Cloud Foundry Foundation Advances Platform-as-a-Service

A new Cloud Foundry Foundation has been established with the aim of promoting a global standard for open Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).  The effort will be managed as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project and operate under a system of open governance created by a team of open source experts from founding Platinum Members EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Pivotal, SAP and VMware.

As an open source project, Cloud Foundry is being used in a variety of commercial deployments including Pivotal Cloud Foundry, IBM Bluemix, HP Helion and Canopy Cloud Fabric among others.

The Cloud Foundry Foundation is also implementing a new approach to open source development called Dojo. This offers developers a unique “fast track” for commit rights, which often take more than a year to gain in a major project.
Recent technical features and community contributions to the project include:

• Docker support for Diego (early release available for testing)
• Ability to FUSE devices in containers
• Firehose: app logs and Cloud Foundry component metrics stream
• Expanded build pack support for Go, PHP, Python and more
• Internationalization and extensibility model for Cloud Foundry CLI
• BOSH external Cloud Provider Interface (CPI)

Gold members of the Cloud Foundry Foundation include Accenture, ActiveState, BNY Mellon, Capgemini, CenturyLink, Ericsson, GE, Hortonworks, NTT, SAS, Swisscom, and Verizon. Silver members include Akamai, Alpine Data Labs, Altoros, Anchora, Anynines, AppDirect, AppDynamics, Azul Systems, Blue Box, Braintribe, Canonical, Canopy, CloudCredo, Docker, Fujitsu, jFrog, Mimacom, Mendix, MongoDB, Piston Cloud Computing, Produban, Redis Labs, Stark & Wayne, Telus and Toshiba Solutions.

http://www.cloudfoundry.org/

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Nokia Security Center Opens in Berlin

Nokia inaugurated an advanced mobile broadband security complex that combines a research laboratory and demo center with conference facilities.

Nokia Security Center in Berlin provides a laboratory equipped with a fully-operational 4G/LTE test network. The facility provides a platform for cooperating with mobile network operators, partners, governments and academic institutes to develop and share security know-how and expertise in how to protect networks against increasing security threats.

“The Nokia Security Center is the vital next stage in our strategy to make mobile broadband security a key differentiator for our company. Nokia is designing all its products with security built-in and is continuously expanding its security portfolio with our own developments as well as with qualified partner products. Our solutions improve the security of our digital society,” stated Marc Rouanne, executive vice president, mobile broadband at Nokia Networks.

http://networks.nokia.com/

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Ciena Hits Q4 Revenue of $591.0 million

Ciena reported revenue of $591.0 million for its fiscal fourth quarter of 2014, as compared to $583.4 million for the fourth quarter 2013. For fiscal year 2014, Ciena reported revenue of $2.3 billion, as compared to $2.1 billion for fiscal year 2013.

Ciena's GAAP net loss for the fiscal fourth quarter 2014 was $(30.7) million, or $(0.29) per diluted common share, which compares to a GAAP net loss of $(9.8) million, or $(0.09) per diluted common share, for the fiscal fourth quarter 2013.

“We delivered strong revenue growth and improved profitability in fiscal 2014 as we benefited from a more diversified customer base and the strong alignment of our solutions with the increasing on-demand needs of our customers,” said Gary B. Smith, president and CEO of Ciena. “As we continue to expand Ciena’s role and reach, we are well positioned to drive continued growth and increased profitability in 2015.”

http://www.ciena.com

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Blueprint: How NFV is Shifting Service Provider Culture

by Jack Barrett, Senior Director of Strategic Account Marketing, Juniper Networks

Gone are the days where mobile providers and telecommunications companies can rightfully be called “phone companies.”

As early as the end of last year, U.S. service providers for the first time saw data revenue outpace voice fees. Nokia Networks has posited that mobile subscribers will consume a full gigabyte of data daily, up from approximately 500 megabytes today.

This points to a larger trend at play – the business model and infrastructure at the center of the modern service provider’s data deluge are shifting dramatically.

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) promise to render networks more agile and suitable for evolving subscriber needs. But this shift to virtualized, software-driven networks isn’t just about upgrading technology. It will also require a stark transformation in the business processes, worker skills and culture within telco organizations.

First, some context

Over the last few months, we’ve met with several of our major service-provider customers who have asked us to discuss our point of view on their journey to NFV and SDN.  As a result, we found four main organizational elements that SDN and NFV are forcing service providers to address:

1. Business processes
2. New software skills
3. Roles and responsibilities
4. Company Culture

The two acronyms SDN and NFV signal a breaking of the silos under which telco servics are traditionally employed. Additionally, the simplification, automation and analytics that accompany NFV and SDN achieve operational benefits by reducing the costs associated with manual and complex processes.

This means groups within telcos – be it the networking guys or the IT folks – that previously never had to collaborate are coming together in new ways as the organizational walls fall.

The Automation in SDN/NFV Requires Faster Business Processes

Simplification and automation is imperative to rapidly delivering the services that consumers and businesses alike need. That could include on-demand firewalls for a startup or tune-streaming services to music lovers that don’t count against data plans.

With NFV, teams can now quickly build and scale these types of new services using virtual functions.

With the introduction of NFV and SDN technologies, software automates complex operational process, and delivers networks functions previously delivered by dedicated or proprietary hardware.  This requires a new process model for controlling software-based objects, not boxes, and as such, service providers must learn to work with logical devices as well as physical devices.   These techniques, which were pioneered in the data center, are no longer restricted to the Web services model and the data center, but now extend to the service provider and global network.

It is important for service providers to understand how SDN and NFV will impact their business. Mapping out where SDN and NFV will most greatly affect their business is the first step to embracing the changes that they will bring. A deep dive into the technology will allow service providers to establish the processes needed, and enable them to support automation and software control.

The New Network Requires New Software Skills

Perhaps one of the most dramatic shifts service providers will face in the transition to NFV or SDN is the need for new software development skills. Network engineering is still a core competency of service providers, who must manage and maintain facilities and service level agreements (SLA) to carry the traffic. However, with services being delivered on programmable platforms, organizations require software skills and DevOps-ready staff.

DevOps brings an agile services delivery model to network services. Spanning code generation, planning, version control, automated testing and code checking, automated release and other functions, DevOps enables service providers to go from delivering services in months and years to delivering services in days and minutes. We see new roles emerging within the service provider:

• IT generalists with responsibilities throughout the virtualization stack
• SDN engineering for flow architecture design and management
• Cloud orchestration, which involves third parties delivering brokerage and clearing-house capabilities
• Partner and channel development to provide content delivery, XaaS and other cloud services as customer solutions

The New Network Changes Roles and Responsibilities

The result of virtualizing the underlying network and separating it from service delivery is the creation of a development platform for service delivery. Because the network now accommodates the use of software-development methodologies, service providers need to embrace concepts like agility and DevOps as the way to speedy service delivery.

This, therefore, extends the influence of traditional IT and CIO functions to the other more operational realms of the network.

This is not about collapsing the CIO and CTO into a single role. The actual organizational structure is less important in this environment, because regardless of how you slice it the same jobs have be done. The important point is enabling the process for collaboration and establishing accountability. The key organizational transitions we see are:

• The CTO becomes more future-focused. The CTO must focus on developments like standards and new technologies that will impact how to best build new services, applications and functions for the customers.
• The CIO becomes more operations-focused. Within most service providers now, the CTO has the lion’s share of operations responsibility, while the CIO is more focused on the enterprise as a whole. The CIO must take on more operations responsibilities. Already widely embraced within the Web services community, this will result from the use of DevOps as the mainstay of the service creation environment.
• The CMO becomes more technical and feature-focused. The CMO will increasingly  work more closely with the CIO to enable the technical changes required to meet customer demand
• Sales teams become more solution-focused (and less network-focused). The enterprise sales organization will need to sell customer-specific SDN and NFV-enabled packages across wire-line and wireless access networks, with a focus on end-to-end management and accountability of the service and application. These services will be built to individual preferences regardless of technology.

The New Network Transforms Company Culture

Through all of this, service providers will need to shift to a software-centric business culture that mimics Web-services, content and media companies.

The change in pace that SDN and NFV, not to mention customer requirements, will cultivate means that service providers will need to get comfortable with launching services in beta, testing “on the fly,” and acknowledge “fast-fail” as success, perhaps more often than not.

Externally, the transitions brought about by NFV and SDN will require cultural changes in terms of service delivery and customer interactions. This biggest shift from a customer-facing perspective will be for service providers to switch from primarily being a connectivity providers to solutions-oriented providers focused on a holistic customer experience.

Bridging the NFV/SDN Chasm From Hype to Reality

The idea that a telecommunications company will move from a hardware-centric company to an agile, software-driven organization is imminent. We are bridging the chasm from NFV/SDN “hype” to reality, while recognizing the unique requirements that telecommunications companies have.

So, while lessons from the IT world related to embracing agile and extending these concepts to operations provide a good vision, we understand it will be important to do so in the context of the telecommunications environment.

With that said, it is more important now than ever before for traditional service providers to embrace change. This cannot be overstated. Quick response to these technologies will allow service providers to embrace the telco transformation and provide the improved services that their customers demand.

About the Author 

Jack Barrett is Senior Director of Strategic Account Marketing, Juniper Networks. He has more than 25 years of experience in Telecommunications and Networking.

About Juniper Networks 

Juniper Networks delivers innovation across routing, switching and security. From the network core down to consumer devices, Juniper Networks' innovations in software, silicon and systems transform the experience and economics of networking. Additional information can be found at Juniper Networks.

Got an idea for a Blueprint column?  We welcome your ideas on next gen network architecture.
See our guidelines.

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AT&T Adds Brocade, Ciena and Cisco to its Domain 2.0 List

AT&T confirmed the latest vendors to join its Domain 2.0 supplier list: Brocade, Ciena and Cisco.

Previously, AT&T has announced Alcatel-Lucent, Amdocs, Juniper Networks, Fujitsu Network Communications, Ericsson, Affirmed Networks, Tail-F Systems (acquired by Cisco, and Metaswitch Networks.  This brings the program to ten vendors.

“With Domain 2.0, we are seeking out agile and disruptive suppliers to help us innovate more quickly as we drive forward towards our next-generation network vision,” said Susan Johnson, senior vice president, AT&T Global Supply Chain.

http://about.att.com/story/att_adds_companies_to_its_20_domain_supplier_program.html

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AT&T Rolls out VoLTE in First Markets

AT&T has launched VoLTE and HD Voice in select areas in the District of Columbia, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin. The carrier's first VoLTE rollouts occurred in Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota and Wisconsin earlier this year.

AT&T also noted that its VoLTE is network performing very well.

VoLTE includes the ability to simultaneously talk and surf the web at LTE speeds. VoLTE also allows for higher audio quality for calls through HD Voice.

http://about.att.com/newsroom/voice_over_lte_network_performance_strong_expansion_planned_for_2015.html

• In November, Verizon and AT&T confirmed that they are working to establish VoLTE interoperability between their networks. The companies are working through a full set of requirements, beginning with extensive testing in lab environments and then moving to field trials.  This approach ensures customers will have a seamless experience making VoLTE HD Voice calls between networks and lays the foundation for interoperability of other Rich Communications Services (RCS) such as video calls, rich messaging, and more in the future.

VoLTE interoperability between Verizon and AT&T customers is expected in 2015.   

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Avi Networks Unveils its Cloud Application Delivery Controller

Avi Networks, a start-up founded by key engineers behind Cisco's Nexus data center platforms, unveiled its hyperscale application delivery controller (ADC) for helping enterprise customers deliver for on-premise and cloud-based applications.

Instead of using fleets of hardware-based ADC appliances, Avi's Cloud Application Delivery Platform (CADP) and Hyperscale Distributed Resources Architecture (HYDRA) adopts the same approach taken by large cloud service providers, such as Amazon, Facebook and Google, in that it runs entirely in software on x86.  Compared to virtualized ADCs or load balancers, Avi's architecture separates the control plane from the data plane, bringing the cloud-scale to the application delivery platform. Avi is also bringing traffic analytics into its Layer 7 switching, enabling application flows to dynamically adapt to traffic conditions.

"In today’s mobile cloud era, the traditional appliance-centric, monolithic application delivery approach doesn’t work anymore,” said Umesh Mahajan, Founder and CEO of Avi Networks. “Inspired by the proven architectural approach pioneered by hyperscale cloud service providers, we developed the Avi Networks Cloud Application Delivery Platform to allow enterprise customers to accelerate their cloud journey, while maximizing their end-user application experience.”

Avi cited the following five virtues of its architecture:

• Agility via programmability, self-service and an on-demand elastic scale.
• Analytics and insights about every real-time and historic user-to-application transaction.
• Adaptive to changes in user-demand or application scale, automatically.
• Mobile-access optimization – from a performance, scale and security perspective.
• Multi-cloud support for on-premise, private and public cloud deployments.

In addition, the company announced a $33 million funding round led by Greylock Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures.

https://avinetworks.com/

• Prior to co-founding Avi Networks in November 2012, Umesh Mahajan was VP/GM of Data Center Switching at Cisco, responsible for the Nexus 7000, MDS, NX-OS and DCNM families. Before that, he was Senior Director of Software Engineering at Andiamo, which was acquired by Cisco.  Avi's team also includes Murali Basavaiah (co-founder and Engineering Lead), who previously was VP Engineering at Cisco for NX-OS Software and Nexus 7000/MDS product; and Ranga Rajagopalan (Cheif Architect and CTO), who previously was Sr. Director of Engineering at Cisco and responsible for NX-OS systems/platform software for the Cisco Nexus 7000.

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Accenture and Microsoft Launch Hybrid Cloud

Accenture and Microsoft officially introduced the Accenture Hybrid Cloud Solution for Microsoft Azure, aiming to bring new capabilities, economics and innovation to the enterprise infrastructure and applications.

“Our expanded relationship with Microsoft represents a game-changing proposition that addresses the biggest concerns and our clients face as they look to leverage the cloud,” said Pierre Nanterme, chairman and CEO, Accenture. “With new demands being placed on IT departments every day, enterprises need to smartly connect their infrastructure, software applications, data and operations capabilities in order to become agile, intelligent, digital businesses.”

“Enterprises around the globe are looking for the right platforms and partners to help them transform and thrive in a mobile-first, cloud-first world,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. “The Microsoft cloud, combined with Accenture’s industry knowledge and implementation expertise, accelerates our customers’ cloud adoption and unlocks new benefits, including powerful new applications, data-driven insights and increased productivity.”

Key attributes:

• The Microsoft cloud platform of Microsoft Azure providing enterprise performance, hyper-scale and hybrid capabilities connected to Windows Server with Hyper-V, System Center and Azure Pack running in customer data centers.
• The Accenture Cloud Platform which supports multi-platform environments with self-service provisioning for any application. Its central dashboard controls cloud brokerage and management capabilities, and provides the enterprise-grade governance, reliability, security and operations enterprise clients expect.
• An end-to-end spectrum of professional services to help clients define and execute against their cloud goals, based on Accenture’s specialized industry knowledge and proven business transformation experience — from strategy and transformation to migration, deployment and managed services.
• Avanade’s deep bench of skilled professionals equipped with broad expertise in Microsoft technologies and a laser focus on unlocking business value in the enterprise.

http://www.accenture.com/us-en/Pages/service-hybrid-cloud-solution-microsoft.aspx

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Cisco to Acquire Neohapsis for Security AdvisoryService

Cisco agreed to acquire Neohapsis, a privately-held provider of mobile and cloud security advisory services. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Neohapsis provides risk management, compliance, cloud, application, mobile, and infrastructure security solutions to Fortune 500 customers. The company is based in Chicago.

The Neohapsis team will join the Cisco Security Services organization under the leadership of Senior Vice President and General Manager Bryan Palma. The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of fiscal year 2015.

https://blogs.cisco.com/news/cisco-announces-intent-to-acquire-neohapsis
http://neohapsis.com/

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Juniper: Mobile Users in Developing Countries More Satisfied

Mobile users in developing nations tend to more satisfied with their service despite lower bandwidth than people in developed countries, according to a new Global Bandwidth Index Report from Juniper Networks. The report explores differences between how people use mobile Internet connectivity in their day-to-day lives at work and at home and what they hope to achieve using their connected devices in the future.

Some highlights:

• Nearly twice as many people in developing countries regularly use connected devices for educational purposes as those in developed markets. 
• 46 percent of respondents in developing countries use connected devices for professional development versus 27 percent in developed markets.
• 97 percent of people in emerging markets reported fundamental life changes due to connectivity, including a transformation in the way they complete a wide range of essential and everyday tasks, from banking to accessing local information, enjoying entertainment, receiving health care and engaging in civic life.
• 22 percent of consumers in developed markets who report that connectivity has not had a significant effect on their lives.
• 40 percent of respondents in emerging markets report that connectivity has improved their earning power, compared with just 17 percent in developed markets.
• 60 percent of consumers in emerging markets believe that connectivity has transformed their social lives, compared with 38 percent in the developed countries.
• 60 percent of consumers in emerging markets cited connection speed as the most common problem (compared with 27 percent in developed countries).
• 30 percent of people in emerging markets stated that simply finding a connection remains an issue (compared to just 13 percent in developed nations).

“Despite these connectivity challenges, the Global Bandwidth Index data shows that consumers in emerging markets are still significantly more satisfied with their networks than their counterparts in developed countries. The transformative impact of connectivity on peoples’ lives in the developing world is much stronger than the feeling that networks should be faster and more reliable. Meanwhile, in developed countries, high bandwidth connectivity is so commonplace that people are much more sensitive to interruptions in service,” Mike Marcellin, senior vice president, strategy and marketing, Juniper Networks.

http://www.juniper.net

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2014 Top Blueprint articles on Network Architecture

Converge! Network Digest publishes articles from across the industry in our ongoing Blueprint Network Architecture series.  These articles provide insights on how new infrastructure is being deployed, how new technologies are changing the network, and how the big traffic trends are transforming the market.

We are pleased to announce the following Top Blueprint articles for 2014, based on overall impact to network architecture and interest from our readers.

Blueprint: Distributed and Virtualized Data Center Architecture

Sunday, July 13, 2014 

by Vinay Rathore, Sr. Director Solutions Marketing, Infinera 

While there has been a strong trend toward creating bigger and more powerful centralized data centers to meet end user needs, there has been another less notable trend toward pushing the data center closer to the end users for the same reasons.  Large data centers create efficiency through a centralized location that accommodates equipment that shares centralized resources (UPS, generators,...

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Blueprint: The Rise of the Virtualized Network

Sunday, October 05, 2014 

By Sanjeev Mervana, Sr Director, Service Provider business, Cisco

As consumer’s bandwidth demands and quality experience expectations are increasing, service providers’ operational expenditures (OpEx) also are growing at an average rate of 11 percent each year. To address the needs of end-users and provide new, more lucrative services, operators are increasingly looking at adopting several new technology innovations  to reduce their OpEx and improve their bottom line – virtualizing many of their network functions is one of such innovation.     READ MORE

Blueprint: The Ethernet of Things

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

By Nicholas Ilyadis
VP & CTO, Infrastructure & Networking Group,  Broadcom Corporation

It’s hard to avoid the buzz these days about the Internet of Things (IoT), the next evolution of computing where the connections are made, not just between PCs and servers or across mobile devices but to billions of devices across the Internet.   But all those devices – and more – generate and consume data that has to go somewhere. The networking industry is responding to this coming data deluge with innovations that are intended to move data quickly, efficiently and reliably.  READ MORE

For 2015, we will be expanding our Blueprint series with more columns on more topics including 5G, Open Compute, OpenDayLight, OpenStack, IoT, VoLTE and software-defined everything.

If you have an idea for a Blueprint article, please see our editorial guidelines. 

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Microsoft Activates Azure Government Cloud

Microsoft announced general availability of its Azure Government cloud service.

Key attributes include:

• Isolation – All aspects of Microsoft Azure Government’s hyperscale infrastructure, including the data center, hardware, network and software, are isolated to meet the unique compliance standards of the U.S. public sector. This isolation covers all physical, logical and network components of the service.
• Community – Azure Government is restricted to only a targeted set of government agencies and their solution providers, including federal, state, local, tribal and the Department of Defense.
• Security – Data centers are secured using physical, logical and procedural controls. Important controls include secured access control to the data center, second person screened escorts, aisle cameras, and secured cabling. All security controls are audited and logged.
• Screened personnel – Operations and support are performed by personnel who are United States persons, who have been background screened. These personnel are based in redundant Service Operating Centers (SOCs), which are greater than 500 miles apart.
• Continental United States – All customer data, content, and organizational data (both at rest and in transit); all hardware, networking and other physical infrastructure; and all personnel reside in the Continental United States (CONUS).
• Business continuity - Data centers are physically isolated from other cloud services and geographically distributed more than 500 miles apart. This enables geo-replication and integrity between locations that supports business continuity and disaster recovery.
• East Coast region – Azure Government has an East Coast region in order to be in close proximity to customers and to, provide efficient high speed connections to Washington D.C. and surrounding areas.

Microsoft first announced its Azure Government cloud in March 2014 and since then over one hundred government customers and solution providers have been testing it.

http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2014/12/09/announcing-general-availability-of-microsoft-azure-government/

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ADVA Adds Fiber Access Link Monitoring

ADVA Optical Networking introduced its new FSP 3000 Access Link Monitoring (ALM) solution for providing greater insights into carrier fiber access networks.

The ADVA FSP 3000 ALM, which is currently in trials with several major operators, is a small, non-intrusive device that operates independently of data networking equipment and regardless of the bitrate and protocol the overlaying service is using. It provides visibility into the health of fiber links by analyzing reflections of a non-intrusive test signal in continuous real-time. It can simultaneously monitor up to 16 fiber access tails and supports distances of 30km.

ADVA said its solution is able to provide operators with up-to-the-second knowledge of their fiber plant and an understanding of where and what action may need to be taken to ensure continued service availability.

“Access networks are undergoing a radical transformation. Fiber is moving closer and closer to the end user,” said Christoph Glingener, CTO, ADVA Optical Networking. “But with this transformation comes the need for insight, for intelligence combined with cost-efficiency. As operators rapidly build their fiber access networks, they need to ensure they’re able to fully leverage their potential. Until now, applications that did not allow for active demarcation devices defaulted back to un-lit service models. Our ADVA FSP 3000 ALM solution with Optojack™ technology changes everything. This deceptively simple concept will forever change how operators sell their access applications. For the first time, they will be able to precisely monitor every aspect of their un-lit fiber access networks. For the first time, they will be able to offer strict SLAs. We’re talking about a new class of service offerings, a new source of revenue opportunity.”

Commercial availability is expected in early 2015.

http://www.advaoptical.com/newsroom/press-releases-english/20141209

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IBM Gains Low-cost Cloud Routing Patent

IBM was awarded U.S. Patent #8,676,981 B2 "Routing Service Requests Based on Lowest Actual Cost within a Federated Virtual Service Cloud."  The company said the technique described by this patent uses analytics to increase cloud computing performance and reduce costs by dynamically moving workloads -- between or within cloud centers -- based on an automatic analysis that determines the most efficient and effective use of available resources.

IBM's patented invention automatically pools cloud computing resources from disparate cloud centers, enabling clients to improve performance and save money by reducing the amount of manual intervention needed to allocate hardware, software and services. The automated technique enables users have more control over where and how their cloud workloads are run and facilitates optimal use of a cloud infrastructure.

"Cloud delivery models are evolving and maturing and are creating new possibilities for end-users and third-party service providers to lower costs for IT deployments as they enter new markets and create new solutions," said Leonard Hand, IBM Master Inventor and lead inventor on the patent. "Our patented invention will give users more control over their cloud deployments so that they can extract the most value from their IT resources at the most optimal cost."

http://www.ibm.com

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GlobeNet Deploys Infinera on US Terrestrial Network

GlobeNet, a wholesale provider of Latin and North America data network services, has deployed Infinera's DTN-X packet optical transport networking platform across its North America routes in the Northeast and South Florida.

GlobeNet's submarine cable network spans 23,500 km system and offers the lowest latency available between the Americas. The network links cable landing stations in Tuckerton, NJ and Boca Raton, FL, USA, with cable landing stations in Fortaleza (CE) and Rio de Janeiro (RJ), Brazil, St. David’s, Bermuda, Barranquilla, Colombia as well as Maiquetía, Venezuela.

GlobeNet has deployed an Infinera Intelligent Transport Network across its entire U.S. terrestrial backhaul network. The Infinera DTN-X offers GlobeNet the capacity to deliver 100 Gbps coherent transmission today via 500 Gbps super-channels, with a forward-scale design to support terabit super-channels in the future.

Infinera said this upgrade provides GlobeNet a network that can deliver over eight terabits per second (Tbps) of transmission capacity on a single fiber.

"GlobeNet's selection of an Infinera Intelligent Transport Network for its North America backbone underscores the value of our solutions to wholesale carriers operating mission critical networks," said Scott Chandler, Infinera vice president, North America sales. “The Infinera Intelligent Transport Network enables GlobeNet to automate, converge and simplify its optical transport network to reliably deliver advanced services to its customers.”

http://www.infinera.com
http://www.globenet.net

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Nutanix Adds Data-at-Rest Encryption

Nutanix, which offers a converged appliance that combines compute/storage/networking for scale-out applications, announced a number of new security capabilities for its Virtual Computing Platform, including data-at-rest encryption.

The new security capabilities are available with Nutanix Operating System (NOS) 4.1 software, and help IT security teams meet stringent standards like HIPAA, PCI DSS and SOX. Nutanix hardware platforms now meet a number of certification standards including FIPS 140-2, NSA Suite B support (to Top Secret), Common Criteria EAL2+, NIST-SP800-131A and others.

Security features available in this release include:

• Self-encrypting drives to secure data at rest, compliant with FIPS 140-2 Level 2 standards
• Strong two-factor authentication, including the use of client certificates, to prevent unauthorized administrator log-ins
• Nutanix Cluster Shield to limit administrator access in security-conscious environments by restricting shell logins.

“Security is required across the entire data center architecture, including server and storage systems. Unfortunately, legacy infrastructure components often lack the necessary controls and fail to meet common certification requirements,” said Simon Mijolovic, Senior Security Solutions Architect at Nutanix.

http://www.nutanix.com

• In August, Nutanix, a start-up based in San Jose, California, announced a $140 million Series E funding round at over a $2 billion valuation.

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China Unicom Deploys Coriant hiT 7300 DWDM

China Unicom, a leading fixed and mobile service provider in China, has selected Coriant's hiT 7300 Multi-Haul Transport Platform to expand its 100G backbone network.  The deployment will link the cities of Wuhan, Hefei and Nanjing.

"We're constantly working to accelerate the expansion of our mobile communications network across China, while providing our customers with high-quality broadband communications and information services," said Mr. Guangquan Wang, Director of Network Technology, Network Technology Research Institute, China Unicom. "For this network expansion, we chose the Coriant hiT 7300 solution because it enables us to support an upgrade without interrupting existing traffic. It also provides us with the flexibility to add capacity as network demands increase."

"Our team has been working with China Unicom since 2006 and we're excited to enhance this network with a solution that enables virtually unlimited capacity growth and seamless scalability," said Pat DiPietro, Chief Executive Officer, Coriant. "Our Coriant hiT 7300 solution allows China Unicom to expand to 100G channels over existing 40G links without service disruptions."

http://www.coriant.com

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Broadcom Raises Q4 Guidance, Announces Stock Buyback

Broadcom raised its financial guidance for the fourth quarter of 2014, increased its dividend and announced a stock buyback plan for 2015.

The company now expects its Q4 2014 revenue to approximately $2.075 — $2.150 billion, which is in the upper half of its previously guided range. Broadcom's quarterly dividend will increase by $0.02 per share, to $0.14 per share or $0.56 on an annual basis, a 17% year-over-year increase, beginning with the dividend that will be declared in the first quarter of 2015. In addition, the company announced a $1 billion share buyback authorization in 2015.

http://www.broadcom.com

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3M and Orange Bring Cloud and 3D Printing to Dental Care

3M is launching a 3D digital scanner service for the dental market using Orange Business Services' secure cloud platform in Europe.

3M and Orange Business Services designed an advanced solution that uses an intra-oral digital camera to capture highly accurate digital scans.  The data is securely transmitted to production centers where prosthetic and orthodontic works or moldings are produced via 3D printers. The service enables better patient care, saves time and maximizes the comfort offered to dentists, orthodontists, dental technicians and patients.

This platform also requires the storage and sharing of patient data. With the Orange Flexible Computing Healthcare solution, 3M implemented a solution complying with the legal requirements of the French Ministry of Health. The French legislation, one of the most stringent in Europe, requires that the data be hosted by an organization approved by the Ministry of Health.

http://www.orange-business.com

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Nokia Demos 4.1 Gbps over TDD-FDD LTE

Nokia Networks showcased a record-breaking speed of 4.1 Gbps over TDD-FDD LTE in collaboration with Ooredoo Qatar and China Mobile at the ITU Telecom World 2014 event in Doha.

The speed was achieved by combining TDD- and FDD-LTE spectrums and aggregating 10 carriers with 200 MHz bandwidth. The demo used:

• Nokia Networks’ commercial Single RAN Advanced hardware
• including the Flexi Multiradio 10 Base Station for high-capacity throughput
• Software to aggregate carriers on both TDD- and FDD-LTE spectrum
• LTE-Advanced Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) technology.

Waleed Al Sayed, Chief Operating Officer, Ooredoo Qatar, said: “We are building the biggest, fastest network in Qatar, so that customers across the country can access next-generation wireless data services. We are very proud that the first-ever ITU Telecom World to be held in Qatar should showcase this record-breaking success with the support of Ooredoo. By deploying our  advanced LTE network in Qatar, we are truly laying the foundation for the future.”

http://networks.nokia.com/

• In June 2014, Nokia and SK Telecom have tested the aggregation of ten 20 MHz spectrum bands to achieve a record LTE throughput speed of 3.78 Gbps.  The test used Nokia’s Single RAN solution including the high-capacity Flexi Multiradio 10 Base Station, enhanced with software to aggregate carriers on both TDD and FDD LTE spectrum and to implement LTE-Advanced Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) technology.  The companies noted that their record performance demo utilized twice the amount of carriers and bandwidth specified by 3GPP, which foresees the aggregation of 5 carriers up to a total bandwidth of 100 MHz.

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