NTT Com expands Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service with Azure

NTT Communications (NTT Com) is expanding its Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) by leveraging Microsoft Azure Site Recovery.

The new DRaaS offering enables replication of enterprise workloads to an NTT Com data center or Microsoft Azure, assuring real-time business continuity (BC) in the case of unexpected server failures or planned downtime. Microsoft Azure Site Recovery is an automated disaster recovery software solution built upon the capabilities of Azure. In addition to replication, NTT Com’s DRaaS offering provides full-scale planning, implementation, testing and management.

“With no capital investment and paying for only the resources they consume, enterprise customers can replicate their primary environment to NTT Com or to Microsoft Azure, depending on their requirements,” said Justin Bannister, Product Manager, North America, for NTT Com. “This is a key differentiator - with NTT Com’s full suite of managed cloud and DRaaS services, customers can securely replicate workloads that don’t fit in the public cloud to an NTT Com data center. They have options.”

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Google Cloud IoT Core released to beta testing

Google Cloud IoT Core, which is a fully-managed service on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to help securely connect and manage IoT devices at scale, has now entered public beta testing

Google has designed its Cloud IoT Core to enable organizations to connect and centrally manage millions of globally dispersed IoT devices. The company says it is working with many customers across industries such as transportation, oil and gas, utilities, healthcare and ride-sharing.

The Google Cloud IoT solution ingests IoT data and then can connect to other Google analytics services including Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Google Cloud Dataflow, Google Cloud Bigtable, Google BigQuery, and Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine.

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Cloudify names Krish A. Prabhu as an advisor

Cloudify, a software developer that specializes in lifecycle management and network functions in cloud-native environments, announced that Dr. Krish A. Prabhu has joined the company as a special strategic advisor.

Prabhu most recently served as president of AT&T Labs and chief technology officer, where he led the flagship network transformation project, driving a revolutionary approach to open Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) on a global scale and automating network operations and control functions. This project now serves as the primary codebase for the Linux Foundation Project ONAP (Open Network Automation Project) on which Cloudify and AT&T have collaborated and are both platinum founding members.

Previously, Prabhu was CEO of Tellabs. Earlier in his career, he held several management positions at Alcatel in Paris from 1991 to 2001, including serving as chief operating officer from 1999 to 2001.

GigaSpaces to spin-off Cloudify orchestration and cloud mgt division

Monday, July 31, 2017    No Comments

New York-based GigaSpaces Technologies, a supplier of software enabling in-memory computing, announced that it plans to spin off Cloudify, its orchestration and cloud management platform business unit, into a new company focused on the growing market for management and orchestration of cloud applications and network functions virtualisation (NFV).

GigaSpaces stated that it began planning for the spin-off last year, based on strong demand for the Cloudify product line in its core enterprise cloud markets and the emerging carrier network orchestration market. The move is intended to enable the Cloudify entity to dedicate engineering, product development, marketing and customer support activities to addressing the cloud market segment.

The new company will retain the core Cloudify engineering, product and marketing teams, working from existing locations in New York City, San Jose, California and Tel Aviv in Israel.

In 2016, GigaSpaces open sourced its products and implemented an open source support business model. The GigaSpaces IMC business unit launched InsightEdge, based on the Apache Spark cluster computing project, while Cloudify launched Apache Project ARIA, an open source orchestration library designed to accelerate TOSCA adoption.

The Cloudify project was launched in its current form in 2014 as an open source TOSCA orchestration platform, positioning Cloudify as a provider of technology for connecting hybrid clouds and the networking layer. The convergence of technology establishes Cloudify as an orchestrator capable of providing end-to-end orchestration of both networks and applications in multi-cloud environments.

Cloudify features built-in support for private clouds such as OpenStack and VMware, public clouds Amazon Web Services, Azure and Google Compute Platform, and container technologies such as Kubernetes. The platform is also being adopted by large telcos and carriers to manage NFV.

GigaSpaces noted that it will continue to market its in-memory computing via its XAP and InsightEdge product lines.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170727005137/en/GigaSpaces-Plans-Spinoff-Cloudify-Division-Focus-Enterprise

* Last year, Cloudify unveiled its Telecom Edition open source orchestrator solution at the OPNFV Summit in Berlin. Cloudify has designed the Telecom Edition to meet the needs of NFV operators by adding a set of new features, NFV-specific plugins and blueprints showcasing how to mode VNFs and SFC (service function chaining).

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NVIDIA secures server design wins with leading manufacturers

NVIDIA has secured design wins for its Volta architecture-based Tesla V100 GPU accelerators with the leading server manufacturers, including Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Supermicro, Inspur, Lenovo and Huawei.

Each NVIDIA V100 GPU features over 21 billion transistors, as well as 640 Tensor Cores, the latest NVLink high-speed interconnect technology, and 900 GB/sec HBM2 DRAM to achieve 50 percent more memory bandwidth than previous generation GPUs. NVIDIA says this enables 120 teraflops of deep learning performance.

V100-based systems announced include:

• Dell EMC -- The PowerEdge R740 supporting up to three V100 GPUs for PCIe, the PowerEdge R740XD supporting up to three V100 GPUs for PCIe, and the PowerEdge C4130 supporting up to four V100 GPUs for PCIe or four V100 GPUs for NVIDIA NVLink™ interconnect technology in an SXM2 form factor.
• HPE -- HPE Apollo 6500 supporting up to eight V100 GPUs for PCIe and HPE ProLiant DL380 systems supporting up to three V100 GPUs for PCIe.
• IBM -- The next generation of IBM Power Systems servers based on the POWER9 processor will incorporate multiple V100 GPUs and take advantage of the latest generation NVLink interconnect technology -- featuring fast GPU-to-GPU interconnects and an industry-unique OpenPOWER CPU-to-GPU design for maximum throughput.
• Supermicro -- Products supporting the new Volta GPUs include a 7048GR-TR workstation for all-around high-performance GPU computing, 4028GR-TXRT, 4028GR-TRT and 4028GR-TR2 servers designed to handle the most demanding deep learning applications, and 1028GQ-TRT servers built for applications such as advanced analytics.

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Cloudian brings its S3 API interface to Azure Blob Storage

Cloudian, a start-up based in San Mateo, California, is extending its hybrid cloud object storage system into Microsoft Azure.

Cloudian HyperCloud for Microsoft Azure leverages the company's S3 API interface to Azure Blob Storage. Cloudian said the world's largest Industrial Internet enterprise is using Cloudian HyperCloud for Azure to connect its Industrial Internet of Things solution to Azure Blob Storage.

"Cloudian HyperCloud for Azure is a game-changer for public cloud storage, enabling true bi-modal data storage across multiple cloud environments," said Michael Tso, Cloudian CEO and co-founder. "For the first time, customers have a fully supported, enterprise-ready solution to access their choice of cloud platforms from their S3-compliant applications. Customers can be up and running in minutes by launching HyperCloud from the Microsoft Azure Marketplace."

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Global LTE connections reach 2.37 billion

The global migration from 3G to 4G continues to gather pace. Global LTE connections grew 59 percent from June 2016 to June 2017 reaching 2.37 billion, according to 5G Americas and Ovum, and now constitutes 30% of all cellular connections.

Some highlights:

• North America achieved 327 million LTE subscriptions by the end of June 2017 with some of the highest penetration rates, most extensive coverage and largest market share for LTE in the world. 
• Latin America nearly doubled LTE connections to 159 million from 81.5 million year-over-year at 2Q 2017 increasing by 95 percent.
• New LTE deployments continue and as of mid-August TeleGeography (GlobalComm) reported 551 commercial LTE deployments worldwide, while 206 of those operators have already evolved to LTE-Advanced.
• Worldwide, LTE is forecast to continue its momentum, reaching over 2.5 billion connections by the end of 2017, 3 billion in 2018 and 4.9 billion connections in 2022. 
• 5G is expected to accumulate connections starting in 2019 and by 2022, it is forecast to have 389 million connections worldwide.
• In Latin America, there are now 695 million total mobile wireless subscriptions, of which 159 million were LTE connections; 77.6 million new LTE connections added year-over-year from 2Q 2016.

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Gigamon Extends its Visibility Platform for Azure

Gigamon is extending its data-in-motion Visibility Platform to include the Microsoft Azure environment to ensure that data-in-motion entering, traversing or leaving the cloud can be protected and monitored by existing security operations centers.

Key features:

• One consistent method to acquire network traffic and apply traffic intelligence before distributing to multiple tools.
• Centralized orchestration and single-pane-of-glass visualization of the Gigamon Visibility Platform across the entire infrastructure – on-premise, public and private cloud. Traffic policies are defined using a simple drag-n-drop user interface.
• Tight integration with Azure APIs and Azure Monitor to automatically detect changes in Azure Virtual Networks.
• Centralized visibility for security monitoring of all Azure Virtual Networks in an enterprise.

"Our customers around the globe require a solution that provides the same level of visibility in their cloud, virtualized and on-premise environments allowing them to leverage the knowledge and processes they've built as they work to secure their enterprise and cloud networks," said Ananda Rajagopal, vice president of products at Gigamon.

Gigamon Debuts Visibility Platform on AWS

Tuesday, November 22, 2016    No Comments

Gigamon released its data-in-motion visibility platform on AWS. The Gigamon Visibility Platform for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) enables enterprises to gain visibility into network traffic in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), eliminating both the visibility gap and the need for custom agents. It provides the ability to consolidate and distribute traffic to multiple security and management tools while supporting Gigamon’s patented...

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NTT Com launches cloud-based SAP solutions globally

NTT Communications introduced its Enterprise Cloud for ERP, a multi-tenant cloud platform service for SAP installations.

The new service, which is offered in collaboration with Dell Technologies Group’s Virtustream and EMC Japan, provides enterprises with the ability to access and run mission-critical core SAP systems in the cloud on a global basis. 

NTT Com's Enterprise Cloud for ERP service has an option for virtual HANA (offering up to 2.9TB of memory) and physical HANA (up to 8.0TB of memory), which will be available as a multi-tenant cloud platform supporting SAP HANA’s in-memory database architecture. NTT Com plans to offer a “high availability” option that ensures enhanced resilience and disaster recovery via the use of diverse routing and duplicate datacenters in Tokyo and Osaka. The service will also include pay-as-you-go options that leverage μVM resource-management technology to regulate CPU & memory usage, enabling customers to enjoy the flexibility and reliability of a cloud environment combining virtual and physical HANA environments. The service aims to reduce total cost of ownership by up to 65% compared to on-premise systems.

NTT Com also plans to offer a total SAP solution in the Americas, Europe, and Australia incorporating the same onboarding services and managed services.

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Transpacific Hawaiki submarine cable reaches development milestone

Hawaiki, the new subsea cable system that will link Australia, New Zealand, and islands of the south Pacific with Hawaii and the mainland United States, reached another construction milestone. The 14,000 km of undersea fiber-optic cable is in the final stages of being loaded aboard TE SubCom’s cable-laying vessels, the CS Global Sentinel and the CS Responder. Installation of the system will commence in early October 2017.

The fiber cable was manufactured at SubCom’s Newington, New Hampshire facility, along with more than 170 completed repeaters. TE SubCom also noted that horizontal directional drilling (HDD) for the cable landing in Pacific City, Oregon and Sydney, Australia has been completed. In Sydney, the construction of the land duct route is complete, the installation of the terminal equipment has started and the pulling of the land cable is scheduled to begin shortly. In New Zealand, the construction of the land duct route is complete and the construction of a new cable station is underway.

The system is on schedule for completion by mid-2018.

The carrier-neutral Hawaiki cable system was co-developed by New Zealand-based entrepreneurs Sir Eion Edgar, Malcolm Dick and Remi Galasso.

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Google acquires Bitium for identity and access management

Google has acquired Bitium, a start-up based Santa Monica, California, that specializes in identity and access management. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Bitium, which was founded in 2012, provides tools to support single sign-on, password management and analytics across cloud services for small, medium and enterprise businesses. Bitium helps enterprises manage access to range of web-based applications — including Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365, as well as social networks and CRM, collaboration and marketing tools.

Bitium will now become part of the Google Cloud team.

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Accelerite builds a hybrid cloud stack

Accelerite, a start-up based in Santa Clara, California, introduced a hybrid cloud platform that federates on-premises resources with public clouds including AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.

Accelerite's new Rovius Cloud platform, which can be deployed on commodity hardware, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) or traditional blade servers, aims to simplify deployment, monitoring and management of on-premises and public cloud compute, storage and networking resources. Rovius Cloud is server, storage (SDS, NAS, SAN, All) and hypervisor (VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, XenServer) agnostic.

The Rovius Cloud is a fully-integrated hybrid cloud stack that builds on Accelerite's CloudPlatform, which combines a cloud resource orchestrator with powerful compute, storage and network managers.

“We developed Rovius Cloud specifically to address the pain we saw enterprises experiencing when trying to deploy and manage hybrid clouds at scale,” said Rajesh Ramchandani, General Manager of Cloud Services and Platforms for Accelerite. “Existing approaches were both too limited in their capabilities and rigid in their implementation requirements. With Rovius Cloud, users get the scalability, monitoring and management functionality they need with the flexibility and simplicity they have been missing. It’s a clear win for IT, end users and cloud providers.” 

Rovius Cloud for AWS is available immediately. Rovius Cloud for Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure will be available in Q4 of this year.

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NVIDIA sees big wins for data center GPUs in China

NVIDIA announced some big wins in China for its Volta GPUs - Alibaba Cloud, Baidu and Tencent are all incorporating the NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU accelerators into their data centers and cloud-service infrastructures.
Specifically, the three cloud giants are shifting from NVIDIA Pascal architecture-based systems to Volta-based platforms, which offer performance gains for AI inferencing and training.

The NVIDIA V100 data center GPU packs 21 billion transistors and provides a 5x improvement over the preceding NVIDIA Pascal architecture P100 GPU accelerators.


NVIDIA also announced that China's leading original equipment manufacturers -- including Inspur, Lenovo and Huawei -- are using the NVIDIA HGX reference architecture to offer Volta-based accelerated systems for hyperscale data centers.

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FlyData raises $4 million for cloud data migration

FlyData, a start-up based in Sunnyvale, California with roots in Japan, raised $4 million in venture funding for its data-driven management solution that enables customers to move large amounts of information to existing data warehouses.

Mirai Creation Investment Limited Partnership (operated by SPARX Group Co., Ltd.) led the investment round, with participation from Amano Corporation and Nissay Capital. Previously FlyData raised more than $5M from noted investors in Japan and the US, including 500 Startups.

FlyData said it is developing a cloud-based Big Data platform to help automotive/manufacturing customers improve the efficiency of production-line and quality control through a partnership with OptoComb, a leading optical-based sensor company. The company was founded in 2011 based on a project selected as a part of Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry's MITOU Program.

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RAD and Advantech partner on Universal CPE White Box

RAD and the Networks & Communications Group of Advantech have developed a universal CPE (uCPE) white box solution offering carrier-class service demarcation and enhanced performance assurance capabilities.  This includes the ability to deliver premium, SLA-based Carrier Ethernet and IP services combined with advanced diagnostics capabilities to detect, localize and troubleshoot network and NFVI/VNF performance issues.

The solution includes Advantech’s universal CPE (uCPE) white box and RAD’s vCPE-OS, which hosts virtual network functions (VNFs) from any vendor.

The ecosystem partnership between the two companies also includes interoperability certification of RAD’s Linux–based vCPE-OS on Advantech’s FWA-1010VC, providing a carrier-class NFV infrastructure (NFVI) with open management interfaces, and with acceleration and integrated networking capabilities.

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China Mobile looks to buy Oi Brasil

China Mobile is negotiating to acquire the mobile division of Oi, the largest telecommunications company in Brazil and South America, according to report in The China Daily.

The deal has not been finalized. China Mobile might have to pay US$3.5 billion in fines owed by Oi to the Brazilian telecoms authority, known as Agencia Nacional de Telecomunicacoes, or Anatel.

If it goes through, the deal would be historic on several fronts. None of the Chinese telecommunications carriers have acquired other carriers in other countries. China Mobile, which is already the world's largest mobile operator, would add nearly 41 million mobile subscribers in Brazil.

Oi, which was once known as Telemar, was formed through the merger of 16 state-owned incumbent local exchange carriers. The company was re-branded as "Oi" in 2007. In June 2016, Oi filed for bankruptcy protection, citing US$19 billion (R$65 billion) in debt. The case is still pending in the Brazilian courts.

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Amazon Web Services plans data centre in Bahrain

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is planning to open an infrastructure region in Bahrain by early 2019. The new AWS Middle East Region will consist of three Availability Zones at launch. AWS today also announced it will launch an AWS Edge Network Location in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in the first quarter of 2018. This will bring Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, AWS Shield, and AWS WAF to the region and adds to the 78 points of presence AWS has around the world.

Currently, AWS provides 44 Availability Zones across 16 infrastructure regions worldwide, with another 14 Availability Zones, across five AWS Regions in China, France, Hong Kong, Sweden, and a second GovCloud Region in the U.S. expected to come online by the end of 2018.

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SAP to acquire Gigya for its consent-based identity data platform

SAP has agreed to acquire Gigya, a start-up offering a customer identity and access management platform. Financial terms were not disclosed, however, The Jerusalem Post valued the deal at US$350 million.

Gigya, which is based in Mountain View, California, with R&D in Israel, specializes in customer identity and access management (CIAM). Its platform enables businesses to (1) securely identify, register and engage with customers across channels and devices, (2) capture first-party data and build rich, actionable user profiles while respecting customer privacy, and (3) integrate customer data into marketing, sales and service applications.

Gigya, an SAP Hybris partner since 2013, has customers already using a solution extension from SAP Hybris and Gigya. Following the acquisition, Gigya will become part of the SAP Hybris business unit for customer engagement and commerce.

“Combining the data matching and enrichment capabilities of SAP Hybris Profile with Gigya’s consent-based identity data and access management platform will allow us to identify consumers across channels and offer a robust single consumer profile,” said Patrick Salyer, CEO of Gigya. “This is a vital step for digitalizing businesses because companies need to be able to draw accurate conclusions seamlessly across all channels, including web, mobile, in-store or connected devices, and the Internet of Things, as well as collect data about consumer preferences. Together, we are uniquely positioned to drive more effective marketing, sales and service through data, while the customer stays in control of how much data is shared.”

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Video: Open Radisys - Fast Forward to More Agile, Flexible and Profitable Networks

In the last 20 years, 52% of the Fortune 500 companies have disappeared. Disrupt or be Disrupted.

Listen and watch our President and CEO, Brian Bronson, discuss how Radisys is making this transition for service providers - seamlessly.

See video: https://youtu.be/VBsa_bwRp00

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ETSI and OpenFog Consortium collaborate on fog and edge

The OpenFog Consortium, which was formed by ARM, Cisco, Dell, Intel, Microsoft, and Princeton University in November 2015, is now collaborating with ETSI to develop fog-enabled mobile edge applications and technologies.

Specifically, OpenFog will work with the ETSI Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) Industry Specification Group (ISG).  One of the first initiatives from the agreement will be focused on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) which support edge computing interoperability within in the OpenFog reference architecture.

“This OpenFog-ETSI MOU is a significant step in our efforts to build interoperability for efficient and reliable networks and intelligent endpoints operating along the Cloud-to-Things continuum,” said Helder Antunes, chairman of the OpenFog Consortium and Senior Director, Cisco. “We’re now positioned to leverage our respective work to give the industry a cohesive set of standards around fog computing in mobile environments, while eliminating any redundancy in our respective efforts.”

OpenFog Consortium Releases its Reference Architecture

Wednesday, February 08, 2017  Fog  No Comments

The OpenFog Consortium, whose founding members include ARM, Cisco, Dell, Intel, Microsoft, and Princeton University, published its OpenFog Reference Architecture, a universal technical framework designed to enable the data-intensive requirements of the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G and artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Fog computing is the system-level architecture that brings computing, storage, control, and networking functions closer...

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Video: Multi-Access CORD Demo

Prakash Siva introduces both demos at the ONF Partner Showcase by explaining how CORD brings together the best of SDN & NFV with cloud technology that transforms today's data centers. This particular demo highlights how CORD becomes a unifying platform, or hybrid CORD for both mobile residential and universal platforms.

See video: https://youtu.be/k5LwOgjas18

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