AT&T offers a Cisco-powered NFV solution for enterprises

AT&T has begun offering the Cisco 5000 Series Enterprise Network Compute System (ENCS) as part of its Edge Solutions portfolio.

The Cisco ENCS supports virtual network functions – including routing, switching, firewall, and WAN optimization – and can be dynamically upgraded.

Cisco ENCS with AT&T will provide these functions on a single piece of AT&T-managed Cisco hardware with Cisco software. Multiple configurations are available, along with a library of virtual network functions.

AT&T said this NFV solution is available to customers who prefer a Cisco-based infrastructure.

"No business has the same network needs, and our expanded relationship with Cisco is helping us support more businesses that need managed services," said Josh Goodell, vice president, Edge Solutions, AT&T Business. "As companies continue to transform their businesses to digital models, having more choices becomes more important than ever."

https://www.business.att.com/solutions/Portfolio/network-services/

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AWS lands Major League Baseball and 21st Century Fox

Major League Baseball (MLB) has chosen AWS as its official provider for machine learning, artificial intelligence, and deep learning workloads. Specifically, MLB will use AWS machine learning services to continue development of Statcast—the tracking technology that runs on AWS to analyze player performance for every game—and develop new technologies to support MLB Clubs.

AWS said it's cloud-based machine learning services will enable MLB to eliminate the manual, time-intensive processes associated with record keeping and statistics, such as scorekeeping, capturing game notes, and classifying pitches.

“Incorporating machine learning into our systems and practices is a great way to take understanding of the game to a whole new level for our fans and the 30 clubs,” said Jason Gaedtke, Chief Technology Officer at Major League Baseball. “We chose AWS because of their strength, depth, and proven expertise in delivering machine learning services and are looking forward to working with the Amazon ML Solutions Lab on a number of exciting projects, including detecting and automating key events, as well as creating new opportunities to share never-before-seen metrics.

AWS also announced that 21st Century Fox has selected it for the vast majority of its key platforms and workloads. The media company is also leveraging AWS’s machine learning and data analytics services to create a consistent set of digital media capabilities across its brands. the companies said 21st Century Fox has already reduced its data center needs by 50 percent and moved over 30 million assets—approximately 10 petabytes of content—to Amazon Glacier and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Continuing this transformation, 21st Century Fox will use AWS as the primary platform to deliver over 90,000 titles on demand for key brands such as FOX, FX, National Geographic, 20th Century Fox Television, 20th Century Fox Film, and FOX Sports. 21st Century Fox has also. implemented a company-wide approach to data collection, processing, and instrumentation using AWS’s technologies.

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AppLovin raises $400 million for mobile game discovery

AppLovin, a start-up based in Palo Alto, California, announced a $400 million investment from KKR, a leading global investment firm, to accelerate its global mobile game discovery business

AppLovin said the partnership with KKR advances its goal of giving app developers of all sizes the ability to finance, market, and grow their businesses.  KKR is making the investment primarily from its KKR Americas XII Fund.

Mobile gaming projected to be a $70.3 billion industry in 2018, growing over 25% year-over-year according to Global Games Market Report.

AppLovin currently reaches over 300 million daily active users and drives over one billion installs for gaming companies annually.

“We’re honored to be partnering with KKR, one of the best investment firms in the world," said Adam Foroughi, CEO and co-founder of AppLovin. “This investment will further fuel the growth of our product and our investment in Lion Studios. KKR’s expertise will be invaluable as we continue to scale our company globally and help more app developers meet and exceed their business goals.”

• AppLovin was founded in 2012.  In 2018, the company launched its own mobile gaming division, Lion Studios, which has already published multiple chart-topping games. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto with offices in San Francisco, New York, Dublin, Beijing, Tokyo, Seoul, and Berlin.

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Keysight Joins 5G Device Forerunner Initiative

Keysight Technologies is joining the 5G Device Forerunner Initiative project, which was created earlier this year to accelerate the commercial availability of 5G devices.  More than 20 key chipset, component, and end solution providers are in the ecosystem.

Keysight said it is supplying its suite of 5G NR network emulation solutions to companies involved in the 5G trials to perform device characterization, design validation and conformance verification.

"We are pleased to extend our close collaboration with China Mobile in support of a connected ecosystem to realize the full potential of 5G across a wide range of applications and devices", says Satish Dhanasekaran, senior vice president of Keysight Technologies, and president of the Communications Solutions Group. "Keysight brings industry-leading 5G expertise and 5G test solutions to the project, supporting China Mobile’s strategic goals of promoting 5G development towards 5G’s commercialization in 2020."

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REFLEX launches 800G acceleration card based on Intel FPGA

Paris-based Reflex CES introduced a 800 GbE accelerator card powered by Intel's S GX FPGA. The board comes in different variants where clients can choose from different memory or FPGA densities.

This board features the largest Stratix 10 GX device with 2800 KLE and is designed for processing intensive and various data a Stratixalgorithms thanks to its unique mix of memory capabilities of DDR4 and QDR2+ modules. REFLEX CES has adopted the disruptive QSFP-DD technology for the optical interfaces, delivering up to 800GbE in total. This is combined with a huge storage capability using 3 SlimSAS interfaces at the rear of the board. The hardware is delivered with a custom passive heat-sink.

http://reflexces.com

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Red Hat Ansible Engine adds multicloud automation

The latest Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.6 release features new capabilities for automating across hybrid and multicloud environments, along with simplified connections to network APIs and updates for Ansible deployments overseeing Windows environments.

This includes updated modules covering Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. The public cloud modules add capabilities designed to match the latest functionality available in the respective cloud environments. Additionally, an improved AWS EC2 Instance module can provide a more streamlined user experience when provisioning new and managing existing EC2-backed instances. Red Hat has also extended support for VMware vSphere-deployed infrastructure, including VMware Cloud on AWS, enabling users to use automation across the hybrid cloud including legacy infrastructure.

http://www.redhat.com

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Verodin raises $21 million for cyber security instrumentation

Verodin, a start-up based in Tysons, Virginia, announced $21 million in Series B funding for its Security Instrumentation Platform (SIP), which continuously executes tests and analyzes the results to proactively alert on drift from a known-good security baseline The system validates and optimizes control configuration, and provide evidence demonstrating if the controls purchased and deployed are actually delivering the desired business outcomes.

The new funding was led by TenEleven Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP). Capital One Growth Ventures, Citi Ventures and all existing investors participated in the round.

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Dell'Oro: Rising shipments of campus Ethernet switches

Ethernet campus switches with enhanced software and hardware capabilities will fuel market growth through 2022, according to a new report from Dell'Oro Group. Power over Ethernet (PoE) port shipments are expected to rise to nearly 850 million total ports over the next five years.

“The Ethernet campus switch market is about to undergo a major upgrade cycle that will drive sustained growth over the next five years,” said Sameh Boujelbene, Senior Director at Dell’Oro Group. “The campus switch installed base is ripe for refresh, not only because it’s an aging infrastructure, but also due to the lack of support of new capabilities needed to enable the digital transformation. New campus switches are expected to provide additional features such as automation, security, analytics and network visibility. We also expect a higher portion of campus switch ports to support PoE due to increased demand from PoE enabled devices such as WLAN, security cameras and PoE lighting,” added Boujelbene.

Key topics covered by the Ethernet Switch – Layer 2+3 5-Year Report:

• How will extended switching software capabilities affect the Ethernet Switch market?
• When will 2.5 Gbps shipments surpass 5.0 Gbps and what is the expected price point for both speeds?
• The impact of the move towards subscription-based sales models in campus switching.

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Thailand's dtac deploys 4G TDD with Nokia

dtac is deploying the first commercial 4G TDD network in Thailand using the 2300 MHz spectrum band operated in cooperation with TOT. The network is being deployed in the Northeast, North and South of Thailand, including major provinces such as Khon Kaen, Chiang Mai, and Phuket.

dtac is using the Nokia AirScale platform, including AirScale radios, AirScale System Modules, AirScale Active Antennas and NetAct. The upgrade leverages 3CC Carrier Aggregation, 256 QAM and 4x4 MIMO.

Sébastien Laurent, head of Nokia Thailand, said: "Nokia is honored and thankful for being selected by dtac to deliver our award-winning Radio Access Network solutions in three regions of Thailand. Our teams strive to deliver solutions and services providing faster mobile broadband experience to dtac's customers, as well as pave way for network evolution to 5G."

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Arrcus builds Network OS for white box data center infrastructure

Arrcus, a start-up based in San Jose, California, emerged from stealth to unveil its software-driven, hardware agnostic network operating system for white boxes.

Arrcus said it sees an opportunity to help enterprises transform the way they manage their networks, liberating them from vertically integrated proprietary solutions and opening the door to horizontally diversified choices of best-in-class silicon and hardware systems.

The company's new ArcOS networking operating system has been ported to both Broadcom’s StrataDNX Jericho+ and StrataXGS Trident 3 switching silicon platforms.

ArcOS is built on a modular micro-services paradigm and offers advanced Layer 3 routing capabilities. Key elements include a hyper-performance resilient control plane, an intelligent, programmable Dataplane Adaptation Layer (DPAL), a data-Model Driven Telemetry for Control Plane, Data Planes and Environmental, and a consistent YANG/OpenConfig APIs for easy programmatic access.  These capabilities in conjunction with Broadcom’s StrataDNX Jericho+ platform enable the support for the full BGP internet routing table.

Arrcus cites the following use cases:

• Spine-Leaf Clos for Datacenter workloads
• Internet Peering for CDN providers and ISPs
• Resilient Routing to the Host
• Massively Scalable Route-Reflector clusters in physical/container form-factors

Arrcus also announced $15 million in Series A funding from General Catalyst and Clear Ventures. Advisors include include Pankaj Patel, former EVP and CDO of Cisco; Amarjit Gill, serial entrepreneur who founded and sold companies to Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, EMC, Facebook, Google, and Intel; Farzad Nazem, former CTO of Yahoo; Randy Bush, Internet Hall of Fame, founder Verio (basis of NTT’s DataCenter Business); Fred Baker, former Cisco Fellow, IETF Chair and Co-Chair of the IPv6 Working Group; Nancy Lee, ex-VP of People at Google, and Shawn Zandi, Director, Network Engineering at LinkedIn.

“We use ‘network different’ as our fundamental approach to enable the freedom of choice through our product innovation and challenging the status quo.  Arrcus has assembled the world’s best networking technologists, is bringing new capabilities, and changing the business model to make it easier to design, deploy, and manage large scale networking solutions for our customers,” stated Arrcus co-founder and CEO Devesh Garg.

• Arrcus is headed by Devesh Garg, who previously was president of EZchip (acquired by Tilera) and founding CEO of Tilera (acquired by EZchip). He also served at Bessemer Venture Partners and Broadcom. Other Arrcus co-founders include Keyur Patel, who was a Distinguished Engineer at Cisco; and Derek Yeung, a former Principal Engineer at Cisco.

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Microsoft Azure Service Fabric Mesh enters beta

Microsoft announced the public preview release of Azure Service Fabric, which is its new distributed systems platform for managing scalable microservices and container-based applications for Windows and Linux.

Microsoft describes Service Fabric as a foundational technology for its core Azure infrastructure, as well as other Microsoft cloud services such as Skype for Business, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL Database, Dynamics 365, and many more.

Azure Service Fabric Mesh will be a fully-managed service that enables developers to deploy and operate containerized applications without having to manage VMs, storage or networking configuration, while keeping the enterprise-grade reliability, scalability, and mission-critical performance of Service Fabric.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-service-fabric-mesh-is-now-in-public-preview/

Azure Kubernetes Service enters general availability

Thursday, June 14, 2018  Kubernetes, Microsoft Azure  No Comments

Microsoft announced that its Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is now generally available in ten regions across three continents. Microsoft expects to add ten more regions in the coming months.

The new Kubernetes service features an Azure-hosted control plane, automated upgrades, self-healing, easy scaling, and a simple user experience for both developers and cluster operators. Users are able to control access to their Kubernetes cluster with Azure Active Directory accounts and user groups. A key attribute of AKS is operational visibility into the managed Kubernetes environment. Control plane telemetry, log aggregation, and container health are monitored via the Azure portal.

Microsoft also announced five new regions including Australia East, UK South, West US, West US 2, and North Europe.

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Telecom Egypt + Liquid Telecom link Cairo-to-Cape Town terrestrial fiber

Telecom Egypt and Liquid Telecom signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to complete the first terrestrial fibre network stretching all the way from Cape Town, South Africa, to Cairo, Egypt.

Under the MoU, Liquid Telecom will link its network from Sudan into Telecom Egypt’s network via a new cross border interconnection – bringing together a 60,000km network that runs from Cape Town, through all the Southern, Central, and Eastern African countries, and has now reached the border between Sudan and Egypt.

As part of the strategic partnership, Liquid Telecom and Telecom Egypt will share network infrastructure and explore further areas of collaboration, including joint network services, a peering arrangement and a voice interconnection agreement.

The Cape to Cairo network - often referred to as “the One Africa” broadband network - has been in the making for over ten years and serves some of the largest global companies with some of the fastest network speeds on the continent.

“Completing our vision of building a single network running on land, all the way from Cape to Cairo is a historic moment for the company and for a more connected Africa. This network not only represents a remarkable engineering achievement that has overcome some of the most challenging distances and terrains on the continent, but it is also supporting the rise of Africa’s digital economies,” said Strive Masiyiwa, Founder and Executive Chairman of Econet.

“This MoU is a great step in our strategy to penetrate the African market and avail Telecom Egypt’s most advanced technology and global infrastructure services to customers across Africa. We look forward to working alongside Liquid Telecom to develop new network services and products that will help stimulate intra-regional trade,” said Ahmed El Beheiry, Telecom Egypt’s Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer.

https://www.liquidtelecom.com/news-events/news.html

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Ericsson, Telstra and Intel complete first 5G data call over 3.5GHz

Ericsson, Telstra and Intel completed the first end-to-end 5G non-standalone (NSA) 3GPP data call on a commercial mobile network at Telstra’s 5G Innovation Centre on the Gold Coast Australia in a multivendor setup.

The 5G data call was made over Telstra’s 5G NSA enabled commercial network using the following components:

• Ericsson’s base station comprising Baseband 6630, AIR 6488 and 4G / 5G system software
• Telstra’s licenced 5G Band 42 (3.5 GHz) and 4G Band 1 spectrum (2100 MHz)
• A Telstra retail SIM
• Network connection to an Ericsson virtualized 5G packet core (vMME and vEPG) running on Ericsson’s NFVi - the 5G slice was connected into the existing Telstra mobile network, which supports other functions such as backhaul, user authentication, billing and provisioning
• Intel 5G Mobile Trial Platform for the 5G NR UE, running an early 3GPP Rel15 Intel 4G module and a 5G NSA implementation

"Demonstrating this 5G data call end-to-end using my own personal SIM card on Telstra’s mobile network is the closest any provider has come to making a ’true’ 5G call in the real world-environment, and marks another 5G first for Telstra. We continue to work with global technology companies Ericsson and Intel as well as global standards bodies to advance the deployment of commercial 5G capability in Australia,” stated Telstra’s Group Managing Director Networks Mike Wright.

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CenturyLink offers private access to Oracle Cloud

CenturyLink is launching a dedicated and private access service to Oracle Cloud.

The CenturyLink Cloud Connect Solutions and Oracle’s FastConnect service will be delivered via both Wavelengths and MEF 2.0-certified Carrier Ethernet services.

“Our integration with Oracle FastConnect provides our customers a network experience that matches their cloud experience,” said Chris McReynolds, vice president of core network services, CenturyLink. “In today’s rapidly changing IT environment, our customers need a network that can adapt with their cloud workloads. Our Ethernet Services connectivity offers real-time network visibility and dynamic bandwidth, providing enterprises with control and scalability across their entire cloud ecosystem.”

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Orange acquires Basefarm for cloud infrastructure in Europe

Orange Business Services has agreed to acquire Basefarm Holding AS, a major player in cloud infrastructure and critical application services in Europe, for EUR 350 million.

Basefarm, which recorded revenues of over EUR 100 million in 2017, has an operational presence in several European countries, particularly in Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Austria and in Germany.

Orange Business Services said the acquisition of Basefarm represents an advancement of its development strategy, complementing its existing catalogue of offers. The addition of Basefarm will also complete the geographical reach of Orange’s services, enabling it to become a leading player in Europe.

“We are very proud to announce the acquisition of Basefarm, which will mark a major milestone in our international development. In particular, the company’s integration will enable us to significantly extend our Big Data and critical application management services on a rapidly consolidating market. In addition to our ability to offer access to public or private cloud infrastructure, it is above all our capacity to propose enriched, automated services to our customers, wherever they are in the world, that will enable us to support companies as they transform onto new, digital models based on cloud-computing, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence,” said Helmut Reisinger, Chief Executive Officer of Orange Business Services.

• The Basefarm group consists of four companies; Basefarm AS (Norway), Basefarm BV (Netherlands), Basefarm AB (Sweden) and The unbelievable Machine Company Gmbh (Germany and Austria). ABRY Partners holds a 90% stake in Basefarm. The company was founded in 2000, is based in Oslo, and is headed by Fredrik Olhsen.

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ZTE begins recovery, posts huge 1H loss

ZTE confirmed that it has resumed business operations following the lifting of the export ban of U.S. components and technology to the company imposed by the U.S. Department of Commerce.

ZTE paid US$1.0 billion in civil monetary penalties to the U.S. and placed an additional US$0.4 billion in escrow as a suspended penalty.

ZTE reported a preliminary loss of between RMB 7 billion (US$1.06 billion) to RMB 9 billion (US$1.345 billion) for the first half of 2018. On a per-share basis, this amounts to a loss of RMB 1.67–2.15 per share.

In June, ZTE said it was pursuing a 30 billion yuan ($4.9 billion) line of credit from Bank of China and a separate $6 billion credit line from China Development Bank.

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Microsoft Azure adds Virtual WAN and Firewall capabilities

Microsoft is introducing two new services that significantly increase the reach and security of its cloud service:  Azure Virtual WAN (wide-area network) and Azure Firewall.

Azure Virtual WAN is a networking service providing optimized and automated branch to branch connectivity for connecting to and through Azure using a distributed connectivity model. It provides mechanisms to connect traditional customer routers on-premises as well as an expanding ecosystem of new Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) systems from Microsoft partners. Microsoft said its Virtual WAN allows customers to seamlessly connect their branches to each other and Azure using last mile Internet. It also enables customers to construct a hub and spoke network in Azure to more easily route traffic to virtual appliances such as firewalls and Azure network security services.  Microsoft's current Virtual WAN partners include Citrix and Riverbed.

Azure Firewall is a cloud-native network security service that protects Azure Virtual Network resources. It is a fully stateful firewall as a service with built-in high availability and unrestricted cloud scalability. Customers can centrally create, enforce, and log application and network connectivity policies, spanning Fully Qualified Domain Names (FQDNs), IP Addresses, ports and protocols across subscriptions and virtual networks. Azure Firewall policies can be fully integrated with customers’ DevOps model while enabling them to manage security risks and achieve compliance requirements for managing resource access and protection in the cloud.

Microsoft has also updated its Azure Data Box, which is its data storage appliance for physically transferring large data sets from a customer location to the Azure cloud. The Azure Data Box will now be offered in Europe and the United Kingdom. A new Azure Data Box is an SSD-disk based option with up to five 8TB drives, totaling 40TB, for a recurring or one-time data migration.

This week Microsoft is hosting its Inspire partner conference in Las Vegas.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-public-preview-of-azure-virtual-wan-and-azure-firewall/

What is Azure Virtual WAN (preview)?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-wan/virtual-wan-about

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Facebook to open source eXecutable ARchives (XARs)

Facebook has decided to pursue an open source path for its eXecutable ARchives (XARs), which is a way to create self-contained executables.

XARs, which are already being used at scale  at Facebook, are described as "a system for distributing self-contained executables that encapsulate both data and code dependencies."

Facebook says XARs are the fastest way to distribute and execute large Python applications.

https://code.fb.com/data-infrastructure/xars-a-more-efficient-open-source-system-for-self-contained-executables/

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Ericsson to divest its field services in Sweden

Ericsson will sell off its business providing field service operations and maintenance of fixed and mobile networks in Sweden.

Under the deal, the Swedish company Transtema Group AB will Ericsson Local Services AB (LSS), a subsidiary of Ericsson. All operations and assets of LSS will be transferred to Transtema ownership. Financial terms were not disclosed, but Ericsson did say the transaction will make it a minority shareholder and represented on the Board of Directors of Transtema Group.

Per Narvinger, Head of Customer Unit Northern & Central Europe, Market Area Europe & Latin America, Ericsson, says: “Ericsson Local Services is a market leader in field service operations in Sweden with a skilled workforce of approximately 700 employees across the country. They deliver very good support to our customers, and we believe Transtema has an excellent opportunity to continue to develop the field service operations while also executing on existing customer commitments. Together we will ensure a quick and smooth transition and a good relationship.”

Magnus Johansson, CEO Transtema Group says “We intend to operate LSS as a separate legal entity within Transtema Group. With LSS experience, competence and customer relations in Sweden they will become the backbone of our field service operations business. Our goal is to continue to grow the service business for telecom networks. This is in line with our ambition to develop our operations in Sweden and internationally. We look forward to welcome and on-board all LSS employees as soon as the deal is closed.”

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Spectrum auctions to top FCC's August meeting

The Federal Communications Commission's open meeting scheduled for Thursday, August 2, 2018, is expected to clear up key spectrum issues: On the agenda:

Spectrum Frontiers Auction Procedures – setting the rules for auctioning Upper Microwave Flexible Use Licenses in the 28 GHz (Auction 101) and 24 GHz (Auction 102) bands.

The auction of the 28 GHz band (Auction 101) would employ the FCC's standard simultaneous multiple round (SMR) auction format, which offers every license for bid at the same time and consists of successive bidding rounds in which bidders may place bids on individual licenses. This auction is scheduled to commence on November 14, 2018,

The auction of the 24 GHz band (Auction 102) would employ a clock auction format, which would allow bidding on generic blocks in each PEA in successive clock bidding rounds. The bidding for the 24 GHz band (Auction 102) will be scheduled to commence after the conclusion of bidding in Auction 101.

Making 39 GHz Band Auction Ready – transitioning existing spectrum holdings in the 39 GHz band (38.6-40 GHz) to a new flexible-use band plan by offering new licenses for contiguous spectrum in the band.

Wireline Infrastructure – an order to reform the pole attachment process, allowing one-touch, make-ready for most pole attachments. The FCC may also issue a Declaratory Ruling to prohibit state and local moratoria on telecommunications facilities deployment.

https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-announces-tentative-agenda-august-open-meeting-4

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