Infinera Debuts Cloud Xpress 2 for Data Center Interconnect

Infinera introduced its second generation Cloud Xpress platform for scalable 100 gigabit Ethernet (100GbE) data center interconnect (DCI) over multi-terabit optical links. The platform is aimed at connecting cloud data centers, which are rapidly migrating to 25 GbE server uplinks and 100 GbE fabrics between server racks.

Infinera, which was first to market with a purpose-built compact DCI product in 2014, said its new Cloud Xpress 2 raises the bar by increasing density by 4.8 times while building on the Cloud Xpress Family’s advantages of simplicity, reliability and automation.

“Cloud Xpress 2 is an important milestone for Infinera as it raises the bar for data center interconnect platforms,” said Dr. Stuart Elby, Infinera’s Senior Vice President, Data Center Business Group. “This is the first Infinera product based on our groundbreaking Infinite Capacity Engine, which sets new standards for optical performance and efficiency. With the Infinite Capacity Engine, Cloud Xpress 2 delivers advanced levels of scalability and low power along with simplicity, automation and built-in security.”

Cloud Xpress 2 highlights:

• Uses Infinera's new Infinite Capacity Engine, which is powered by the company’s next generation FlexCoherent Processor and its fourth-generation photonic integrated circuit (PIC)
• Delivers a 1.2 terabit per second (Tb/s) super-channel in one rack unit 
• Enables best in class fiber capacity with up to 27.6 Tb/s on a single fiber pair by stacking multiple chassis, which can be managed as a single system
• Incorporates Infinera’s unique Instant Bandwidth product offering, a software-activated bandwidth delivery technology that provides a success-based business model while lowering operational costs. 
• Low power consumption and built-in security with in-flight wire-speed data encryption. 
• Plug-and-play with simplified provisioning and support for data center automation. 
• Built-in optical amplification capable of transmitting 1.2 Tb/s up to 130 kilometers using a single fiber pair without an external multiplexer or external amplifier
• Topology auto-discovery, zero-touch provisioning support, standard application programming interfaces for programmability and streaming telemetry.

http://www.infinera.com

Infinera's Infinite Capacity Engine Revs to 2.4 Tbps Capacity

Monday, March 21, 2016  DWDM, Infinera, Optical  No Comments

Infinera unveiled its Infinite Capacity Engine, a multi-terabit optical subsystem combining the company's next generation FlexCoherent Processor and the photonics of its fourth generation photonic integrated circuit (PIC).

The Infinite Capacity Engine, which will be integrated into the Infinera portfolio of long-haul terrestrial, subsea, metro and data center interconnect platforms, breaks new ground for optical transport by being the first in the industry to deliver optical super-channel capacity up to 2.4 terabits per second and reach up to 12,000 kilometers in a single small package.

Infinera said its new Infinite Capacity Engine represents the next step function in WDM performance because of the capacity jump to 2.4 Tbps of optical bandwidth, combined with longer reach, better power efficiency and the integration of other advanced functions. Significantly, the Infinite Capacity Engine furthers the company's Instant Bandwidth capability, which enables pre-deployed bandwidth to be provisioned on-demand in 100 Gbps increments via software activation. New capabilities include 100G temporary licenses, enabling capacity to be deployed for a specific duration of time.

Some highlights of the Infinera Infinite Capacity Engine:

• Massive scale: supporting super-channels up to 2.4 Tbps from a single subsystem with up to 12 times more bandwidth than other implementations.
• Advanced Coherent Toolkit (ACT):delivers up to 60 percent more capacity-reach performance for submarine and terrestrial networks than the current generation of optical technologies by allowing extended reach and/or utilization of higher order modulation formats on a per channel or super-channel basis in challenging fiber environments. The Infinera ACT features Nyquist subcarriers, a new technology that increases tolerance for non-linear effects and SD-FEC gain sharing. In addition, multiple modulation formats are supported including matrix enhanced - phase shift keying (ME-PSK), BPSK, 3QAM, QPSK, 8QAM and 16QAM.
• Sliceable super-channels: provides the unique ability to deliver 2.4 Tbps of capacity in a single module with a single fiber pair. In addition, it provides fine-grained and flexible control of optical wavelengths at 100 Gb/s. The Infinite Capacity Engine can tune and route a 100 Gbps wavelength or N x 100 Gbps super-channels in multiple separate directions with any specified flexible grid coherent modulation across the extended C-Band. As a result, network line-card module requirements can be reduced up to 77 percent while delivering tremendous flexibility. Moreover, total cost of ownership can be reduced by up to 53 percent as compared to non-sliceable implementations.
• In-flight wire-speed encryption: encrypts traffic transparently at Layer 1 on a per service basis or in the bulk mode per super-channel, using the strong 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) key. The Infinite Capacity Engine is integrated with easy-to-use key exchange and cryptography mechanisms, providing wire-rate multi-terabit processing with more capacity than current industry solutions.

"The Infinera Infinite Capacity Engine ushers in a new era in optical transport networking and is the foundation for network operators to rapidly respond to massive bandwidth demands," said Dr. Dave Welch, Infinera Co-founder and President.

https://www.infinera.com/technology/engine/ 

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OpenDaylight Boron Focuses on Use Cases for SDN

The OpenDaylight Project announced its fifth open SDN release: OpenDaylight Boron, featuring significant enhancements to Cloud and NFV use-case capabilities, as well as to performance and tooling to simplify management of a range of use cases.

“Since its inception in 2013, OpenDaylight has served to unite the industry around a common SDN platform,” said Neela Jacques, Executive Director, OpenDaylight. "With Boron, the OpenDaylight platform cements its position as the de facto standard platform for building next-generation networking solutions. Boron further develops and standardizes support for the industry’s leading use cases, while facilitating development of innovative new approaches to solving network-related business challenges. From the world’s biggest telco networks to webscale giants and even the Large Hadron Collider, OpenDaylight is at the heart of more and more SDN solutions and production infrastructures.”

More than half of the new projects proposed came from user organizations, including:

• YangIDE, led by AT&T, provides support for building new YANG models
• Telefonica and Intel-led NetIDE, which makes it easier to share apps across controller deployments
• EMAN, led by Comcast, for improved energy efficiency for the network​
• As deployments grow in scale and sophistication, end-users are increasingly looking to integrate OpenDaylight more deeply into their core architectural frameworks. One example of cross-industry collaborations is the Atrium Enterprise project which was led by the Open Networking Foundation with participation from Criterion Networks, WIPRO and Microsoft. Another example is  ECOMP, from AT&T, an infrastructure delivery platform and scalable, comprehensive network cloud service for a software-centric network.

“We’re excited to see the release of OpenDaylight Boron,” said Chris Rice, SVP of Domain 2.0 Architecture and Design at AT&T. “We contributed to the release and expect to use the code at the heart of our network. We like OpenDaylight for the breadth of ‘brownfield’ protocols that are supported, its model driven approach that matches our service abstraction logic, and the ability to add applications on top of the controller base. One of the tenets of the open source community is that you don’t just take code. You contribute it, as well. We’re committed to doing just that, and this is an example.”

Enhancements in Boron include:

• OpenStack-related capabilities have been re-architected within a unified development framework for better scalability and performance, including clustering, High Availability (HA), and persistence. 
• Southbound enhancements for VNFs include OpenFlow and NETCONF optimization, as well as hardware VTEP support, and DPDK enhancements.
• The NetVirt project brings new focus to features and performance to OpenStack environments. These include improved coordination between OpenStack Neutron and the controller, as well as enhanced support for IPv6, Security Groups (via OpenFlow configuration), VLANs and other important capabilities. The new architecture enables the ability to grow beyond OpenStack integration by allowing control from other orchestration systems and applications.
• The OPNFV project has driven a broad set of Telco requirements and new functionality in OpenDaylight. As Service Function Chaining has become a key required capability of NFV deployments, collaboration between ODL and OPNFV SFC-focused projects have led to a number of key improvements including Proof of Transit validating service chain packet-flow, enhancements to support FD.io Service Chain Identification and support for the latest OVS release.
• The Genius project, a community-wide effort, provides an app-agnostic framework for application composition. This supports the deployment of modular distributed applications as well as Service Function Chaining (SFC). First introduced as a “proof of concept” project in Beryllium, Genius is now application-agnostic and can be used to operate production cloud networks.
• New clustering features in Boron simplify HA management for non-distributed network applications, make it easier for developers to write applications without needing to understand the underlying architecture.
• Controller health is easier to monitor with the Cardinal project, which provides controller health data as a service. Time Series Data Repository (TSDR) and the Centinel project enable Big Data Analytics for streaming data.

https://www.opendaylight.org/news/foundation-news/2016/09/opendaylight-project-releases-boron-network-driven-businesses

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Amazon Plans 253 Megawatt Wind Farm in Texas

Amazon will commission a new 253-megawatt (MW) wind farm in Scurry County, Texas, that will generate 1,000,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of wind energy annually – enough energy to power almost 90,000 U.S. homes.

Amazon Wind Farm Texas, which is scheduled to open in late 2017, will include more than 100 turbines and be the company’s largest renewable energy project to date. Amazon previously announced wind and solar farms in Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia that deliver energy to the electrical grids supplying both current and future Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud data centers. The five projects together will generate more than 2.6 million MWh of renewable energy each year.

http://www.amazon.com/sustainability

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Global CDN Picks Zayo for 20 Point-to-Point 10G Wavelengths

A global content delivery network (CDN) provider has selected Zayofor a wavelengths solution to support a large portion of its backbone traffic across North America and Europe. The customer name was not disclosed.

Under the multi-year contract, the customer has purchased 20 point-to-point 10G wavelengths throughout the U.S., Canada and western Europe. The solution provides high-performance capacity and connectivity to many large internet peering locations to meet the customer’s increasing demands for bandwidth.

http://www.zayo.com

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Red Hat Revenue Pops to $600 million, up 19% YoY

Red Hat reported total revenue of $600 million for its second quarter of fiscal year 2017 ended August 31, 2016, up 19% in U.S. dollars year-over-year, or 18% measured in constant currency.

“Red Hat's second quarter revenue results were highlighted by 18% in year-over-year growth for our Infrastructure offerings combined with 33% in year-over-year growth for our Application development and other emerging technologies," said Jim Whitehurst, President and Chief Executive Officer of Red Hat. "Digital transformation and hybrid cloud computing are changing how applications are built, deployed, and managed. As organizations adopt agile application development technologies such as Linux containers, they are able to rely on Red Hat as their strategic partner to modernize their infrastructure and application development platforms.”

Subscription Revenue Breakout: Subscription revenue from Infrastructure-related offerings for the quarter was $427 million, an increase of 18% in U.S. dollars year-over-year and 17% measured in constant currency. Subscription revenue from Application development-related and other emerging technologies offerings for the quarter was $104 million, an increase of 33% in U.S. dollars year-over-year and 32% measured in constant currency.

http://www.redhat.com

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Centec Raises $47 Million for Ethernet Switching Silicon

Centec Networks, a developer of Ethernet switching silicon and SDN white box solutions, announced $47 million in Series E funding led by China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund (CICF), a national fund established to help develop IC technology companies in China.

Centec, which was founded in 2005 and is based in Suzhou, China, said it is pursuing an open-networking strategy. The company has developed and released multiple product generations including switch silicon for 1GE10GE, 40GE and 100GE applications, with OCP’s Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) to ease the integration into both commercial and open source Network Operating System(NOS). Centec has a history of success delivering productized switch platform based on either a commercial or open source NOS for global vendors to integrate and customize for SDN and Open Networking applications.

The company has raised $30 million in previous funding rounds, developed four generations of switching silicon, and has achieved double-digit quarterly growth for the past 3 years.  Proceeds from its Series E funding round will be used to develop new products and to scale the company’s sales and marketing operations across the globe, especially North America.  CICF is joined in the round by existing investor China Electronics Corporation (CEC) through its China Electronics Innovations Fund, which led the company’s prior funding round.

“This funding round further establishes Centec as one of the top global sources of Ethernet switching silicon, and will enable us to meet growing product demand, accelerate innovation, and launch a new product family for the rapidly growing SDN white box market,” said James Sun, CEO of Centec Networks.  “The CICF investment also reinforces our position as a leading innovator in the worldwide market for Ethernet switching silicon, and a valued partner for customers entering the Chinese market.”

“Centec has emerged as a leading competitor in a segment dominated worldwide by a single vendor and has developed impressive switch chips with competitive features using a fraction of the funding a U.S. company would require,” said Bob Wheeler, principal analyst at The Linley Group. “The additional funding led by CICF will further strengthen its technology and market leadership in China and fuel its major expansion beyond China into the global market.”

http://www.centecnetworks.com/en/About.asp?ID=23

Centec Debuts Fourth Generation 1.2 Tbps Switching Silicon

Monday, March 30, 2015  #SDN, Data Center, Ethernet, Silicon  No Comments

Centec Networks announced its fourth-generation GoldenGate switch silicon, a 1.2 Tbps chip designed to address SDN and virtualization in 10GE, 40GE and 100GE networks by increasing visibility in the forwarding plane.

The company said it was able to incorporate a number of unique features to solve SDN challenges for elephant flow detection, flow completion time, and flow visibility and control, while also supporting network virtualization with diverse overlay technology including the latest GENEVE protocol.

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Liberty Global and CableLabs Join the MulteFire Alliance

Liberty Global and CableLabs have joined the MulteFire Alliance, an independent, diverse and international member-driven consortium dedicated to developing next-generation wireless technology. customers.”

The main focus of the MulteFire Alliance is to ensure that next-generation LTE mobile standards are compatible with shared and unlicensed spectrum. This compatibility ensures that the next generation technology is more widely available and that it can coexist alongside Wi-Fi and other technologies. What also makes this technology unique is that operators without access to the licensed spectrum still will be able to use it, breaking down barriers to entry and opening the door to greater innovation.

“This step will arm the cable industry with a new wireless technology that builds on our success in providing Wi-Fi and mobile services and complements the industry’s fixed broadband technology leadership,” said Ralph Brown, CTO of CableLabs.

Currently, the MulteFire Alliance is working to adapt 3GPP-based mobile wireless standards for shared and unlicensed spectrum so that the technology is broadly available and fairly coexists with Wi-Fi and other technologies. MulteFire is based on 3GPP Release 13 License Assisted Access LTE (LAA) and Release 14 enhanced LAA (eLAA), which uses Listen-Before-Talk (LBT) etiquette to share spectrum in a manner similar to Wi-Fi.

Unlike LAA, however, which is anchored to licensed spectrum and must be used in conjunction with a mobile network, MulteFire will operate entirely in unlicensed or shared spectrum, so that operators without licensed mobile spectrum can utilize it. This “standalone” functionality has been proposed in the 3GPP standards body for both LTE and 5G. By building this capability in the Alliance, its member companies will enable its adoption in global standards and the corresponding broad benefit of wireless innovation.

“We appreciate that the Alliance is committed to transparency and collaboration, given the importance of unlicensed spectrum to broadband access,” said Rob Alderfer, vice president of technology policy at CableLabs. “As we move toward ever greater sharing of scarce spectrum resources, reliable coexistence across technologies is essential as we continue to innovate. It’s what we believe is the most critical aspect of the Alliance, and one that will be important as the industry moves toward 5G standards.”

http://www.multefire.org/news/5352/

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Nokia and T-Mobile Trim 5G Latency to 1.8 milliseconds

Nokia and T-Mobile US report real-time latency of 1.8 milliseconds while streaming four simultaneous 4K videos over a prototype 5G network in the lab.

The 5G air interface lab test used T-Mobile's 28GHz spectrum and Nokia's commercial 5G-ready AirScale radio platform.

"We've now brought 5G out of the lab and into the field. With Nokia's partnership, we're seeing the kind of astounding data speeds and low latency that are hallmarks of 5G and set the standard for future network performance," stated Neville Ray, chief technology officer, T-Mobile.

http://company.nokia.com/en/news/press-releases/2016/09/21/nokia-and-t-mobile-showcase-the-real-potential-of-5g-through-network-testing-and-applications

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T-Mobile and Ericsson Hit 12 Gbps on 5G

T-Mobile US and Ericsson report a top downlink speed exceeding 12 Gbps using Ericsson's 5G radio prototype system and T-Mobile's LTE network and devices.

The 5G trial occurred on August 3, 2016, at Ericsson's facilities and included test demonstrations of two-directional beam steering, operation of multiple simultaneous 4K video streams and the first test of a voice call connecting between 4G and 5G networks. The test also recorded ultra-low latency connections of less than 2 milliseconds.

In February 2016, Ericsson and T-Mobile announced they would work together to deploy a 5G pre-standards based 28GHz test system for lab and field trials in the United States. The two companies agreed to develop and test selected 5G use-cases and services to enable T-Mobile to evaluate emerging 5G technologies, drive 5G technology development and standardization and to explore new business opportunities.

"We're building towards 5G every single day with advanced technologies in our network, so we can put 5G to work for our customers just like we do with every new innovation. With Ericsson, we've now demonstrated speeds over 12 Gbps," stated Neville Ray, Chief Technology Officer of T-Mobile.

https://www.ericsson.com/news/2043477

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Telstra Tests 5G in Melbourne with Ericsson

Telstra is conducting outdoor tests on one of the world’s first 5G trial systems in Melbourne, Australia using Ericsson prototype systems.

Telstra's 5G trial system used 800 MHz of spectrum, 10 times more than what the carrier currently use for their 4G network. The companies reported aggregate speeds of greater than 20 Gbps, with an indicative latency of at least half of what is seen in current 4G networks.

“Today we conducted the first live 5G trial on Australia soil, and did so in a real world, outdoor environment. This provided a truly realistic view of what 5G will be able to offer,” Jones says.
“5G enhances existing services with additional capacity, higher speeds and lower latency, while supporting a large number of machine-type connections. We are very excited to be working with Ericsson on this technology and how we can use 5G in the future to further connect and empower Australians,” stated Telstra’s Chief Technology Officer, Philip Jones.

https://www.ericsson.com/news/160920-ericsson-telstra-5g-trial-australia_244039854_c

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DE-CIX Tops 5.5 Tbps Across its Frankfurt Internet Exchange

The DE-CIX Internet Exchange in Frankfurt (Main/Germany) hit a new peak traffic load of 5.5 terabits per second (Tbps).

"With the roll-out of Apple's iOS 10 update, we recorded a new peak in traffic on DE-CIX’s Frankfurt Exchange this week,” says Harald A. Summa, CEO of DE-CIX. “In general, our traffic moves along in waves and reflects our usual daily Internet use rhythm, starting at 6:00 am and peaking at 9:00 pm. One should also take into account seasonal changes. For instance, during the summer months, people aren’t online as often as they are in winter.  Overall the data traffic at DE-CIX in Frankfurt is certainly going to increase even more going forward.”

https://www.de-cix.net

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IBM Launches Hybrid Cloud-ready Systems

IBM launched cloud-ready systems, services and solutions that simplify the movement of data, applications and services across a hybrid cloud environment.

Highlights include:

• Power Systems for cloud. With integrated OpenStack-based cloud management and elastic consumption models, these new enterprise-class IBM Power Systems for the cloud enable clients to transform their IT infrastructure to a local cloud for AIX, IBM i and Linux workloads and extend them with rapid access to compute services in the IBM Cloud.
  
• z Systems for cloud. IBM z Systems Operational Insights is a new SaaS-based offering that provides analytic insights on cloud operations for new levels of efficiency and application performance.  It allows users to make better business and application decisions based on trends and embedded expertise on performance data through a GUI dashboard. This accompanies IBM OMEGAMON Application Performance Management, which provides quick identification of problem components through end-to-end visibility for clients’ hybrid workloads that include z Systems applications.  

IBM is pursuing an open ecosystem of partners for the hybrid cloud, including: Canonical, Hortonworks, Mirantis, NGNIX, and Red Hat.

http://www.ibm.com

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Ericsson Appoints Ewaldsson as CTO and Qureshi as Head of Region North America

Ericsson has appointed Ulf Ewaldsson as Senior Vice President, Chief Strategy and Technology Officer and Head of Group Function Strategy and Technology.

In addition, Rima Qureshi was appointed Head of Region North America and will be responsible for the company's strategic partnership with Cisco.

Both Ewaldsson and Qureshi will continue to be Executive Leadership Team members and report to Ericsson's CEO.

https://www.ericsson.com/thecompany/corporate_governance/company_management/ulf_ewaldsson

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Adobe's Record Revenue Driven by Cloud Services

Adobe reported record quarterly revenue of $1.46 billion, representing year-over-year growth of 20 percent.

Digital Media segment revenue was a record $990 million, with Creative revenue growing 39 percent year-over-year to a record $803 million. The company cited strong growth in its Creative Cloud and Document Cloud offerings, as more customers adopt a cloud-based software over traditional desktop software.

“We drove strong revenue and earnings performance in Q3, further distancing ourselves from our competitors,” said Shantanu Narayen, Adobe president and chief executive officer. “Our leadership in cloud-based content and data platforms make us a mission critical partner to the world's biggest brands as they transform how they engage with their customers.”

http://www.adobe.com

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Nokia Bell Labs, T-Labs and TU Munich Hit 1 Tbps w New Modulation

Nokia Bell Labs, Deutsche Telekom T-Labs and the Technical University of Munich have demonstrated a new modulation technique that achieved a net 1 Terabit per second transmission rate -  close to the theoretical maximum information transfer rate of that channel and thus approaching the Shannon Limit of the fiber link.

The trial, which was carried out as part of the Safe and Secure European Routing (SASER) project, used the optical fiber network of Deutsche Telekom. Bell Labs is calling the novel novel modulation approach "Probabilistic Constellation Shaping (PCS)."  It uses quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) formats to achieve higher transmission capacity over a given channel to significantly improve the spectral efficiency of optical communications. PCS modifies the probability with which constellation points - the alphabet of the transmission - are used. Traditionally, all constellation points are used with the same frequency. PCS cleverly uses constellation points with high amplitude less frequently than those with lesser amplitude to transmit signals that, on average, are more resilient to noise and other impairments. This allows the transmission rate to be tailored to ideally fit the transmission channel, delivering up to 30 percent greater reach.

Marcus Weldon, president Nokia Bell Labs & Nokia CTO, said:  "Future optical networks not only need to support orders of magnitude higher capacity, but also the ability to dynamically adapt to channel conditions and traffic demand. Probabilistic Constellation Shaping offers great benefits to service providers and enterprises by enabling optical networks to operate closer to the Shannon Limit to support massive datacenter interconnectivity and provide the flexibility and performance required for modern networking in the digital era."

https://www.bell-labs.com/

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Fujitsu and Fraunhofer HHI Develop Simultaneous Wavelength Conversion Technology

Fujitsu Laboratories and the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute HHI have developed a new method to simultaneously convert the wavelengths of wavelength-division-multiplexed signals.  The researchers have successfully tested the method using high-bandwidth signal transmission in the range of 1 Tbps.

Conventionally, optical wavelength conversion has worked by converting each individual optical wavelength into an electrical signal that is then re-transmitted at a new wavelength.  The researchers said this method is proving impractical for terabit-class processing, as each wavelength requires its own O/E/O circuit.

Using the new methos, the optical wavelength conversion and the polarization state are controlled at the same time, so simultaneous wavelength conversion of wide-band optical signals can be achieved without restrictions on the wavelengths of the optical input signal or the modulation formats. As a result, processing can be achieved with a single wavelength converter, regardless of the number of wavelengths multiplexed. Therefore, considering optical signals in excess of 1 Tbps multiplexed from ten wavelengths, for example, the new method can process them using just one-tenth of the power or less compared to previous technologies that required a separate circuit to convert each wavelength into an electrical signal and back.

http://www.fujitsu.com/jp/group/labs/en

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Acacia Debuts Long-haul Module for DCI

Acacia Communications introduced a new long-haul optical module solution as part of its AC100-CFP product family, which was initially launched in 2014 as a low power pluggable 100G optical transport solution targeted for metro and data center interconnect (DCI) applications.

Acacia’s new long-haul CFP-DCO model is based on Acacia’s latest silicon photonics integrated circuit (PIC) and contains an internal digital signal processor (DSP) chip.

In addition to improved receiver OSNR performance and 2500km of dispersion compensation, Acacia’s long-haul CFP-DCO module offers 37.5GHz channel spacing and supports passive multiplexing in CDC-ROADM applications.

Acacia also announced that more than 12 of its customers have adopted coherent solutions based on Acacia’s Dual-Core Flex-Rate Denali digital signal processor (DSP) for applications in data center interconnect, metro, long haul and submarine networks.

http://www.acacia-inc.com

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Oracles Targets IaaS Market with Bare Metal Servers

Oracle has set its sights on AWS, Azure and other infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers with the launch of bare metal cloud servers that it says are 11.5X faster and 20 percent cheaper than the fastest solution offered by the competition.

The new servers are deployed in a fully virtualized network environment and offer database-as-service, network block storage, object storage and VPN connectivity. In addition, Oracle Bare Metal Cloud Services provide a secure, private and high-performance software defined Virtual Cloud Network (VCN) that allows customers to treat Oracle Bare Metal Cloud Services as a secure and elastic extension of their on-premise network. The servers are designed to maximize network throughput by providing direct connectivity between compute and storage nodes.

Another new offering is the Oracle Ravello Cloud Service, which takes enterprise VMware and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) workloads and runs them in the public cloud without any changes. Customers can run VMware natively on public cloud without requiring VM conversion, application reconfiguration or networking changes. It is also allows enterprises to have full L2 and L3 networking flexibility in the public cloud.

The company is also introducing Oracle FastConnect, which provides secure connections from an enterprise data center to the Oracle Cloud. Connectivity options now include IPsec VPN, MPLS to connect to existing enterprise networks and Fast Connect for quick peering.

https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/iaas-cloud-offerings-091916.html

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IDC: Worldwide Server Market Revenue Declines 0.4% in Q2

Vendor revenue in the worldwide server market declined 0.4% year over year to $13.4 billion in the second quarter of 2016 (2Q16), according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker.

IDC attributed the slowing market to a pause in hyperscale datacenter expansion and the continued drag from high-end server sale declines. In addition, the robust enterprise refresh cycle of 2015 will create difficult comparisons in 2016 to the prior year’s quarterly results.

Some highlights:

• Worldwide server shipments increased 2.6% to 2.4 million units in 2Q16 when compared with the same year-ago period.
• On a year-over-year basis, volume system revenue increased 5.3% and midrange system demand increased 12.7% in 2Q16 to $10.6 billion and $1.3 billion, respectively. 
• Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) retained the number 1 spot in the worldwide server market with 25.4% market share in vendor revenue for 2Q16, as revenue decreased 0.3% year over year to $3.4 billion. 
• HPE's year-over-year growth rate as reported by IDC was impacted by the start of the H3C partnership in China that began in May of 2016; as a result, a portion of HPE-designed servers were rebranded as H3C for the China market. Had these systems been branded as HPE servers, their worldwide server market share would have been 26.6% in vendor revenue for the quarter as revenue increased 4.2% year over year to $3.6 billion. 
• Dell maintained its number 2 position in the worldwide server market, building on server revenue growth of 10.0% year over year to $2.6 billion, resulting in 19.3% vendor revenue market share in 2Q16. IBM retained the number 3 position with 9.8% share for the quarter as revenue decreased -34.0% year-over-year to $1.3 billion in 2Q16, as both POWER systems and system z mainframes experienced double-digit declines. 
• Lenovo and Cisco tied for the number 4 position for the second consecutive quarter with 7.2% and 6.4% market shares, respectively. Lenovo earned $969 million in revenues following an increase of 2.1%, while Cisco's revenues declined 0.7% year over year to $860 million.
• ARM sales have yet to make an impact on the server market.

"The server market is progressing exactly as expected, with close to flat growth in the second quarter, following a difficult first quarter, but growth in volume servers is still healthy, which is a good sign for the market moving forward," said Kuba Stolarski, research director, Computing Platforms at IDC. "As we prepare for the second half of 2016, expect to see market growth led by cloud datacenter buildouts from key hyperscalers. Looking out further, the market will be impacted by digital transformation initiatives, including the Internet of Things and cognitive computing, and by a continuing shift towards software-defined infrastructure."

http://www.idc.com

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Salesforce Embeds AI in its CRM Platform

Salesforce unveiled "Einstein" -- its artificial intelligence initiative for delivering more predictive and personalized customer experiences across its CRM platform.

The company plans to embed Einstein AI capabilities will be embedded across every Salesforce Cloud. The ideal is to leverage all the data in Salesforce—customer data; activity data from Chatter, email, calendar and ecommerce; social data streams such as tweets and images; and even IoT signals—to train predictive models.

The AI is powered by advanced machine learning, deep learning, predictive analytics, natural language processing and smart data discovery.  Salesforce said its AI allow models to be automatically customized for every single customer, with Einstein automatically discovering relevant insights, predicting future behavior, proactively recommending best next actions and even automating tasks.

One outcome is Predictive Lead Scoring, which aims to help sales reps focus on closing the best leads.

“With Salesforce Einstein, we are delivering the world's smartest CRM," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, Salesforce. "Einstein is now every customer’s data scientist, making it easy for everyone to take advantage of best-in-class AI capabilities in the context of their business.”

http://sforce.co/2d0LYd7

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