and topology. It provides TechOps and DevOps teams with tools to visualize all layers and siloes of the application stack, enabling definitive post-mortem and real-time automated root cause analysis to improve mean time to repair. The system uses machine learning algorithms to distinguish between critical events and false positive alarms.  The idea is to provide leverage behavior profiling and predictive analytics to detect anomalous trends and prevent dangerous issues before they impact application performance.

"We are excited to bring to market the world's first 'application infrastructure time machine' that combines topology and performance data. It helps overburdened IT teams identify problems and mitigate risks by analyzing the continuous changes to the application infrastructure stack. We are able to track when an incident occurs and automatically identify the root cause to provide IT departments with the ability to gain real answers immediately. Similar to instant replay during the big game, Perspica provides Incident Replay for big data," stated Dan Maloney, CEO, Perspica.

Perspica is funded by March Capital, The Fabric and The Hive.

http://www.perspica.io

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Datera Launches Elastic Block Storage Software

Datera, a start-up based in Mountain View, California, emerged from stealth and unveiled an AWS-like elastic block storage solution for enterprises and Service Providers.

Datera Elastic Data Fabric is scale-out storage software that turns standard, commodity hardware into a RESTful API-driven, policy-based storage fabric for large-scale clouds. The company said its mission is to bring the operational efficiencies enjoyed by AWS and Google to the open market.  Datera Elastic Data Fabric natively integrates through iSCSI with OpenStack, CloudStack, VMware vSphere and container orchestration platforms such as Docker, Kubernetes and Mesos.

Key features include:

• API-first operations provides web-scale automation with full infrastructure programmability.
• Policy based configuration leaves the details to Datera Elastic Data Fabric so customers can optimize price/performance for each application without hand-crafting every LUN.
• Grow-as-you-go model so customers only buy what they need when they need it. The scale-out architecture of Datera Elastic Data Fabric means customers do not need to compromise on performance or capacity.
• Flash-first design delivers high efficiency and low latency (< 1ms) across distributed, diverse storage media types. This maximizes application performance and access density.
• Multi-tenancy and quality of service for cloud-native and traditional workloadsoptimizes asset utilization and simplifies operations across containers, VMs and bare-metal.
• Heterogeneous component support makes it possible for IT and DevOps to seamlessly scale across many configurations and generations of industry standard x86 servers with multiple storage media types.

Datera also announced $40 million in funding from Khosla Ventures, Samsung Ventures and Silicon Valley luminaries Andy Bechtolsheim and Pradeep Sindhu:

"In the cloud era, things scale up and down constantly. It's always in flux. At scale, you can't operate this kind of environment manually. It must be automated," said Marc Fleischmann, Co-Founder and CEO of Datera. "In this world, customers want their storage fast, at scale, with a self-service delivery model. They can't afford to wait for someone to hand-craft a LUN whenever a developer needs some storage."

http://datera.io

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Australia's nbn Signs Telstra for HFC Broadband

nbn, the company building Australia’s new broadband network, signed a contract with Telstra to manage the design and construction of fast broadband to more than three million homes currently in the footprint of Telstra’s pay-TV cable network (Hybrid-Fibre Coaxial or HFC cable). Once the build is completed, it will be handed to nbn for operation. Telstra valued the contract at approximately A$1.6 billion.

The deal streamlines the existing arrangements nbn has with Telstra, creating a faster rollout schedule and access to all nbn retailers.

nbn said it is on track to make the initial 10,000 HFC premises available for orders by the end June 2016.

nbn CEO Bill Morrow said:  “The nbn™ network is now available to two million homes and businesses, with close to one million already connected.  This deal will extend the nbn™ network to millions more, bringing new opportunity in education, health and online services to more families.

http://www.nbnco.com.au/corporate-information/media-centre/media-releases/nbn-and-Telstra-sign-deal-to-bring-the-nbn-network-to-millions-of-homes.html

• In 2011, nbn and Telstra signed the initial Definitive Agreements for the use of existing Telstra infrastructure and the migration of former wholesale customers from Telstra’s legacy network to the nbn network, with payments progressively scheduled as the new services were activated.
•  
• In 2014, the nbn and Definitive Agreements were amended to allow nbn to access and progressively acquire existing Telstra network infrastructure to enable the deployment of the multi-technology mix as required.

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Openreach Hits 25 Million Premises Milestone in UK

Openreach's wholesale fibre network has passed the 25 million premises milestone -- marking what the company claims as one of the fastest rollouts of fibre broadband in the world.

Clive Selley, CEO of Openreach, said: “The UK is making great progress with fibre broadband. Availability and take up are well ahead of most European countries and I’d like to thank the thousands of Openreach engineers who have worked so tirelessly to make this happen.

“The job isn’t finished however and we are working hard to get coverage to 95 per cent and above. We are also exploring how we can improve speeds for the million or so premises in the final few per cent of the country.

http://www.btplc.com/news/#/pressreleases/openreach-fibre-network-passes-25-million-uk-premises-1367903

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USB Type-C Gets Authentication Protocol

A new USB Type-C Authentication specification defines cryptographic-based authentication for USB Type-C chargers and devices. This will enable systems to confirm the authenticity of a USB device or USB charger at the moment a wired connection is made – before inappropriate power or data can be transferred.

“USB is well-established as the favored choice for connecting and charging devices,” said Brad Saunders, USB 3.0 Promoter Group Chairman. “In support of the growing USB Type-C ecosystem, we anticipated the need for a solution extending the integrity of the USB interface. The new USB Type-C Authentication protocol equips product OEMs with the proper tools to defend against ‘bad’ USB cables, devices and non-compliant USB Chargers.”

Key characteristics of the USB Type-C Authentication solution include:

• A standard protocol for authenticating certified USB Type-C Chargers, devices, cables and power sources
• Support for authenticating over either USB data bus or USB Power Delivery communications channels
• Products that use the authentication protocol retain control over the security policies to be implemented and enforced
• Relies on 128-bit security for all cryptographic methods
• Specification references existing internationally-accepted cryptographic methods for certificate format, digital signing, hash and random number generation

http://www.usb.org
The newly completed USB 3.1 specification adds enhancements to enable operation at at up to 10 Gbps.

SuperSpeed USB 10 Gbps uses a more efficient data encoding and will deliver more than twice the effective data through-put performance of existing SuperSpeed USB over enhanced, fully backward compatible USB connectors and cables. Compatibili

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Nexenta, Micron and SuperMicro Partner on All Flash Arrays

Nexenta announced a strategic relationship with Micron Technology and Supermicro to engineer and deliver innovative solutions for next-generation all-flash data centers. The companies are jointly engineering the Micron-Accelerated NexentaEdge for block and object storage. The solution will be optimized to cost-effectively provide high performance native block, iSCSI block, Swift and S3 object services to OpenStack, VMware and Container-based infrastructures.

http://www.nexenta.com

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ADTRAN Posts Q1 Sales of $142 Million

ADTRAN reported Q1 sales of $142.2 million, compared to $142.8 million for the first quarter of 2015. Net income was $5,014,000 compared to $3,317,000 for the first quarter of 2015. Earnings per share, assuming dilution, were $0.10 compared to $0.06 for the first quarter of 2015.

ADTRAN Chief Executive Officer Tom Stanton stated, “ADTRAN delivered a solid performance this quarter resulting in earnings coming in ahead of initial expectations. Compared to the same period last year, Q1 domestic revenue was up over 39% with increases in both our products and services businesses. Improved gross margins and lower operating expenses helped us increase operating income over 181% versus Q1 of 2015. Longer term, we expect further improvement in the carrier environment as customers accelerate investments in upgrading their network infrastructure to meet customer demand.”

http://www.adtran.com

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Juniper Issues Q1 Financial Warning

Juniper Networks updated its financial outlook for its quarter ended March 31, 2016, saying revenue is now expected to be in the range of $1,090 million to $1,100 million, below its previous guidance of $1,150 million to $1,190 million.

Juniper cited weaker than anticipated demand from Enterprise customers and the timing of deployments of certain U.S. and EMEA Tier 1 Telecoms. The company now expects non-GAAP net income per diluted share of $0.35 to $0.37, compared to the Company's previous guidance of $0.42 to $0.46 per diluted share.

"Although we expect results to be lower than our initial guidance for the first quarter, we remain constructive on fiscal 2016 and expect growth from new products to contribute to our topline, coupled with our ongoing focus on cost discipline to drive non-GAAP operating margin expansion for the full year," stated Rami Rahim, chief executive officer of Juniper Networks.

http://investor.juniper.net

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Blueprint: Endpoint Visibility in the IoT

A Five-Step Action Plan for Securing the Network in the Age of IoT

by Tom Kelly, CEO, AccelOps

A report from BI Intelligence projects that Internet of Things (IoT) deployments will create $421 billion in economic value for cities worldwide in 2019. Cities will enjoy benefits such as improved traffic flow, a reduction in air pollution and better public safety.

This is just one example of the advancements the IoT will bring to all sectors. However, along with all the positives comes the negative of heightened security concerns. The IoT represents a proliferation of endpoints such as has never been experienced, and at a stunning rate.

All these endpoints are creating pinholes across the enterprise security landscape. It is clear that the malicious intent of hackers has not only increased, but it has become more creative. The reality is that the IoT is changing everything, especially cyber security, and without the proper tools, it is nearly impossible to know what is connecting to your network.

The IoT’s Dark Side

Smart devices have proven to be a double-edged sword. While delivering greater work efficiencies, they also offer more inroads for crime. By using connected devices that are agentless, malicious actors are able to gain access to corporate networks and may not be discovered until after an attack.

To add to the problem, the vendor landscape has become more complex. CISOs now must extend their security monitoring policies and procedures to incorporate every supplier and vendor in the supply chain, no matter how benign their products might seem to network security.

A real-world example will serve to drive the point home. A major carrier recently suffered a breach, resulting in hackers posting 300,000 customer records online. Imagine the look on the CEO’s face when he learned that the data was stolen from a third-party marketing firm involved in the carrier’s supply chain. Smart CISOs and CIOs must look to implement vendor risk management processes as part of their own operational security reviews before they find themselves facing an angry board of directors who are looking for answers as to how the latest breach occurred.

Five Recommendations for Today’s Network Security

Security, availability and compliance have become inextricably linked as a result of the hyper-connected world of cloud-based apps, sensors and mobile devices. More importantly, if you can’t see it, you can’t protect it, so before proceeding, be sure you know what is connecting to your network.

Here are five recommendations to manage the corporate IoT environment.

1. Analyze and measure it to fix it. Turn to real-time network topology monitoring and best practices to improve correlation accuracy. Best-of-breed solutions incorporate rich analytics collection and cross-correlation along with third party big data analytics tools to help network and security operations personnel apply methods that are faster and more accurate. If you can’t measure it, you can’t fix it.

2. Analyze root causes and cross-correlate. It’s no longer good enough to simply monitor your network. Today’s security challenges require that network operations and security operations work together to ingest all meaningful data for analysis. Gone are the days of keeping technology domains in silos. Correlate across security, availability and performance for events, logs and configuration files. By pulling together all available network data, it is possible to turn data collection into a weapon against hackers and create actionable information that provides a mechanism for improved root cause analysis.

3. Compare intention to behavior. Network forensics will be easier if you map user identities, locations and behaviors. Look for solutions that help ingest more than just an event, but also correlate performance, log and security data. Additionally, by looking at user IDs, locations and behavior patterns, you can determine if the user connecting to the network through proper login and password entries is authorized or is a malicious actor with stolen credentials.

4. Use visual analytics to describe security health. Does upper management understand what has happened after a breach? With accountability moving down the chain of command, it is more important than ever to use the language of the business stakeholder. Communicate issues so that business people understand how IT affects the health of the business.

5. Manage compliance for audits proactively. Look for solutions that report across common compliance frameworks such as PCI, ITIL, COBIT, SOX, HIPAA etc. No matter your industry, establish a compliance posture for formalized management and gain a deep understanding of how compliance failures may affect your organization, looking beyond the revenue impacts and potential for fines, plus embarrassing media exposure, to things like impact on brand, reputation, trust with customers, supplier relationships and employee productivity.

Keeping IoT Devices in Check

There’s no practical way around IoT devices connecting to the network. These devices provide the promise of many new and useful tools in their ability to perform business better and to predict unforeseen risks. Where you have identified the needs for IoT devices in your organization, insure you fully understand the risk benefit analysis, before deploying them. Methodologies such as Synthetic Transaction Monitoring can help you safely identify what the baseline behavior, or “normal” functionality, is as well as expected behaviors for how it should interact with other devices, and applications in the network.

Like any vulnerable and protected resource, it is important to insure these devices are kept behind trusted firewalls and, as with any device in your network, constantly monitor them for changes against normal. Other best-practice methods include establishing a “multi-tenant” reporting environment consolidating and isolating IoT devices into a unique and highly granulated reporting domain.

About the author

Tom Kelly is a technology industry veteran, having led companies through founding, growth, IPO and strategic acquisition. He has served as a CEO, COO or CFO at Cadence Design Systems, Frame Technology, Cirrus Logic, Epicor Software and Blaze Software.  Tom led successful turnarounds at Bluestar Solutions, MonteVista Software and Moxie Software, having served as CEO in repositioning and rebranding the companies in advance of their new growth. He serves on the Boards of Directors of FEI, Fabrinet, and ReadyPulse.  Tom is a graduate of Santa Clara University where he is member of the University’s Board of Regents.

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Dell SecureWorks Sets IPO

SecureWorks, a provider of information-security services based in Atlanta, announced its initial public offering of 9,000,000 shares of its Class A common stock. The initial public offering price is expected to be between $15.50 and $17.50 per share.

SecureWorks will trade on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol “SCWX.”

Some background notes on the company:

• Dell acquired SecureWorks in 2011.
• Claims 4,200 clients worldwide.
• Generates revenue from managed security and threat intelligence solutions through subscription-based arrangements, as well as revenue from security and risk consulting engagements through fixed-price or retainer-based contracts. 
• Total revenue was $339.5 million in fiscal 2016, $262.1 million in fiscal 2015 and $205.8 million in fiscal 2014, for annual growth of 30% and 27%, respectively. 
• Incurred net losses of $72.4 million in fiscal 2016, $38.5 million in fiscal 2015 and $44.5 million in fiscal 2014. 
• Headed by Michael R. Cote
• Total of 2,47 employees

http://www.secureworks.com

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IDC: Worldwide Cloud IT Infrastructure Spend Grew 21.9% in 2015

Vendor revenue from sales of infrastructure products (server, storage, and Ethernet switch) for cloud IT, including public and private cloud, grew 21.9% year over year to $29.0 billion in 2015, according to a new report from IDC.

"The cloud IT infrastructure market continues to see strong double-digit growth with faster gains coming from public cloud infrastructure demand," said Kuba Stolarski, Research Director for Computing Platforms at IDC. "End customers are modernizing their infrastructures along specific workload, performance, and TCO requirements, with a general tendency to move into 3rd Platform, next-gen technologies."

Some highlights:

• Compared to overall IT infrastructure spending, the share of cloud IT infrastructure sales climbed to 32.2% in 4Q15, up from 28.6% a year ago. 
• Revenue from infrastructure sales to private cloud grew by 17.5% to $3.3 billion, and to public cloud by 14.6% to $4.9 billion. 
• In comparison, revenue in the traditional (non-cloud) IT infrastructure segment decreased 2.7% year over year in the fourth quarter, with declines in all three technology segments (server, storage and Ethernet switch).
• All three technology markets showed strong year-over-year growth in both private and public cloud segments, except for storage in the public cloud, which declined 4.0% in 4Q15 on a difficult compare with a very strong quarter in the prior year. 
• Private cloud growth was led by Ethernet switch with 19.6% growth. In public cloud, Ethernet switch led the way with 56.9% year-on-year growth, while public cloud revenue from server grew 28.9% year on year in 4Q15. For the full year, server revenue in private cloud grew by 23.0% year on year, while Ethernet switch revenue in public cloud grew by 36.6% during the same period.

http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS41176716

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SmartSky Picks Brocade + VMware for NFV Capabilities

SmartSky Networks selected Brocade and VMware to supply the pre-certified network functions virtualization (NFV) capability for its air-to-ground broadband network. SmartSky's new Air-to-Ground, pan-US network network connects more than 250 cell sites strategically placed across the continental U.S.

SmartSky is deploying the Brocade Virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) running on VMware vCloud NFV. The network will deliver differentiated services for different types of customers.

“We are building SmartSky’s network from the ground up, enabling us to rethink how a cross-continental air-to-ground network such as this should be built,” said David Claassen, Vice President of Network and Service Architecture at SmartSky. “As we worked through the design, it became clear that using an NFV approach and leveraging commodity hardware for the underlying physical fabric would deliver the best ROI while increasing our service-ability and reducing many of the operational headaches common with traditional hardware-based networks. Brocade and VMware are delivering a combined NFV solution that will help us accelerate our delivery of this unique service offering.”

Brocade said its full-function vEPC features independent slices of control, data and session management capabilities. The vEPC provides seamless data service across the continent while eliminating redundant functionalities and internode dependencies.

“Brocade and VMware have collaborated for years as NFV partners, driving performance, scalability and life-cycle management for network functions to customers such as SmartSky,” said Nishi Kant, vice president of mobile networking, Brocade. “Stability, ease of deployment and ongoing management of the Brocade vEPC solution are recurring themes in our customer deployments, and certification of the Brocade vEPC as VMware Ready for NFV gives customers confidence in the interoperability of our NFV platforms.”

http://www.brocade.com
http://www.vmware.com

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