Cisco releases Application Centric Infrastructure 3.0

Cisco released version 3.0 of its Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) software-defined networking (SDN) solution for data centers and enterprise clouds. The latest software adds key features for multi-site scalability, container integration, and enhanced security.

The new ACI 3.0 features include:

• Multi-site Management: Customers can seamlessly connect and manage multiple ACI fabrics that are geographically distributed to improve availability by isolating fault domains, and provide a global view of network policy through a single management portal. This greatly simplifies disaster recovery and the ability to scale out applications.
• Kubernetes Integration: Customers can deploy their workloads as micro-services in containers, define ACI network policy for these through Kubernetes, and get unified networking constructs for containers, virtual machines, and bare-metal. This brings the same level of deep integration to containers ACI has had with numerous hypervisors.
• Improved Operational Flexibility and Visibility: The new Next Gen ACI User Interface improves usability with new consistent layouts and simplified topology views, and troubleshooting wizards. In addition, ACI now includes graceful insertion and removal, support for mixed operating systems and quota management, and latency measurements across fabric end points for troubleshooting.
• Security: ACI 3.0 delivers new capabilities to protect networks by mitigating attacks such as IP/MAC spoofing with First Hop Security integration, automatically authenticating workloads in-band and placing them in trusted security groups, and support for granular policy enforcement for end points within the same security group.

“As our customers shift to multi-cloud strategies, they are seeking ways to simplify the management and scalability of their environments,” said Ish Limkakeng, senior vice president for data center networking at Cisco.

Read More

CENIC, Pacific Northwest Gigapop, and Internet2 renew agreement

CENIC, the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (PNWGP), and Internet2 will renew their collaboration to provide networking capabilities across the entire West Coast of the United States.

The agreement will extend high-bandwidth connectivity to the academic community using CENIC and PNWGP fiber-optic cable and Internet2’s Ciena optical system.

This supports the West Coast portion of Internet2’s nationwide backbone network. It also supports other CENIC and PNWGP networks and network initiatives, including the West Coast backbone of the Pacific Wave International Exchange, as well as the underlying infrastructure for the core of the National Science Foundation-funded Pacific Research Platform (PRP).

The term of the renewal is five years (2017 – 2022) with additional extensions possible.

Pacific Wave connects twenty-seven networks representing more than 40 countries throughout the Pacific Rim, the Americas, and the Middle East. Pacific Wave has access nodes in Los Angeles, San Jose, Seattle, Denver, Albuquerque, and El Paso and is directly connected to the StarLight International Exchange in Chicago, providing connectivity to all major European R&E networks. Additional new nodes of Pacific Wave are planned for December 2017 in Texas and Oklahoma.

“This is a significant collaboration with Internet2, one of several, which enables network interconnection and transit capabilities for our U.S. and international research partners in order to achieve the performance and service capabilities required by researchers who depend heavily on high-speed access to large datasets, remote scientific instruments, multi-institutional collaborations, and computing resources,” noted Louis Fox, president and CEO of CENIC.

Read More

Bharti Airtel to acquire Tata and its 42m mobile subscribers

Bharti Airtel, which currently ranks as India’s largest telecommunications services provider, will acquire the Tata Teleservices' Consumer Mobile Businesses (CMB) and its operations across India in nineteen circles, representing the bulk of India’s population and customer base. The deal is described as a merger that will be conducted on a debt-free and cash-free basis pending regulatory approval.

Key points:

• Tata's 42 million mobile customers and the assets of Tata CMB will be transferred to Bharti Airtel
  
• Tata's 178.5 MHz spectrum (of which 71.3 MHz is liberalised) in the 850, 1800 & 2100 MHz bands will be transferred to Bharti Airtel.
  
• The transaction will also provide Bharti Airtel with an indefeasible right to use (IRU) for part of the existing fibre network of Tata.

Tata and Bharti Airtel agreed to further explore mutual areas of cooperation. Tata is also in initial stages of exploring combination of its Enterprise Business with Tata Communications and its Retail Fixed Line and Broadband business with Tata Sky.

Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman, Bharti Airtel, said, “This is a significant development towards further consolidation in the Indian mobile industry and reinforces our commitment to lead India’s digital revolution by offering world-class and affordable telecom services through a robust technology and solid spectrum portfolio. On completion, the proposed acquisition will undergo seamless integration, both on the customer as well as the network side, and further strengthen our market position in several key circles. The customers of Tata will be able to enjoy India’s widest and fastest voice & data network, and bouquet of Airtel’s best-in-class products and services.”

Read More

AT&T cites financial impact of hurricanes, video subscriber losses

AT&T said damage caused by recent hurricanes and the earthquake in Mexico will decrease its Q3 2017 consolidated revenues nearly $90 million and its reported pre-tax earnings about $210 million, or $0.02 per diluted share. In an SEC filing, AT&T said it continues to assess damage to its network and that further charges in Q4 are likely.

It should be noted that AT&T's network in Puerto Rico completely collapsed following Hurricane Maria on September 20 (as did the mobile networks of four other carriers serving the island), and that as of October 14 only partial services have been restored and that many cell towers and backhaul links remain offline.

In its SEC filing, AT&T also noted that it lost about 90,000 video subscribers in Q3 due to heightened competition in traditional pay TV markets and over-the-top services, hurricanes and stricter credit standards. AT&T's own over-the-top DIRECTV NOW service added 300,000 users.

On the positive side, AT&T continued to expand its postpaid smartphone base even as it had nearly 900,000 fewer handset equipment upgrades than in the year-ago third quarter.

Read More

China Unicom sets up Brazilian subsidiary

China Unicom officially opened a subsidiary in Brazil. This marks the second overseas subsidiary of China Unicom International following the previous establishment of a local operating company in Russia.

China Unicom's network operates in 31 nations and has 70 overseas POPs.

The opening ceremony was attended by Consul General Chen Peijie, Consul General of the Chinese Consulate in Sao Paulo, Andre Borges, Director of the Office of the Ministry of Science and Technology Innovation and Communications of Brazil, Director of the Department of International Relations and Foreign Trade of the São Paulo State Industrial Association Tomaz Zonoto (Thomaz Zanotto), China Unicom Deputy General Manager Jiang Zhengxin.

• In September, news broke that 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. 

Read More

AT&T wins 2017 Sustainability award

AT&T was awarded the 2017 Sustainability Initiative of the Year title by The Business Intelligence Group. The award recognized AT&T for its 10x Carbon Reduction Goal.

The only other tech company winning an award this year was Oracle, which was commended for its California Water Conservation Project.

AT&T Aims for Carbon Savings 10X By 2025

Thursday, November 19, 2015  ATT, Green  No Comments

AT&T has set a goal to enable carbon savings 10 times the footprint of its operations by 2025.

The gains will be achieved by enhancing the efficiency of its network and delivering low-carbon customer solutions.

To be achieved by 2025, additional goals focus on the communities in which AT&T operates and the company's supply chain:

• AT&T will invest resources, develop initiatives and collaborate with stakeholders to close the skills gap, by increasing the number of Americans with high-quality, post-secondary degrees or credentials to 60 percent.
• AT&T will work with its industry peers to develop and promote adoption of sustainability metrics that will transform the environmental and social impact of technology supply chains.

Read More

GSMA confirms Barcelona as host of 2018 MWC

On Friday, GSMA issued a statement confirming that the 2018 edition of Mobile World Congress will take place in Barcelona from 26 February to 1 March 2018, as previously scheduled.

An agreement is in place designating Barcelona as Mobile World Capital and host city of the GSMA Mobile World Congress through 2023.

GSMA said it continues to monitor the political situation in Spain and Catalonia.

Read More

IBM and Google collaborate on container security API

IBM is joining forces with Google to create and open source the Grafeas project, which is an open source initiative to define a uniform way for auditing and governing the modern software supply chain.

Grafeas (“scribe” in Greek) provides a central source of truth for tracking and enforcing policies across an ever growing set of software development teams and pipelines. The idea is to provide a central store that other applications and tools can query to retrieve metadata on software components of all kinds.

IBM is also working on Kritis, a component which allows organizations to set Kubernetes governance policies based on metadata stored in Grafeas.

Read More

A10 scales up its DDoS protection

A10 Networks launched its most powerful DDoS protection to date with a solution that can manage 500,000 flows per second -- more than double the performance of the nearest competitive flow-based DDoS detection system, according to the company.

The A10 Thunder Threat Protection System (TPS) Detector is now available as a virtual machine on the A10 aGalaxy 5000 management appliance or on other TPS mitigation appliances. For the full solution, the Thunder TPS Detector can be integrated with A10’s TPS Mitigator and A10 aGalaxy TPS management.

A10 Thunder TPS solution leverages more than three dozen threat intelligence sources to block malicious traffic. It monitors performance and security baselines with 28 behavioral indicators.

According to a recent report commissioned by A10, large DDoS attacks greater than 50 Gbps have quadrupled the past two years. The number of companies experiencing between 6-25 attacks per year has increased more than four times in that same time span. However, with the complete Thunder TPS solution, A10 is improving protection for companies looking to augment mitigation capacity, SecOps-friendly automation, and reduction of false positives.

“With the new Thunder TPS options and flexibility, A10 is helping service providers, cloud providers, gaming companies and enterprises combat aggressive DDoS attacks with greater intelligence and agility,” said Raj Jalan, CTO of A10 Networks. “We believe the intelligent automation, combined with the industry’s highest-performing combination of powerful detection, mitigation, and management, will increase SecOps efficiency and drive more effective defense for businesses.”

Read More

ADTRAN intros 10G-EPON virtual Remote-OLTs

ADTRAN introduced environmentally sealed, 10G-EPON virtual Remote-OLTs (virtual R-OLTs) that provide cable MSOs the ability to further execute on their 10Gbps FTTH and SD-Access strategies, while seamlessly integrating into existing DOCSIS back office provisioning and operational systems.

The new virtual R-OLTs support DOCSIS provisioning of EPON (DPoETM), native SDN integration and remote outside plant packaging, enabling MSOs to capitalize on evolving distributed access architecture (DAA) deployments as they leverage next-generation FTTH to enhance support for high-bandwidth services.

ADTRAN said its OLTs bridge the management horizon with support of both DPoE management and modern SDN control protocols allowing MSOs to effectively execute over time their transition to virtualized, managed and orchestrated SD-Access service architectures.

“ADTRAN’s market leadership in outside plant (OSP) product design has enabled us to successfully deploy hundreds of thousands of remote FTTx systems in many of the world’s harshest environments,” said Hossam Salib, vice president of cable and wireless strategy at ADTRAN. “Combining this unique OSP experience with our field-proven, fully standards-compliant DPoETM solution and our SD-Access leadership uniquely qualify ADTRAN to meet the requirements of a range of evolving DAA strategies.”

Read More

INEX deploys Coriant Groove G30 in Irish Internet Exchange

INEX, the Internet exchange for the island of Ireland, has deployed the Coriant Groove G30 Network Disaggregation Platform in its backbone network.

INEX is located in six data centres in the Dublin region and opened its first regional Internet exchange in Cork in 2016. INEX currently has over 1 terabit of connected capacity with approximately 300 petabytes of traffic having flowed over the exchange in 2016.

Coriant's Groove G30 platform is being used for secure, resilient, and scalable high-speed services, including 100G interconnect services optimized for growth in Internet. The network is now live.

The Coriant Groove G30 delivers 3.2 Tbps of capacity throughput in a highly compact, power-efficient 1RU form factor. It features a plug-and-play modular architecture and can be equipped as a muxponder terminal solution and as an Open Line System (OLS) optical layer solution.

Read More

AWS and Microsoft collaborate on deep learning library

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft announced a new deep learning library, called Gluon,for prototyping, building, training and deploying sophisticated machine learning models for the cloud, devices at the edge and mobile apps.

"The potential of machine learning can only be realized if it is accessible to all developers. Today’s reality is that building and training machine learning models requires a great deal of heavy lifting and specialized expertise,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Amazon AI. “We created the Gluon interface so building neural networks and training models can be as easy as building an app. We look forward to our collaboration with Microsoft on continuing to evolve the Gluon interface for developers interested in making machine learning easier to use.”

“We believe it is important for the industry to work together and pool resources to build technology that benefits the broader community,” said Eric Boyd, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft AI and Research. “This is why Microsoft has collaborated with AWS to create the Gluon interface and enable an open AI ecosystem where developers have freedom of choice. Machine learning has the ability to transform the way we work, interact and communicate. To make this happen we need to put the right tools in the right hands, and the Gluon interface is a step in this direction.”

Key facts on the Gluon interface:

• Provides an easy-to-understand programming interface that enables developers to quickly prototype and experiment with neural network models
• Can be used to create neural networks on the fly, and to change their size and shape dynamically. 
• Currently works with Apache MXNet and will support Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK) in an upcoming release
• Can be used to build machine learning models using a simple Python API and a range of pre-built, optimized neural network components. 

https://github.com/gluon-api/gluon-api/.

Read More

EE flies a 4G mast in helium balloon

EE, which is now part of BT Group, deplyed a Helikite ‘air mast’ at a Red Bull Foxhunt downhill mountain biking event in Wales. Specifically, the EE air mast was flown 300 feet above Machynlleth, on the edge of Snowdonia National Park, to boost 4G coverage and capacity for the Red Bull mountain biking event.

EE claims this was the first time the balloon technology has been used to provide mobile connectivity to consumers.

EE also noted that it recently upgraded more than 900 sites across the UK to support the latest smartphones with Cat 12 and Cat 16 capabilities, increasing the maximum downlink rate from 50Mbps to up to 100Mbps.

Read More

Juniper trims Q3 financial expectations

Citing weakness in cloud sales, Juniper Networks trimmed its financial outlook for Q3 2017, saying it now expects revenue to be in the range of $1,250 million to $1,260 million, below the company's previous guidance of $1,290 million to $1,350 million. Juniper now expects non-GAAP net income per diluted share of $0.54 to $0.56, compared to previous guidance of $0.55 to $0.61 per diluted share.

"We are confident in our company strategy, product roadmap and strong positioning with our cloud provider customers as we continue to navigate and disrupt a very dynamic industry. Although we are disappointed in our lower than anticipated revenue, we remain focused on operational excellence, cost efficiencies, and delivering long-term, sustainable growth," stated Rami Rahim, Chief Executive Officer of Juniper Networks.

Read More

CableLabs completes Full Duplex DOCSIS 3.1 spec

CableLabs has completed its Full Duplex DOCSIS 3.1 specification, significantly increasing upstream capacity and enabling symmetric multi-Gigabit services over existing hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) technology. Full Duplex DOCSIS 3.1 technology builds on the DOCSIS 3.1 specification, which made deployments of 10 Gbps downstream and 1 Gbps upstream broadband possible.

Full duplex communication enables upstream and downstream traffic to efficiently use the same spectrum simultaneously. In contrast, spectrum is typically split between the upstream and downstream in current DOCSIS implementations.

“In the United States, more than 90 percent of households are connected to an HFC network, and consumers typically have higher download speeds than upload speeds,” said Phil McKinney, president and chief executive officer of CableLabs. “By enabling Full Duplex DOCSIS, the upstream and downstream traffic can flow at up to 10 Gigabits concurrently, doubling the efficiency of spectrum use.”

Read More

Alibaba to crank up its research activities

Alibaba expects to invest more than US$15 billion in research and development over the next three years. The expanded R&D efforts includes the launch of a new Alibaba Academy for Discovery, Adventure, Momentum and Outlook (DAMI) which will focus on cutting-edge technologies such as machine learning, network security, visual computing, Natural Language Processing. The academy plans to open seven research labs in China (Beijing and Hangzhou), the United States (San Mateo and Bellevue), Russia (Moscow), Israel (Tel Aviv) and Singapore.

Alibaba Group’s Chief Technology Officer, Jeff ZHANG will be the head of the Academy.

“The Alibaba DAMO Academy will be at the forefront of developing next-generation technology that will spur the growth of Alibaba and our partners. We aim to discover breakthrough technologies that will enable greater efficiency, network security and ecosystem synergy for end-users and businesses everywhere,” said Jeff ZHANG.

The Academy will set up an advisory board of globally renowned educators and researchers, including:

• Avi Wigderson, Professor of Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
• George Church, Professor of Harvard University and Professor of Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Henry M. Levy, Professor and Director of the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington
• Hong MEI, Professor and Vice President of Beijing Institute of Technology
• Jeannette Wing, Director of the Data Science Institute, Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University
• Kai LI, Professor of Princeton University
• Michael I. Jordan, Professor of University of California, Berkeley
• Ru HUANG, Professor and Dean of School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University
• Wen GAO, Professor and Dean of Faculty of Information and Engineering Sciences, Peking University
• Zhaohui WU, President, Zhejiang University

Read More

Vantage plans $1 billion data centre in Ashburn

Vantage Data Centers announced plans to invest $1 billion to build a brand-new 108MW wholesale data center campus in Ashburn, Virginia. The company has already purchased a 42-acre property for the project.

The new facility will be larger than Vantage's campuses in Silicon Valley and Quincy, Washington. The new facility is less than two miles away from Mae East (Equinix). The company 8, with a five-building design. The first 24MW building  will be ready in early 2019.

Read More

Tintri updates its automation toolset for all-flash

Tintri, which offers an enterprise cloud platform, announced the latest release of its Automation Toolkit featuringexpanded capabilities for automating all-flash storage operations.

The latest version of Tintri Automation Toolkit provides a set of APIs and SDKs to build automation workflows that are standardized, repeatable and abstracted at the same level – the virtualized application – as their other workflows for maximum efficiency. The 3.1 version supports Tintri synchronous replication and has the ability to initiate failovers. The Toolkit consists of the following features:

• Tintri REST API – the fully documented REST API provides customers a high degree of flexibility to extract any data and perform any action on any VM
• Tintri Python SDK – provides abstraction above the REST API for use in automating Tintri with open source, OpenStack and Linux environments
• Tintri PowerShell Toolkit – provides a full set of PowerShell cmdlets for use in Microsoft Windows environments. The Toolkit integrates with a heterogeneous ecosystem of PowerShell offerings from other companies, including integration with VMware vSphere PowerCLI cmdlets.

Read More

Box brings machine learning to its cloud storage

Box introduced a framework for applying machine learning tools such as computer vision, video indexing, and sentiment analysis to content stored in its cloud service.

The Box Skills framework includes functionality powered by IBM Watson, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as Box Skills Kit, a set of developer resources for building custom skills. These skills include:

• Audio Intelligence: Uses audio files to create and index a text transcript that can be easily searched and manipulated in a variety of use cases
• Video Intelligence: Provides transcription, topic detection and detects people to allow users to quickly find the information they need in a video
• Image Intelligence: Detects individual objects and concepts in image files, captures text through optical character recognition (OCR), and automatically adds keyword labels to images to easily build metadata on image catalogs.

Box will also add automatic workflow initiation, APIs, e-signatures, and workflow management tools to its workflow software.

Read More

FirstNet and AT&T launch developer program for public safety

FirstNet and AT&T, which in April announced a partnership for the deployment of a national high-speed data and voice network for first responders, launched a developer program geared toward America’s first responders.

FirstNet is looking to independent software developers to spur innovation and create new apps for public safety. The developer program will feed the FirstNet app store, providing public safety with a one-stop shop for reliable, highly secure solutions optimized for the FirstNet network. Based on common and open standards, this ecosystem will be an engine for innovative, cost effective and interoperable public safety solutions.

“The FirstNet app ecosystem is an important building block as we work to modernize public safety’s communications tools and capabilities,” said Chris Sambar, senior vice president, AT&T – FirstNet. “The FirstNet network will bring public safety the connectivity they need to communicate and collaborate. But it’s really what we’re able to build on top of that connectivity that will make the biggest difference in these brave men and women’s day-to-day operations.”

Read More