Google Expects its Cloud vEPC to Scale for Billions of Users

Google is now delivering Wi-Fi access in Indian railway stations using a virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) running in its cloud infrastructure, said Geng Lin, Head of Global Engineering, Global Markets, at Google, in a keynote address at Layer123 NFV World Congress in San Jose, California.

The Google Access project is striving to bring reliable Internet options to the estimated 4 billion unconnected users in developing markets. Wi-Fi is one of the access technologies it will use, but there will be others. Google is looking to partner with other carriers, governments and organizations to bring down the cost of serving large populations.

This project, which was undertaken last year with India's RailTel, aims to offer reliable, super-fast Wi-Fi to as many as 10 million daily users when it is fully rolled out in hundreds of railway stations across the country.

Lin said Google chose to implement a cloud-based, EPC control plane and service operations center to offer an extensible service across the country that can scale to millions of users. RailTel provides a fiber backhaul to each station. Google integrates the Wi-Fi RAN with the vEPC running on its Google Compute Engine infrastructure. Google's cloud-based service operations is also delivering advanced analytics and service level monitoring to improve the customer experience.

The service went live in January in the first railway stations. So far, the network is delivering 99.94% weekly, end-to-end availability for users, proving the vEPC running on the Google cloud is stable and scaling well. The number of active users is now on a sharp uptick as more stations are added to the network. Currently, the vEPC is serving nearly 200,000 active, registered users. Average usage per user per day is over 50 minutes, equating to 366MB of data per user per day.

Lin said Google's vEPC will scale to tens of millions of users for this Railtel project, but the architecture is extensible to reach hundreds of millions and ultimately billions of users by leveraging the global Google Compute Engine. The vEPC could also be offered as a wholesale service on the Google Compute Engine to partner carriers.

http://www.layer123.com/nfv-agenda-day2/
https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/09/bringing-the-internet-to-more-indians.html

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Video: Source Photonics Demos PAM4 - 2x50G QSFP28

Pulse Amplitude Modulation encodes information in the amplitude of a series of signal pulses.

In this video, Dr. Manish Mehta, EVP of Product Line Management at Source Photonics, introduces the fundamentals of PAM4 encoding, which is expected to play a major role in enabling lower cost, 100Gbps data center connections.

Source Photonics conducted a live demonstration of PAM4 2x50Gbps QSFP28 transceivers at #OFC2016. These will add to the company's portfolio of small form factor 100G optical transceivers.

The PAM4 demonstration comes on the heels of Source Photonics’ industry leading release of the 100G QSFP28 LR4 platform of products. Source Photonics announced first in industry sampling of the LR4 and LR4 Lite in March 2014 and mass production in March 2015. In January 2016, Source Photonics announced the shipment of its 10,000th QSFP28 module to customers.

The 2x50G-PAM4 QSFP28 will operate at a worst case power consumption of 3.5W at 70C case temperature and support KR4 FEC in the host IC. The company is also in development to support a KP4 FEC implementation similar to the FR8 requirements for 8-channel 400G standards.

“Cloud scale and Web 2.0 datacenters are demanding increased volume and lower cost 100G small form factor products and reducing component count is a critical long term solution”, says Sheng Zhang, Chief Scientist at Source Photonics. “We are demonstrating a major step towards the productization of PAM4 technology that will be instrumental in the cost reduction of 100G QSFP28 products and the release of initial 400G products.”

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Anomali Raises $30 Million for Early Threat Detection

Anomali, a start-up based in Redwood City, California, raised $30 million in series C funding for its ThreatStream threat intelligence and Anomali Enterprise platforms.

The company, which was previously known as ThreatStream, delivers early detection and identification of adversaries in a network. The company says this makes it possible to correlate tens of millions of threat indicators against real time network activity logs and up to a year or more of forensic log data.

The new funding, led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), includes significant investments from General Catalyst Partners, GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Paladin Capital Group. The round raises Anomali’s total funding to more than $56 million since launching in 2013.

"Anomali is entering a very exciting era of cybersecurity, and we couldn’t be happier to have the support and backing of our customers and partners. Our rebrand, new product suite and this latest round of funding validates our vision for reducing business risk for large enterprises and small to medium sized businesses," said Hugh Njemanze, CEO of Anomali. "We are truly in a unique position as the only security vendor who can scale to meet the challenge of making ever increasing amounts of threat intelligence useful for the entire security team while detecting and preventing attacks enabled by long adversary network dwell times.”

http://www.anomali.com

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Verizon Posts Q1 Revenue of $32.2 billion

Verizon reported Q1 sales of $32.2 billion, a 0.6 percent increase compared with first-quarter 2015, and $1.06 in earnings per share (EPS), compared with $1.02 per share in 1Q 2015.

“Verizon’s strong first-quarter results demonstrate our capacity to compete effectively, while executing on our plan of continued network leadership and seeding new growth markets in mobile video and the Internet of Things,” said Chairman and CEO Lowell McAdam.

New IoT revenue streams reached approximately $195 million in first-quarter 2016, a year-over-year increase of about 25 percent.

Some highlights:

Wireless

• 640,000 retail postpaid net additions in first-quarter 2016
• At the end of first-quarter 2016, Verizon had 112.6 million retail connections, a 3.7 percent year-over-year increase, and 107.2 million retail postpaid connections, a 4.4 percent year-over-year increase.
• Total revenues were $22.0 billion in first-quarter 2016, a decline of 1.5 percent compared with first-quarter 2015 as more customers continued to choose unsubsidized device payment plans. Service revenues plus installment billings increased 1.6 percent, comparing first-quarter 2016 with first-quarter 2015.
• Verizon ended first-quarter 2016 with a total of 73.8 million smartphones. This is 85 percent of the total phone base, with 4G devices more than 81 percent of the retail postpaid connections base.
• Approximately 92 percent of Verizon’s total data traffic is on the LTE network. Overall data traffic on LTE has increased by approximately 50 percent year over year.
• Wireless capital expenditures totaled $2.2 billion in first-quarter 2016 and are expected to ramp up throughout the year.
• Fios remains the growth driver in wireline segment

Wireline highlights

• Verizon added 98,000 net new Fios internet connections and 36,000 net new Fios video connections in first-quarter 2016. 
• Total Fios revenues grew 5.0 percent, to $3.5 billion, comparing first-quarter 2016 with first-quarter 2015, including consumer Fios revenue growth of 4.7 percent.
• In first-quarter 2016, consumer revenues were $4.0 billion, an increase of 0.8 percent compared with first-quarter 2015.

http://www.verizon.com

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Ericsson Q1 Sales Drop 2% YoY, Profitability Rises

Ericsson reported Q1 sales of SEK 52.2 billion (US$6.42 billion), down 2% compared to the same period last year. Net income amounted to SEK 2.1 billion, up 45% from SEK 1.5 billion in Q1 2015. Gross margin declined despite higher IPR licensing revenues. The main reasons were lower margins in Global Services, a higher share of mobile broadband coverage projects in parts of Asia and lower software sales in IP and core networks.

Some highlights:

• Segment Networks sales declined slightly YoY. A continued weak macro-economic environment impacted sales negatively in some emerging markets in the Middle East and Latin America. In addition, sales in Europe were down primarily driven by completion of mobile broadband projects in 2015. Mobile broadband sales in North America and South East Asia grew and the fast pace of 4G deployments in Mainland China continued. IPR licensing revenues grew YoY, mainly driven by recently signed contracts which included certain one-time items. Software sales in IP and core networks declined.
• Sales in segment Global Services declined YoY. This was mainly due to lower Network Rollout activities in Europe and Latin America. Professional Services sales were stable with growth in Consulting and Systems Integration driven by transformation projects and stable Managed Services sales with 21 contracts signed in the quarter.
• Sales in Support Solutions increased YoY due to higher IPR licensing revenues. The underlying demand remains strong in OSS and BSS as data growth and increased focus on customer experience drives operators to transform their OSS and BSS solutions.

"We are not satisfied with our overall growth and profitability development over the past years and I am convinced this will make us more competitive and enable us to grow both our company and our earnings," stated Hans Vestberg, President and CEO of Ericsson.

http://www.ericsson.com

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ADVA Hits Sales of EUR 122.0 Million in Q1 2016

ADVA Optical Networking reported Q1 2016 revenues of EUR 122.0 million, up 27.6% year-on-year (YoY) and in line with the company's guidance.

Pro forma operating income in Q1 2016 stood at EUR 2.0 million or 1.6% of revenues, which represents a EUR 1.7 million YoY decrease (Q1 2015: EUR 3.7 million) and is in line with the previously announced guidance. The operating income came to EUR 1.0 million (Q1 2015: EUR 3.3 million).

“We were absolutely right with the assessments we communicated in 2015,” commented Brian Protiva, CEO, ADVA Optical Networking. “The demand for data center interconnect (DCI) technology continues to grow, and 100G solutions in metro networks are gaining momentum.”

http://www.advaoptical.com/

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DC/OS Open Source Project Gets Underway

A new open source project has gotten underway to develop a Data Center Operating System for running containers and distributed apps in production.

The DC/OS project, which is derived from Mesosphere's Datacenter Operating System, the 100 percent open source DC/OS offers powerful capabilities for container operations at scale and single-click, app-store-like installation of 20+ complex distributed systems (called DC/OS "services"), including HDFS, Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, Apache Cassandra and more.

DC/OS is an evolution of the Apache Mesos technology originally developed at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2009. Mesos was inspired by the types of systems that manage datacenter resources for companies such as Microsoft and Google, and simplifies the work of managing data centers and the process deploying modern datacenter-scale applications. It works essentially by aggregating data center resources -- tens of thousands of servers in its largest deployments -- into a single logical computer on which many workloads (Docker containers, Hadoop, Spark and Kafka, to name a few) can run simultaneously.

Backers of the project said DC/OS will let every company deploy the automated infrastructure that powers applications at some of the world's largest technology companies. More than 60 partners are backing the DC/OS project, including Accenture, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Microsoft.

"The world needed a better architecture for all modern apps, not just containers," said Florian Leibert, CEO & Co-Founder of Mesosphere. "DC/OS represents a major industry transformation, delivering today's enterprises an open source datacenter-scale operating system that pools compute resources into what looks like one big computer, running containers, microservices, big data systems and other components of modern applications with ease. The open source community has come together around DC/OS to deliver an amazing ecosystem of products and datacenter services."

"DC/OS is the inevitable next step for Apache Mesos," said Benjamin Hindman, Co-Creator of Mesos and Mesosphere Chief Architect and Co-Founder. "Organizations that run Mesos quickly discover they need all of the components we've built into DC/OS. DC/OS will democratize large-scale distributed systems and the applications they power, building on the work of the Apache Mesos kernel. By open sourcing DC/OS we're enabling organizations of all sizes to harness the same computing infrastructure as the Twitters and Apples of the world."

"Hybrid and multi-cloud deployments are the new reality," said Ihab Tarazi, CTO of Equinix. "We see DC/OS as a critical part of the true hybrid cloud. Equinix is home to 1,100 network providers across 145 datacenters in 21 countries and we will be using DC/OS to form the foundation for an open source ecosystem that innovates around multi-cloud and IoT. We believe that DC/OS, combined with other initiatives like Open Compute, will drive rapid innovation in the manageability, performance, security, and reliability of modern applications in hybrid environments."

The project also includes DC/OS Universe, an app-store with an open catalog of services built to run on DC/OS. The DC/OS Universe simplifies packaging and delivery of its services for use in datacenter and cloud environments and provides a low-friction distribution path for ISVs that is analogous to app stores on desktop and mobile devices.

https://dcos.io/

Mesosphere Raises $73M for its Containerized Data Center OS

Sunday, March 27, 2016    No comments

Mesosphere raised $73.5 million in a Series C round of financing backed by strategic partners, including Microsoft and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). Also participating in this round are previous Mesosphere investors Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures and Fuel Capital, as well as new investors A Capital and Triangle Peak Partners. This brings Mesosphere’s total funding to nearly $126 million.

Mesosphere's data center operating system (DCOS) is used for building, deploying and running containers and distributed systems in production. The solution also includes:

• Marathon: a production-grade container orchestration system, which is a standard part of the DCOS.
• Velocity: The newly launched developer agility and CI/CD platform for the DCOS, which leverages open source tools like Jenkins to make it possible for development teams to go from source code to production with ease and speed.
• Infinity: a big data and real-time analytics platform, which harnesses open source services such as Spark, Cassandra and Kafka so enterprises can easily build world-class analytics into their businesses.

http://www.mesosphere.com

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Diamanti Raises $12.5 Million Appliance Built to Track Linux Containers

Diamanti (previously Datawise.io) , a start-up based in San Jose, California, emerged from stealth to unveil its converged appliance built to address the infrastructure problems that developers and operators face when deploying containers in production. The solution’s software-defined controls, which Diamanti has contributed to Kubernete’s open source project, empower developers to specify their network and storage resources and service levels. The appliance includes network and storage innovations that deliver guaranteed performance levels with 10X latency and throughput improvements. It also plugs seamlessly into existing infrastructure and is simple to deploy, manage, and scale for operators.

"Diamanti was founded to solve network and storage challenges in Linux containerized environments,” said Jeff Chou, Diamanti co-founder and CEO. “Diamanti’s guiding philosophy is that solving IO challenges demands converged networking and storage."

“Our vision is to enable enterprises to deploy containerized applications quickly, knowing with certainty how they will perform and that they will work off the shelf in an open ecosystem,” said Chou. “We fast track containers to production by automating their most challenging networking and storage operations.”

Diamanti has contribute its FlexVolume code to Kubernetes. This contribution automates IO configuration based on user-defined requirements. Diamanti's scheduler contribution enables the Kubernetes scheduler to factor storage and networking requirements when placing workloads, leveraging a declarative model for developers and container administrators.

“Red Hat OpenShift Enterprise, built including Kubernetes and Docker technologies, accelerates containerized application development for our customers,” said Ashesh Badani, VP and General Manager Openshift Group, Red Hat. “Diamanti’s network and storage contributions to the community give users further choice in how they deploy performance applications at scale. We look forward to continued collaboration with Diamanti to drive industry adoption of containers.”

Diamanti also announced $12.5 million in funding. Backers include CRV, DFJ, GSR Ventures, and Goldman Sachs.

http://www.diamanti.com

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VMware Posts Q1 Revenue of $1.59 Billion, Announces Stock Repurchase

VMware posted Q1 revenue of $1.59 billion, an increase of 5% from the first quarter of 2015, or up 6% year-over-year in constant currency. GAAP net income for the first quarter was $161 million, or $0.38 per diluted share, down 17% per diluted share compared to $196 million, or $0.45 per diluted share, for the first quarter of 2015.

VMware also announced its intention to repurchase up to an aggregate of $1.2 billion of its Class A common stock through December 31, 2016 in the open market, subject to market conditions.

“Q1 was a good start to 2016. We made solid progress with our strategic goal of building momentum for our newer growth businesses and in the cloud,” said Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer, VMware. “We continue to see momentum across our portfolio of growth products and businesses, including NSX, Virtual SAN and End-User Computing.”

http://www.vmware.com

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Citrix Hits Q1 Sales $826 Million, up 9% YoY

Citrix achieved revenue of $826 million, compared to $761 million in the first quarter of fiscal year 2015, representing 9 percent revenue growth. Net income for the first quarter of fiscal year 2016 was $83 million, or $0.54 per diluted share, compared to $29 million, or $0.18 per diluted share, for the first quarter of fiscal year 2015.

“I am very pleased with our performance this quarter on both the top line and bottom line,” said Kirill Tatarinov, chief executive officer for Citrix. “The progress we made in refocusing the company - simplifying our portfolio and sharpening our message – is starting to pay off."

Some highlights:

• Product and license revenue increased 10 percent;
• Software as a service revenue increased 17 percent;
• Revenue from license updates and maintenance increased 6 percent;
• Professional services revenue, which is comprised of consulting, product training and certification, decreased 12 percent;
• Net revenue increased in the Americas region by 14 percent, increased in the EMEA region by less than 1 percent, and decreased in the Pacific region by 8 percent.

http://www.citrix.com

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ServiceNow Sees 44% YoY Growth for Enterprise Cloud Services

ServiceNow, which offers enterprise cloud services, reported Q1 total revenues of $305.9 million, an increase of 44% year-over-year.

There was a GAAP net loss of $333.3 million, or loss of $2.06 per basic and diluted share, compared to a GAAP net loss of $58.1 million, or loss of $0.38 per basic and diluted share, in the first quarter of 2015.

“We’re off to a strong start with our best first quarter ever,” said Frank Slootman, president and chief executive officer, ServiceNow. “Strong upsells and traction with our emerging products were two key growth vectors during the quarter. We now have 249 customers each paying us more than $1 million in annualized contract value, an increase of 48% year-over-year,” said Michael Scarpelli, chief financial officer, ServiceNow. “We also landed a record 13 upsells in the quarter each with an annualized contract value greater than $1 million.”

http://www.servicenow.com

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F5 Networks' Quarterly Sales Were Up 2% YoY

F5 Networks reported revenue of $483.7 million for its second quarter of fiscal 2016, up 2 percent from $472.1 million in the second quarter of fiscal 2015. GAAP net income was $75.4 million ($1.11 per diluted share), compared to $85.7 million ($1.18 per diluted share) in the second quarter a year ago. This result reflects the jury verdict and other associated costs with that patent litigation during the quarter.

Excluding the impact of this patent litigation expense, stock-based compensation and amortization of purchased intangible assets, non-GAAP net income was $114.0 million ($1.68 per diluted share), compared to $115.3 million ($1.59 per diluted share) in the second quarter of last year.

“Given the backdrop of a continued difficult macro and spending environment, I was pleased with our execution, as we delivered revenue within our guided range while maintaining solid profitability.” said John McAdam, F5 President and Chief Executive Officer. “In addition, sales of our Better/Best software bundles, Virtual Editions, and Silverline subscription services all grew during the quarter as customers continued to embrace hybrid strategies and venture into public and private clouds.

http://www.f5.com

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Mellanox Posts Record Q1

Mellanox reported record Q1 revenue of $196.8 million, up 11.2 percent, compared to $176.9 million in the fourth quarter of 2015. GAAP gross margins of 64.2 percent in the first quarter compared to 70.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015. There was a GAAP net loss of $7.2 million, compared to net income of $43.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2015.

“We are pleased to report the fourth consecutive quarter of record revenue. Our profitability grew 37.2 percent year-over-year. During the quarter we closed the acquisition of EZchip Semiconductor Ltd. We see great promise in the combination of EZchip’s intelligent processors, and Mellanox’s leading interconnect technology. We believe the combined company can deliver compelling value to current and future customers,” said Eyal Waldman, president and CEO of Mellanox Technologies.

“We recorded strong growth in our Ethernet business, supported by adoption of our 40 Gigabit Ethernet adapters. We are seeing strong interest in the Spectrum product line and expect revenues to accelerate in the coming quarters. Tests demonstrate superior performance, costs, resiliency, and power of Spectrum compared to alternative products. We are pleased to see our InfiniBand business grow year-over-year. We see additional hyperscale entities deployed InfiniBand in their data centers.”

http://www.mellanox.com

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Ericsson Names Executive Team

Ericsson announced the following leadership line-up, effective 01-July-2016:

Hans Vestberg, President and CEO (since 2010)

Jan Frykhammar, Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Head of Group Function Finance & Common Functions. Frykhammar currently holds the position as Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Head of Group Function Finance (since 2009)

Arun Bansal, Senior Vice President and Head of Business Unit Network Products. Bansal currently holds the position as Head of Business Unit Radio (since 2014) - new member of the ELT

Per Borgklint, Senior Vice President, Chief Innovation Officer and Head of Business Unit Media. Borgklint currently holds the position as Senior Vice President and Head of Business Unit Support Solutions (since 2011)

Bina Chaurasia, Senior Vice President, Chief Human Resources Officer and Head of Group Function Human Resources (since 2010)

Ulf Ewaldsson, Senior Vice President, Chief Technology Officer and Head of Group Function Technology (since 2012)

Niklas Heuveldop, Senior Vice President, Chief Customer Officer and Head of Group Function Sales. Heuveldop currently holds the position as Head of Global Customer Unit AT&T - new member of the ELT

Chris Houghton, Head of Region North East Asia (since 2015) - new member of the ELT

Fredrik Jejdling, Senior Vice President and Head of Business Unit Network Services. Jejdling currently holds the position as Head of Region sub-Saharan Africa (since 2013) - new member of the ELT

Anders Lindblad, Senior Vice President and Head of Business Unit IT & Cloud Products. Lindblad currently holds the position as Head of Business Unit Cloud & IP (since 2014) - new member of the ELT

Nina Macpherson, Senior Vice President, Chief Legal Officer and Head of Group Function Legal Affairs (since 2011)

Helena Norrman, Senior Vice President, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer and Head of Group Function Marketing and Communications (since 2014)

Jean-Philippe Poirault, Senior Vice President and Head of Business Unit IT & Cloud Services. Poirault currently holds the position as Head of Consulting and Systems Integration - new member of the ELT

Rima Qureshi, Senior Vice President, Head of Region North America and Chief Strategy Officer. Qureshi currently holds the position as Senior Vice President, Head of Group Function Strategy and Head of M&A (since 2014)

Charlotta Sund, Senior Vice President and Head of Customer Group Industry & Society. Sund currently holds the position as Head of Region Northern Europe and Central Asia (since 2014) - new member of the ELT

Elaine Weidman-Grunewald, Head of Group Function Sustainability and Corporate Responsibility - new member of the ELT

In addition to the ELT members Ericsson today also announces the following appointments effective July 1, 2016:

Peter Laurin, Head of Region Northern Europe and Central Asia. Laurin currently holds the position as Head of Global Customer Unit Vodafone

Jean-Claude Geha, Head of Region sub-Saharan Africa. Geha currently holds the position as Head of Business Line Managed Services

Gustav Brismark, Chief Intellectual Property Officer and Head of IPR & Licensing. Brismark currently holds the position as Vice President, Patent Strategy and Portfolio

The following individuals will leave the Executive Leadership Team effective July 1, 2016:

Magnus Mandersson, Executive Vice President (since 2011) and Head of Segment and Business Unit Global Services (since 2010). As of July 1, 2016, Mandersson will hold the position as Head of Segment Global Services, Executive Vice President and Advisor to the CEO.

Jan Wäreby, Senior Vice President and Head of Group Function Sales (since 2014). Wäreby will retire from Ericsson as of November 30, 2016.

Anders Thulin, Senior Vice President, Chief Information Officer and Head of Group Function Business Excellence and Common Functions (since 2013). Thulin will leave the company as of July 1, 2016, to pursue opportunities outside the company.

Angel Ruiz, Head of Region North America (since 2010). Ruiz will continue with the company as Chairperson of regions North and Latin America.

Mats H. Olsson, Senior Vice President and Head of Ericsson Asia-Pacific (since 2013). Olsson will leave Ericsson as of July 1, 2016.

http://www.ericsson.com

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Video: Achieving 400GbE

Many techniques were employed to achieve the remarkable speed of 400 GbE, says John D'Ambrosia, Chairperson of the Ethernet Alliance.

 These vectors include moving faster, increasing the number of physical paths, adding wavelengths across single-mode fiber, and boosting the modulation with PAM4.

YouTube: https://youtu.be/5QLbDXNGfJk

 

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IBM and SAP Seek to Integrate Cognitive + Cloud

IBM and SAP are looking to deepen their partnership by developing cognitive extensions enabled with SAP HANA software.

Specifically, the companies intend to co-locate resources in Walldorf, Germany and Palo Alto, California with the aim of sparking new solutions.

"The future of business strategy and business value will proceed from the foundational elements of this announcement -- cognitive, cloud and the design of consumer-quality experiences in every industry," said Bridget van Kralingen, senior vice president, IBM Global Business Services. "We're formalizing a complementary set of capabilities to simplify and speed outcomes for clients evolving to become cognitive enterprises."

"Today's announcement builds on SAP's commitment to enable strong, growing businesses that can seize the amazing opportunities of the digital economy," said Rob Enslin, member of the Executive Board of SAP SE and president of Global Customer Operations, SAP. "SAP S/4HANA is the reimagined suite of core business applications that has once again set the standard for the industry. I'm delighted that IBM and SAP will collaborate closely to give customers a clear roadmap to innovating new business models and outcomes that were never before possible."

http://www.ibm.com
http://www.sap.com

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AWS Adds Security Inspector Tool

Amazon Web Services released an automated security assessment service that helps customers improve the security and compliance of their applications running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) by identifying potential security issues, vulnerabilities, or deviations from security standards.

Amazon Inspector deploys on-host agents so customers get insight from inside Amazon EC2 instances and other AWS resources that make up an application environment. Amazon Inspector is also fully integrated with AWS CloudTrail, providing central logging of all security testing activity, giving auditors full visibility into what tests were performed and when, streamlining the process of demonstrating compliance in the development and operations lifecycle. With the new Amazon Inspector tool, customers pay only for the assessments they run, with the first 250 assessments free for a customer’s first 90 days.

“Customers have asked us if we could help them do the same rigorous security assessments on their applications that we do for our AWS services,” said Stephen Schmidt, Chief Information Security Officer, AWS. “Amazon Inspector delivers key learnings from our world-class security team as a managed service, so customers benefit from our continuous implementation of best practices and threat intelligence. Companies of all sizes can now perform assessments of their applications in an automated way and proactively remediate vulnerabilities.”

https://aws.amazon.com/inspector

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Intel Restructuring Looks to Data Center and IoT for Growth

Intel will cut up to 12,000 jobs globally - approximately 11% of its workforce - as it aims "to accelerate its evolution from a PC company to one that powers the cloud and billions of smart, connected computing devices."

Intel said it sdata center and Internet of Things (IoT) businesses are the primary growth engines now, with memory and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) accelerating these opportunities. These growth businesses delivered $2.2 billion in revenue growth last year, and made up 40 percent of revenue and the majority of operating profit, which largely offset the decline in the
PC market segment.

“Our results over the last year demonstrate a strategy that is working and a solid foundation for growth. The opportunity now is to accelerate this momentum and build on our strengths. These actions drive long-term change to further establish Intel as the leader for the smart, connected world. I am confident that we’ll emerge as a more productive company with broader reach
and sharper execution,” stated Intel CEO Brian Krzanich.

Intel expects the restructuring to deliver $750 million in savings this year and annual run rate savings of $1.4 billion by mid-2017. The company will record a one-time charge of approximately $1.2 billion in the second quarter.

http://www.intel.com

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Transition Networks Debuts 40Gbps QSFP+

Transition Networks introduced its new 40G quad small form factor pluggable (QSFP+) optical transceivers designed for high growth 40G Ethernet networks.

The new TN-QSFP-40G-xx transceivers can be installed in any QSFP+ port, allowing for 40GBase-X interfaces to the network through the QSFP+ connector. The transceivers are built for bi-directional serial-optical data communication such as 40G Ethernet.

The TN-QSFP-40G-xx series features 4 channels with up to 11.1 Gb/s per channel, a maximum link length of 400m on OM4 multimode fiber or 30km over single mode fiber and a hot-swappable 40G transceiver that plugs into a QSFP+ port. The series supports SFF-8436 digital diagnostic monitoring interface (DMI) and is compatible with Cisco switches and routers as well as their IOS.

“Existing 1G/10G infrastructures are not able to meet the rising demand of the higher data rates being driven by virtualization, big data, cloud services and convergence. This demand is necessitating 40G fiber networking which SFP has become the standard for cost effective service turn-up,” said Tony LeFebvre, Director of Product Management for Transition Networks. “The addition of TN-QSFP-40G-xx to our extensive SFP portfolio demonstrates Transition Networks’ continued commitment to providing reliable, cost effective and high performance networking products with the dedicated service and support our customers have come to expect..”

http://www.transition.com

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Intel Posts Q1 Revenue of $13.7 Billion, up 7%

Intel reported first-quarter GAAP revenue of$13.7 billion, operating income of $2.6 billion, net income of $2.0 billion and EPS of 42 cents. The company generated approximately $4.0 billion in cash from operations, paid dividends of $1.2 billion, and used $793 million to repurchase 27 million shares of stock.

“Our first-quarter results tell the story of Intel’s ongoing strategic transformation, which is progressing well and will accelerate in 2016,” said Brian Krzanich, Intel CEO. “We are evolving from a PC company to one that powers the cloud and billions of smart, connected computing devices.”

Segment highlights:

• Client Computing Group revenue of $7.5 billion, down 14 percent sequentially and up 2 percent year-over-year
• Data Center Group revenue of $4.0 billion, down 7 percent sequentially and up 9 percent year-over-year 
• Internet of Things Group revenue of $651 million, up 4 percent sequentially and up 22 percent year-over-year
• Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group revenue of $557 million, down 15 percent sequentially and down 6 percent year-over-year
• Intel Security Group revenue of $537 million, up 5 percent sequentially and up 12 percent yearover-year
• Programmable Solutions Group revenue of $359 million, which does not include $99 million of revenue as a result of acquisition-related adjustments. 

http://www.intel.com

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