Telecom Italia Appoints New CEO

Telecom Italia announced the appointment of Flavio Cattaneo as CEO, following the departure of Marco Patuano as CEO and Director. Cattaneo currently heads the rail network NTV SpA-Nuovo Trasporto Viaggiatori.

News reports cited a management conflict between Patuano and the Telecom Italia Board. As severance, Patuano was paid an additional amount of 1,235,000 euros gross with respect to termination of the directorship and 4,765,000 euros gross with respect to termination of the employment contract for a amount of 6,000,000 euros gross.

http://www.telecomitalia.com/

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Arista Unveils 100+ Terabit Switching/Routing Platform

Arista Networks introduced a 100+ Terabit switching and routing platform for cloud service provider and next generation enterprise data centers. The new Arista 7500R is being positioned as the industry's highest performance universal spine switch for data centers.

Arista believes that shifting traffic patterns inside the data center are best served with scalable two-tier active Leaf-Spine and single tier Spline architecture. The traditional core routing layer can be replaced with an Arista 7500R series-based spine for rapid re-convergence and network-wide resilience between data centers and to the Internet. The Arista 7500R Series supports familiar MPLS functions allowing up to 13-labels deep packet lookup for programmatic control across the largest networks. Along with the state oriented architecture of Arista’s Network–wide Database NetDB and SDK, Arista EOS (Extensible Operating System) users can customize their own preferred path across the largest networks in the world, instead of relying on best-effort forwarding on the Internet.

The new Arista 7500R Series, which begin shipping in Q2, provides industry-leading 100GbE density and large table sizes in a single chassis. Key attributes:

• Chassis Fabric capacity of up to 115 Tbps
• Up to 432 wirespeed 100GbE ports in a choice of three form factors
• 288 Gigabytes of deep and smart packet memory for reliable packet transfers
• Virtual Output Queues (VoQ) for lossless forwarding
• Agile port speeds of 1/10/25/40/50/100GbE
• FlexRoute technology delivers up to 1 Million wire speed routes with MPLS, Segment Routing and EVPN (Ethernet Virtual Private Network) protocol support
• Programmable traffic engineering with up to 128,000 MPLS, GRE (Generic Routing Encapsulation), VXLAN (Virtual Extensible Local Area Network) and IP-in-IP tunnels
• Support for NEBS (Network Equipment Building System) compliance for Service Provider deployments
• Mix and Match across the wide selection of 7500E and 7500R series line-card options

Arista is also introducing three new wire speed 7500R Series line cards:

• 36 x 100GbE QSFP - choice of 10/25/40/50/100GbE
• 36 x 40GbE with flexible combinations of 10GbE and up to 6 ports of 100GbE
• 48 x 10GbE SFP+ and 2 x 100G QSFP

“The 7500R is the highest performance switching and routing platform that supports the full Internet routing table, enabling a Universal Spine in cloud-scale networks,” said Andreas Bechtolsheim, Arista’s Chairman and Chief Development Officer.

https://www.arista.com/en/company/news/press-release/1283-pr-20160329

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AT&T to Bring its Fiber GigaPower Network to LA

AT&T is launching its fiber-based, residential and SMB Internet service in the Los Angeles metro area. This brings speeds up to 1 gigabit per second to more homes, apartments and small businesses over

AT&T GigaPower Internet Premier offers Internet speeds up to 1Gbps for $110 a month or speeds up to 300Mbps for $80 a month.

The AT&T GigaPower network is now available to tens of thousands of locations, including single family homes, thousands of apartments and small businesses in parts of Eastvale, Irvine, Los Angeles, Orange County and surrounding communities.

"We’ll continue to expand our 100% fiber AT&T GigaPower network to additional locations. We’re planning to triple availability by the end of the year. Eventually, we plan to make our AT&T GigaPower presence in the Los Angeles area one of the largest in the country. Additional local communities where we are planning to bring AT&T GigaPower include Arcadia, Glendale and more," stated Eric Boyer, senior vice president of AT&T wireless and wired product marketing.

AT&T also noted that it has invested more than $2 billion in its Los Angeles area wireless and wireline networks from 2012 through 2014.

http://www.att.com

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Rancher Ships its Container Management Platform

Rancher Labs, a start-up based in Cupertino, California, released its open-source container management software.

The Rancher software is designed to simplify the deployment and management of containers in production enterprise applications. The software lets users select from multiple container orchestration frameworks such as Kubernetes and Docker Swarm, while maintaining a single management experience.  Rancher implements a cloud-agnostic infrastructure services layer that works across any public or private cloud, or traditional data center. The platform works across cloud and data center boundaries, and its load balancing and persistent storage services function uniformly on any computing resources.

Rancher said its solution allows organizations to gain visibility, manage policies and exert control of containers and infrastructure spread across different teams within an organization.  It also enables IT to improve deployment reliability, orchestrate software upgrades, and improve the utilization of infrastructure resources.
 
“Since announcing our beta product less than a year ago, Rancher Labs has experienced incredible demand, as well as received encouraging and helpful feedback and community support for this open platform which has enabled us to make meaningful enhancements to Rancher,” said Sheng Liang, CEO, Rancher Labs. “Now, with well over a million downloads, Rancher has quickly become the platform of choice for teams serious about running containers in production.”

http://rancher.com/

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PLUMgrid Brings OpenStack SDN for Containers

PLUMgrid announced a major software update including SDN support for Docker containers, expanded gateway integration with Cisco Nexus 9000, IPv6, PLUMgrid SmartLogs and many other enhancements.

PLUMgrid's Open Networking Suite (ONS) 5.0, which supports OpenStack Kilo and Liberty release, enables data centers with virtual machines, containers, and bare metal architectures to leverage SDN overlays to provide secure micro-segmentation for multi-tenancy, traffic isolation, and policy enforcement.

“Cloud networking is adding virtualized network functions and applications at an accelerated rate and ONS is keeping pace with an aggressive iteration cycle,” said Pere Monclus, founder and CTO at PLUMgrid. “Adding support for Docker containers provides SDN services that are essential to secure multi-tenant networking. In this complex environment it is critical for data center operations to have a tool such as CloudApex that provides a simplified view of both physical and virtual resources in OpenStack clouds.”

Some highlights:

• PLUMgrid now offers a SDN plugin for Docker containers to enable rich networking functions, secure multi-tenancy, multi-host networking, high availability, and distributed scale-out performance for Docker clouds. 
• PLUMgrid ONS has added support for Project Kuryr, an OpenStack initiative that provides container network abstraction for Neutron API. 
• In addition to supporting gateways from Arista Networks and Cumulus Networks, ONS 5.0 introduces gateway support for Cisco Nexus 9000 Series. Through VXLAN Tunnel End Point (VTEP) integration, PLUMgrid delivers unified physical and virtual network infrastructure with simple drag and drop configuration.
• IPv6 can be configured within and between tenant clouds for flexible addressing while IPv4 is running concurrently. 
• PLUMgrid ONS 5.0 introduces a number of smart wizards that check system and connectivity status to ensure workloads and applications have unhindered reachability and access to resources. 

http://www.plumgrid.com

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CloudRouter Project Clears Release 3.0 Hurdle

The CloudRouter Project, which is a Linux-based open source routing and software-defined networking (SDN) initiative, released its CloudRouter 3.0 and new performance numbers showing throughput in excess of 650 Gbps on commodity hardware.

The CloudRouter 3.0 release ships with new versions of ONOS Drake 1.4, CentOS 7.2, and Fedora 23. Four new open source projects have been added including iSDX, an open source SDN exchange point, two new network traffic generator and analyzers, Ostinato and pktgen-dpdk, and pmacct, a network monitoring utility.

CloudRouter 3.0 new key features summary:

• 100 GigE Performance: new DPDK 2.2.0 kernel enhancements tested at 650 Gig/sec
• OS: upgraded to CentOS 7.2 or Fedora 23
• SDN OS: ONOS 1.4 (Drake) in addition to OpenDaylight Lithium
• SDN Exchange Point: iSDX for advanced routing interconnection
• Security and Performance Testing: pktgen-dpdk, Otinato
• pmacct: network monitoring utility

"Today's announcement gives network administrators the choice of continuing to use CloudRouter as a software-based router or advancing into deployments of software-based controllers with whitebox hardware," said Jay Turner, CloudRouter Project Lead and Senior Director of DevOps at IIX. "The community told us that they wanted the benefits of SDN in the future, but needed a bridge between old and new architectures. CloudRouter is an open source network innovation platform, and we believe it's the most flexible SDN platform out, incorporating best-of-breed open source projects, fully tested for security and stability."

"The traditional way of building networks with vertically integrated, proprietary, over-priced boxes is being disrupted, and replaced by the new and much more open way of disaggregation, abstraction and easy composition of network resources. This transformation was driven by hyper-scale cloud and web services providers and is being widely accepted to power web-scale IT. The decoupling of software from hardware first happened on switches, and CloudRouter is bringing it one step further to routers. Mellanox is a supporter and driver of this transformation, and we build hardware for the new open composable networks that enable this transformation to happen without performance or infrastructure efficiency compromises," said Chloe Jian Ma, Senior Director of Cloud Marketing at Mellanox.

https://cloudrouter.org

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Brocade Acquires StackStorm for DevOps Automation

Brocade has acquired StackStorm, a start-up based in Palo Alto, California, that offers an event-driven automation platform. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Stack Storms ties together components across the IT infrastructure. It’s commonly used for auto-remediation—including response to security events—and other cases such as complex deployments.

https://stackstorm.com
http://www.brocade.com

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César Alierta to Step Down as Executive Chairman of Telefónica

César Alierta announced his intention to step down as Executive Chairman of Telefónica.  He will remain on the company's Board.

Alierta is recommending that Telefónica’s Board of Directors consider the appointment of José María Álvarez-Pallete as its new Executive Chairman. Álvarez-Pallete has serves as Chief Operating Officer for the past 3 years. Previously, he was Telefónica’s CFO and has served as Executive Chairman of Telefónica Internacional and as Chairman of Telefónica Latinoamérica.

César Alierta has served as CEO and Chairman of Telefónica since 2000.

https://www.telefonica.com/es/web/press-office/-/cesar-alierta-ends-his-tenure-as-executive-chairman-of-telefonica-and-will-propose-the-appointment-of-jose-maria-alvarez-pallete-to-the-board-of-direc

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Global Capacity Appoints Tony Thakur as CTO

Global Capacity named Tony Thakur as its new CTO, responsible for all aspects of its One Marketplace network strategy, architecture, engineering and planning.

Most recently, Thakur served as Vice President of Engineering & Technology for TelePacific Communications, where he provided strategic direction, technology selection and product development support for next-generation services including IP Virtual Private Network (VPN) and Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) wide-area Ethernet.  He also held executive positions at leading network and technology companies, including Executive Vice President of Engineering and Operations for CENX and Vice President of Network Technologies and Systems for tw telecom.

https://globalcapacity.com/news-resources/global-capacity-names-new-chief-technology-officer

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Video: TeliaSonera IC on Making Networks More Predictable

Over the past year, TeliaSonera International Carrier invested in expanding its network geographically.

This year, the carrier is focused predictability by thickening the network, says Mattias Fridström Vice President, Technology.

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/UTDXTEJ7ncg

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NTT DATA to Acquire Dell Services for $3 Billion

NTT DATA agreed to acquire Dell Services, an IT services provider recognized for its depth in vertical industries and for its offerings around infrastructure services, cloud services, application services, and business process outsourcing. The purchase price was reported at $3.05 billion.  NTT Data said the agreement will expand its brand and leadership position globally.

John McCain, CEO of NTT DATA, led this transaction and will have overall responsibility for leading the combined business.

“I’m extremely proud of Dell Services’ solid growth, broad capabilities and deep domain expertise in Healthcare & Life Sciences, Banking, Financial Services and Insurance. Our investments in digital services, application modernization, tools, automation and ‘as-a-service’ models, have enabled Dell Services customers to simplify their IT environment, empower their workforce, engage their customers and grow,” said Michael Dell, chairman and chief executive officer of Dell Inc. “Together, NTT DATA and Dell Services will be a winning combination for Dell Services customers, team members and partners.”

http://www.nttdata.com/global/en/news-center/pressrelease/2016/032800.html

• Dell Services traces its origins to Perot Systems, which Dell acquired in 2009 for $3.9 billion.

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NTT Researchers Manipulate the Color of Single Photons

Researchers at NTT demonstrated the wavelength conversion of a single-photon wave packet required for quantum information-communication technologies. The company said the technique enables it deterministically change the color and shape of a single-photon wave packet in a lossless manner.

NTT lossless scheme utilized an all-optical effect called cross-phase modulation (XPM) to control the phase of light (signal pulses) via a change in the refractive index of a medium induced by another light (control pulses).

"When the refractive index varies dynamically, frequency modulation is induced to the signal field as a result of a signal’s non-uniform phase shift. By using single photons as the signal field, we can modulate the wavelength of the photons (Fig. 1). Since XPM always occurs regardless of the intensity of the control field, the wavelength conversion occurs without a photon loss. This is in contrast to the conventional all-optical wavelength conversion scheme for photons, namely nonlinear frequency mixings, where an intense control field is required for high conversion efficiency."

http://www.ntt.co.jp/news2016/1603e/160326a.html

Researchers at NTT Envision Quantum Repeaters in Future Photonic Networks

Thursday, April 16, 2015  Japan, NTT, Optical, Quantum  2 comments

Researchers at Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) and the University of Toronto are proposing all-photonic quantum repeaters for long-distance quantum communication.  If achieved, such devices would disprove the necessity of matter quantum memories in long distance quantum communications, which is seen by many as the ultimate future of optical communications.

In a paper published this week by the journal Nature Communications, the researchers said their all-photonic scheme paves a completely new route towards long-distance quantum communication based only on optical devices. Compared to matter quantum memories, this approach eliminates the quantum interface between matter and photons.  The design is based on existing optical technology, such as linear optical elements, single-photon sources, photon detectors and an active feed-forward technique.

http://www.ntt.co.jp/news2015/1504e/150415a.html

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Sumitomo Electric Announces New Multi-Core Optical Fiber

Sumitomo Electric Industries announced a new-type coupled multi-core optical fiber suitable for ultra-long-haul transmission/

The coupled-core MCF (CC-MCF) features 4 pure-silica cores in the standard 125-µm cladding. The developed fiber has achieved the attenuation of 0.158 dB/km at the wavelength of 1550 nm and the spatial mode dispersion (SMD) of 6.1 ps/√km*4 in the wavelength from 1520 to 1580 nm, both of which are the lowest ever reported in the optical fibers for space division multiplexing.

The company says the new fiber has set records for the low attenuation and the low spatial mode dispersion in the optical fibers for space division multiplexing.  Attenuation, or (transmission) loss, is the amount of light degraded by scattering and absorption while traveling in an optical fiber. With a lower attenuation, optical signals can be transmitted for a longer distance.

http://global-sei.com/company/press/2015/03/prs022_s.html

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Mesosphere Raises $73M for its Containerized Data Center OS

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

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

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

http://www.mesosphere.com

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Cloudera Acquires Data Analytics Start-up

Cloudera has acquired Sense, a start-up based in San Francisco that is developing a cloud-based platform from data analytics.  Financial terms were not disclosed.

The Sense platform enables users to collaborate and share data and analyses on a secure platform.

https://sense.io/
http://www.cloudera.com

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#OFC2016: AT&T Pushes for Open ROADM MSA

An Open ROADM project is underway with the backing of AT&T and a goal of driving faster innovation and open software control for the Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexers (ROADMs) used in optical transport networks.

The Open ROADM Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) defines interoperability specifications for Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexers (ROADM). Included are the ROADM switch as well as transponders and pluggable optics. Specifications consist of both Optical interoperability as well as YANG data models.

Participants in the MSA include AT&T, Ciena, Fujitsu, and Alcatel-Lucent USA (Nokia).

http://openroadm.org/home.html

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#OFC2016: Inphi Targets DCI with QSFP28 Design

Inphi unveiled a QSFP28 reference design that uses advanced Pulse Amplitude Modulation (PAM4) signaling to deliver up to 4 Tbps of bandwidth over a single fiber at distances up to 80km.  The target application is metro Data Center Interconnect (DCI). Commercial launch date was not specified.

Key features of Inphi's "ColorZ":

• QSFP28 form factor supporting 100G Ethernet
• Extended reach up to 80km
• Enables 4Tb/s capacity over a single fiber
• 4.5W power dissipation
• ITU wavelength grid compatible
• "InphiNity" Core DSP Engine with a unique mixed-mode DSP architecture for high performance, low power applications needing adaptability and configurability
• Multiple programmable FEC options with varying levels of pre-FEC BER performance
• Numerous self-test and loopback modes that allow diagnostic monitoring of channel and system parameters
• Eye-scan, samplers and monitors on all receiver interfaces for link margin and stress testing along with GUI and API routines for data and error analytics  

“The current gap in the inter-data center interconnects is at the sub 80km segment, which is being supported by 10G solutions today. ColorZ is filling the gap with 100G links matching the rest of the data center network,” said Dr. Loi Nguyen, founder, senior vice president, Optical Interconnect at Inphi. “This demonstrates Inphi’s continued industry leadership, as we build on our technology foundation to dramatically reduce the cost of data movement.”

https://www.inphi.com/media-center/press-room/press-releases-and-media-alerts/inphi-debuts-100g-dwdm-solution-for-80km-data-center-interconnects.php

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#OFC2016: Inphi Develops Silicon Photonics for Data Centers

Inphi announced a highly integrated Silicon Photonics (SiPho) chip that includes multi-channel modulators, photodetectors, multiplexers, demultiplexers, optical power monitors and fiber coupling structures on the same integrated circuit (IC).  The chip is targeted at 100G intra and inter data center optical interconnects.

The company said it expects a 100G upgrade cycle in data centers to begin this year with the introduction of a new generation of 3.2T switches using QSFP28 pluggable transceivers.

Inphi believes its SiPho technology, coupled with its low power DSP-based PAM4 and linear amplifiers/drivers, will deliver the industry’s first 100G DWDM PAM4 platform reference design for the QSFP28 form factor.

“Inphi selected Silicon Photonics over competing platforms, because it allows us to integrate multiple key photonics components in a single IC,” said Dr. Radha Nagarajan, chief technology officer, Optical Interconnect at Inphi. “Silicon Phonics technology enables us to deliver innovative solutions to solve customer’s pain points today.  Silicon Photonics also scales well into the future for next-generation optics.”

https://www.inphi.com

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#OFC2016: Lumentum Targets Optical Whiteboxes for SDN

Lumentum (formerly JDSU) unveiled an "optical whitebox" platform for data center & metro/edge DWDM transport.

Lumentum said its SDN optical whitebox platform will consist of family of configurable building blocks with open interfaces for integration into SDN controller/orchestrator layers, enabling system integrators and network operators to deploy and turn-up services. The initial products based on this SDN whitebox platform target simple point-to-point DCI applications, as well as ROADMs (for metro edge DWDM transport). These include:

Terminal Amplifier: The terminal amplifier whitebox and its associated mux/demux form the endpoints of a transport link.  It supports two high-power variable gain EDFAs, OSC termination, optical channel monitor, and automatic line protection within a 1RU network element.

Mux/Demux: The mux/demux is a passive element that provides the entry/exit point for data transmission channels. The device requires no external power or management connections.  Inventory data for the device is visible through its associated terminal amplifier.

Line Amplifier: The line amplifier whitebox is used to extend system reach beyond the single span limit of the terminal amplifier whitebox. It combines all necessary functions to support amplification in two directions into a single 1RU network element.

ROADM: The ROADM whitebox is used to support wavelength agility in meshed networks. It supports a TrueFlex twin 1xN (9-20+) or single 1xN (2-9) wavelength selective switch, two high power variable gain EDFAs, OSC termination, and optical channel monitor within a 1RU network element.

“SDN optical whiteboxes are another example of Lumentum partnering with customers to anticipate, construct and deliver solutions they need to fulfill the relentless demand for higher performance, higher density, and lower cost,” said Madhu Krishnaswamy, director, product line management, Optical Communications. “The platform is customizable, and supports the addition of updated features for dynamic market conditions.”

https://www.lumentum.com/

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Cisco Brings High-Density TDM to Optical Transport

Cisco rolled out a number of enhancements to its optical transport portfolio including high-density time-division multiplexing (TDM) to IP/MPLS capabilities.

Some highlights:

Cisco Network Convergence System (NCS) 4200 Series: Part of the Cisco Evolved Programmable Network (EPN), this transport system addresses network inefficiencies with high-density circuit emulation technology located at the network edge. It converts TDM services into pseudowires that facilitate transport over highly scalable MPLS core networks. With this technology, service providers can keep their existing operational models and service revenue while running all services over IP and retiring their older networks. Service providers can reduce space and power required over existing solutions by up to 90 percent.

Multi-service line card for the Cisco NCS 4000 Series - a new, multi-service line card that doubles slot bandwidth to 400Gbps, while providing port-by-port, pay-as-you-grow flexibility for OTN, Packet, MPLS and Coherent DWDM service. When deployed in the Cisco NCS 4009 and NCS 4016 platforms, chassis density doubles to 3.6Tbps and 6.4Tbps, respectively. The NCS 4000 Fabric is also enhanced to help enable unprecedented in-service scale from a single Cisco NCS 4000 chassis (6.4Tbps) to a Multi-Chassis solution capable of delivering over 100Tbps of capacity leveraging Cisco’s multi-chassis leadership.

Increased density and flexibility for the Cisco NCS 2000 Series: New XPonder line card provides 400 Gbps of client and 400 Gbps of trunk capacity to Cisco’s widely deployed optical transport platform. The XPonder supports OTN, packet and coherent DWDM while contributing significantly to cost reduction – one line card for any mix of DWDM, gray, OTN and packet services.

Cisco NCS 1000 data center interconnect solution - commercial shipment is now underway. Cisco said the DWDM solution is now in trials with 9 top cloud providers.

“We are committed to offering service providers the technology to transform their network architectures and achieve the operational efficiency, scale, and reliability needed to succeed in the digital age,” said Bill Gartner, vice president of optical systems, access routing and transceivers group, Cisco. “We are confident that our new innovations in packet optical convergence will enable our customers to transform their networks today while positioning them to face the challenges and leverage the opportunities presented by a future dominated by the Internet of Things.”

Cisco also confirmed that Verizon will deploy the Cisco NCS Series on portions of its 100G metro network.

http://www.cisco.com

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