Facebook Unveils "Wedge" Top-of-Rack Programmable Switch

Facebook introduced a new top-of-rack network switch, code-named “Wedge,” and a new Linux-based operating system for that switch, code-named “FBOSS.”  Both products are part of Facebook's efforts to "disaggregate" the network from traditional product categories so as to create more flexible, more scalable and more efficient data centers. 

The Wedge switch features a modular design that brings capabilities of a micro-server using a range of processors, including Intel, AMD and ARM.  On the software side, the "FBOSS" uses the same libraries that Facebook currently uses to manage its server fleet.  This will let Facebook program the switch with the same abstraction layer used for other software services.

In an engineering blog posting, Facebook describes its capabilities as a hybrid of distributed and centralized  control models.

Facebook is currently testing Wedge and FBOSS and plans to contribute key elements to the Open Compute Project (OCP).

https://code.facebook.com/posts/681382905244727/introducing-wedge-and-fboss-the-next-steps-toward-a-disaggregated-network/

In May 2013, The Open Compute Project announced plans to develop an open, OS-agnostic top-of-rack switch.  The effort will be led by Najam Ahmad, who runs the network engineering team at Facebook. Companies that are supporting the effort include Big Switch Networks, Broadcom, Cumulus Networks, Facebook, Intel, Netronome, OpenDaylight, the Open Networking Foundation, and VMware.

In November 2013,  OCP said that it had received more than 30 potential contributions, covering most of the network hardware stack and even some of the network software stack.  In a blog posting, the Open Compute Project highlights four contributions in particular, all of them currently being considered by the OCP Incubation Committee and likely to be accepted soon.   These included  Broadcom's full specification for and implementation of an open switch;  Cumulus Networks' Open Network Install Environment (ONIE) software;  Intel's specification for an open switch; and Mellanox's open switch.

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T-Mobile US Expands VoLTE and Wideband LTE Rollouts

T-Mobile has expanded its deployment of 15+15MHz Wideband LTE to 16 total markets and VoLTE to 15 total markets reaching over 100 million people.  The carrier's overall LTE footprint will exceed 230 million pops by the end this month.

Wideband LTE enables peak network download speeds up to nearly 150 Mbps.

T-Mobile was the first major provider to launch VoLTE. It now supports VoLTE on four devices, including the Samsung Galaxy S 5. In addition to expanding the number of markets served by VoLTE, the company is nearly doubling the amount of data dedicated to voice calls for highest fidelity HD Voice and faster call setup times. For HD Voice, T-Mobile US uses a 23.85 Kbps voice codec rate.  In addition, the company confirmed that it now expects to have VoLTE nationwide by the end of the year.

“The old telecoms designed their networks for a time when your phone’s only app was a phone call—and they haven’t shaken that dial-tone mind-set,” said Neville Ray, Chief Technology Officer for T-Mobile. “Our 4G LTE network was built in the last year and a half, so naturally we built it differently.  We built it for the way people use smartphones and tablets today, and we built it with a mobile Internet architecture, so we could roll out new technologies faster.”

http://newsroom.t-mobile.com/issues-insights-blog/the-un-carrier-network-designed-data-strong.htm

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T-Mobile Offers Week-long Test Drive with iPhone 5s

T-Mobile US will begin offering a free, no-obligation "Test Drive" whereby consumers can receive an iPhone 5s and unlimited nationwide service for seven days. When the week-long test drive is over, they simply drop the phone off at any T-Mobile retail store.

“The way this industry forces Americans to buy wireless is completely, utterly broken.  I’m here to tell you there’s a better way,” declared John Legere, T-Mobile CEO and President. “While the carriers ask you to buy blind, the Un-carrier gives you transparency.  Our network kicks ass, and now people can experience for themselves what a data-strong network can do with T-Mobile Test Drive.”

http://explore.t-mobile.com/test-drive-free-trial

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Wind River Launches Titanium Ecosystem for NFV

Wind River launched its Titanium Cloud ecosystem for service providers and telecom equipment manufacturers (TEMs) deploying infrastructure based on network functions virtualization (NFV).

Initial members include Brocade, GENBAND, Metaswitch Networks, Nakina Systems, and Overture.

Wind River said its ecosystem program helps ensure interoperability of solutions based in  its Carrier Grade Communications Server, which is an integrated portfolio of software elements that enables NFV infrastructure to achieve the carrier grade reliability required for telecom networks. The company said its Carrier Grade Communications Server enables service providers to maintain six-nines reliability as they transition to virtualized infrastructure, allowing them to meet “always on” expectations.

“Realizing a successful NFV infrastructure requires collaboration across a broad ecosystem, ensuring the availability of end-to-end solutions that integrate seamlessly to deliver virtualized services at the necessary levels of carrier grade performance and reliability,” said Mike Langlois, general manager of the communications business for Wind River. “Carrier Grade Communications Server delivers a critical element of this infrastructure. Our Titanium Cloud ecosystem program provides a framework for Wind River to work with industry leaders like Brocade, GENBAND, Metaswitch, Nakina, and Overture to deliver standard product solutions that help service providers achieve their critical business imperatives, such as reducing operating costs while accelerating the introduction of new, high-value services.”

http://www.windriver.com

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GigOptix to Acquire Tahoe RF Semiconductor

GigOptix agreed to acquire all of the assets of Tahoe RF Semiconductor in an all-cash deal. Financial terms were not disclosed. All of Tahoe RF’s team of engineers will become employees of GigOptix.

Tahoe RF Semiconductor developed RF/analog RFICs, IPs, and fully integrated systems and subsystems on a chip. It has an extensive IP library, including radio frequency front-ends, low-power transmitters, direct conversion receivers, low noise amplifiers, and fractional-N frequency synthesizers, as well as automatic gain control and RF receiver patents.

"I am happy about the acquisition of Tahoe RF which brings to GigOptix a solid team of very experienced RF engineers and a rich portfolio of proven silicon IP into our RF and Wireless product line,” said Dr. Avi Katz, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of GigOptix, Inc. "The acquisition of Tahoe RF is one more step in our continuous quest to strengthen our industry leading RF engineering team, and enable GigOptix to address increasing aggregate data bandwidth demand through our optimized Monolithic Microwave IC (MMIC) products targeted at point-to-point wireless backhaul applications. The acquisition also puts us in an excellent position to expand into adjacent RF and wireless market opportunities, including consumer and high volume enterprise applications, such GPS devices.”

E-Band radios shipments by GigOptix are expected to grow to 6,000 per month with total shipments in 2014 in excess of 50,000 radios, driven by the deployment of LTE cellular infrastructure in support of the ever growing demand for mobile data for smartphones. The deployment of small cells, addressed by V-Band devices, 60GHz band, is expected to be one order of magnitude greater than regular cells in urban areas and the demand for V-band radios is expected to accelerate in the next two years with volumes at much higher than E-Band.

http://www.gigoptix.com/
http://www.tahoerf.com/

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NIMBOXX Introduces Software Defined Data Center Box

NIMBOXX, a start-up based in Austin, Texas, unveiled its ‘atomic unit’ for the software-defined data center -- an all-in-one appliance that converges servers, storage, networking and security.

NIMBOXX features mesh-based scale out, dynamic storage orchestration, self-balancing workload heuristics, and a shared-nothing management model. It also provides dynamic adaptation to cache and storage changes based on multi-dimensional workload analyses. Deployments can start with a single node and scale to hundreds. NIMBOXX uses its own Mesh Operating System (MeshOS) on bare metal and offers a RESTful API for integration with third-party applications. The company claims 180,000 IOPS generated from a 1U system with factory settings

NIMBOX also announced $12 million in Series A funding from SMC Holdings, a Hong Kong-based institutional investor.

http://www.nimboxx.com

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Puppet Labs Raises $40 Million for Automation Software

Puppet Labs announced $40 million in new funding from existing investors Cisco, Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Triangle Peak Partners, True Ventures and VMware.

Puppet Labs, which develops IT automation software, said it now has over 18,000 enterprises using its software to accelerate operations. The software can automate repetitive tasks, deploy applications across multiple machines, proactively manage infrastructure where on-premise or in the cloud.

Puppet Labs is based in Portland, Oregon, and has about 300 employees. The company will use the new funding to expand internationally.

Puppet's has now raised a total of $86 million since June 2009.

“Puppet Labs is growing fast for a reason: IT automation is critical for any company that uses software to compete,” said Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of Puppet Labs. “Today, we help more than 18,000 organizations automate IT, both on premise and in the cloud. But we're just getting started. This funding round enables us to further our leadership position by entering new markets and helping our customers deliver great software faster than ever.”

http://puppetlabs.com

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Infonetics: A Shift in Data Center Security Investments

Virtual security appliances will capture a growing share of investments in data center security, according to new report from Infonetics Research.

“Historically, data centers have been protected by big-iron security solutions and complex webs of security appliances and load-balancing infrastructure,” says Jeff Wilson, principal analyst for security at Infonetics Research. “But as more providers virtualize their data centers and roll out SDNs and NFV, we anticipate a fairly significant revenue transition from hardware appliances to virtual appliances and purpose-built security solutions that interface directly with hypervisors, with SDN controllers via APIs, or orchestration platforms.”

Some highlights of the report:

• The ported virtual security appliances segment of the data center security market grew 10% in 2013 over 2012, to $437 million
• Meanwhile, sales of purpose-built virtual security appliances totaled $150 million in 2013, up 44% from the prior year
• Cisco, Juniper, and Fortinet are the top 3 revenue share leaders in the data center security appliance market
• Massive interest in SDN- and NFV-compatible security solutions is expected to drive consolidation among established security players, virtualization platform vendors, and specialist vendors
• Infonetics is projecting a cumulative $1.35 billion will be spent on purpose-built virtual security appliances from 2014 to 2018.

http://www.infonetics.com

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Intel to Integrate Xeon + FPGA On Chip to Accelerate Data Center Processing

Intel announced plans to integrate its Xeon processor with a coherent FPGA in a single package, socket compatible to a standard Xeon E5 processor. The goal to accelerate software defined infrastructure and support scale-out, distributed applications. Intel's Diane Bryant and Tom Krazit discussed the plans at the Gigaom Structure’14 conference in San Francisco.

In the past year, Intel has already delivered 15 custom silicon devices to meet specific needs of the end customers, including Ebay and Facebook.  The company expects to deliver more than twice the number of specialized products in 2014.

In a blog post, Bryant writes that the new Xeon+FPGA solution "provides yet another customized option, one more tool for customers to use to improve their critical data center metric of Performance/TCO”. She also highlights work underway with Facebook on the Open Compute Project and ETSI's NFV ISG to develop many proof-of-concept demonstrations.

https://communities.intel.com/community/itpeernetwork/datastack/blog/2014/06/18/disrupting-the-data-center-to-create-the-digital-services-economy

In February, Intel introduced its new Xeon processor E7 v2 family featuring triple the memory capacity and double the compute performance of the previous generation processor family, allowing much faster and thorough data analysis.

The Intel Xeon processor E7 v2 family is built for up to 32-socket servers, with configurations supporting up to 15 processing cores and up to 1.5 terabytes (TB) of memory per socket. 

To reduce data bottlenecks, the Intel Xeon Processor E7 v2 family features Intel Integrated I/O, Intel Data Direct I/O and support for PCIe 3.0, achieving up to four times the I/O bandwidth over the previous generation and providing extra capacity for storage and networking connections.

Intel said Big Data analysis and Internet-of-Everything require vastly increased in-memory processing, which places and analyzes an entire data set – such as an organization's entire customer database – in the system memory rather than on traditional disk drives.

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CenturyLink Cloud Adds Pay-by-the-Hour Billing

CenturyLink introduced pay-by-the hour billing for managed services on its CenturyLink Cloud platform, including web servers, middleware, operating systems, directory services and database applications.

CenturyLink's new cloud-based managed services are provisioned via a single, self-service interface using an on-demand model. The initial launch debuts eight services: Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux managed operating systems, as well as managed applications Active Directory, Apache HTTP Server, Apache Tomcat, Microsoft Internet Information Services, Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL. Thee cloud-based managed services will be available starting June 30 through CenturyLink Cloud nodes in Santa Clara, California, and Sterling, Virginia, with additional managed services and global locations in Europe and Asia enabled later this year.

"CenturyLink continues to change the game in cloud. One-click access to managed services delivers our expert management resources in a new way, providing customers with extraordinary flexibility," said Jared Wray, chief technology officer, CenturyLink Cloud. "As cloud adoption evolves and enterprises pursue new and easier ways to manage their IT infrastructure, the time is right in the industry for an optimized experience that brings cloud together with expert managed services."

http://www.centurylink.com/technology

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FCC: Broadband Speed Promises Mostly Accurate

Most broadband providers in the U.S. continue to improve service performance by delivering actual speeds that meet or exceed advertised speeds during the past year, according to the latest "Measuring Broadband America" report released by the FCC. Some providers showed significant room for improvement, particularly with respect to consistency of speeds.

The FCC noted 5 key trends in its data:

1. ISPs continue to deliver the combined upload/download speeds they advertise, but a new metric this year – consistency of speeds – shows there’s still work to be done: This year’s report shows that average speeds are close to advertised, but not always available. Cablevision, for example, delivered 100 percent or better of advertised speed to 80 percent of our panelists 80 percent of the time during peak periods, but about half the ISPs delivered about 90 percent or better of advertised speed, and several ISPs delivered less than 60 percent or better of advertised speeds 80 percent of the time to 80 percent of the panelists.

2. Download speeds performance varies by service tier, with some ISPs delivering less than 80 percent of advertised speeds: All ISPs except for one (Qwest, which had a 16 percent performance improvement in download speed) were within 10 percent of last year’s results, i.e. largely unchanged. Overall trends were encouraging. For download speeds, ten of 14 reporting ISPs showed slightly improved download performance, four were virtually unchanged and only one ISP (Verizon offering DSL service) showed results slightly worse than last year. However, Windstream’s 1.5 Mbps speed tier only delivers 78 percent of advertised speeds, a low among all ISPs at all speed tiers.

3. Fiber and Cable technologies continue to evolve to higher speed offerings, but DSL is beginning to lag behind: Additionally, while providers using cable and fiber access technologies generally met or exceeded their advertised tiers, providers using DSL technology generally failed to meet their advertised speeds. This may indicate differences in the economics of upgrading DSL relative to other technologies, and investment choices by broadband providers or the price points at which higher speeds are made available for DSL.

4. Consumers continue to migrate to higher speed tiers: We continue to see a migration of consumers from lower speed tiers to higher offerings both by consumers electing to purchase higher speeds and through upgrades of standard offerings by Internet service providers. A simple average of service tiers surveyed in 2013 shows an average advertised speed of 21.2 Mbps, representing an increase of approximately 36 percent from 15.6 Mbps in 2012.

5. Upload speeds vary sharply: Many studies have shown that consumer Internet traffic today is asymmetric – consumers typically download far more data than they upload. Consistent with that behavior, most service offerings typically have far higher download than upload rates. Verizon offers upload rates as high as 35 Mbps. Frontier offers upload rates of 25 Mbps.  Both are fiber-based.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said, “Consumers deserve to get what they pay for. While it’s encouraging to see that in the past these reports have encouraged providers to improve their services, I’m concerned that some providers are failing to deliver consistent speeds to consumers that are commensurate to their advertised speeds. As a result, I’ve directed FCC staff to write to the underperforming companies to ask why this happened and what they will do to solve this.”

The report is posted online.

http://www.fcc.gov/reports/measuring-broadband-america-2014

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Spirent Puts 400G Ethernet to the Test with Xilinx and Huawei

Spirent Communications unveiled its 400G Ethernet Test System -- an industry first -- and announced the completion of testing of Huawei’s NE5000E core router.  The tests verified the layer 1-3 quality and highlighted error free performance with different combinations of streams, frame lengths and rates including a single stream running at full line rate.

Spirent's pre-standard 400G Ethernet Test System uses Xilinx’s 28nm Virtex-7 H870T programmable device.  Spirent, Huawei and Xilinx have been collaborating for more than six months on 400GbE testing.
 
Spirent said its solution marks an important for the industry in the development of 400GbE systems. The 400G Ethernet Test System is a one-slot blade compatible with Spirent’s existing chassis and its other Ethernet products.  Key features of the solution include:

• Sending and receiving Ethernet frames from 64 to 16K bytes in length
• Generating and analyzing 400G traffic as a single stream running at line rate or as an aggregation of multiple streams
• Compensating for small clock differences between link partners with parts per million (PPM) adjustment
• Delivering per-port and per-stream statistics such as latency, frames out of sequence, frame counts and rates, and layer 1 statistics to help debug physical link problems
• Allowing modification of generated frame contents
• Capturing received traffic at wire rate

“The collaboration with Huawei and Xilinx to develop and validate our 400G test solution builds on Spirent’s position as the leader in high-speed Ethernet testing. As a result of this effort, we are ready for a live showcase of a solution that enables network equipment manufacturers and service providers to move forward with early 400G design projects and effectively test their next-gen offerings,” stated Eric Hutchinson, CEO, Spirent Communications.

http://www.spirent.com/go/400g

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Infonetics: 16G Fibre Channel Takes Over

Sales of 16G Fibre Channel are quickly taking over the market from earlier 4G and 8G implementations, according to a new study published by Infonetics.

“With 16G Fibre Channel ramping fast, 8G is making a quick exit,” says Cliff Grossner, Ph.D., directing analyst for data center and cloud at Infonetics Research. “16G Fibre Channel solutions now make up 42% of storage area network (SAN) revenue, and we expect to see the continued acceleration of 16G at the expense of 8G and 4G, especially with 32G still two years out.”

“Most of the 16G market is inter-switch, or switch-to-storage array, and not server connections,” adds Grossner.

Some highlights:

• Globally, the SAN market (Fibre Channel switches and host bus adapters) totaled $592 million in 1Q14, down 9% from 4Q13, and down 3% from a year ago
• Brocade continues to dominate the SAN switch and adapter market, gaining 3 market share points in 1Q14
• Worldwide converged data center network adapter revenue (Ethernet switch ports-in-use for storage and converged network adapters, or CNAs), declined 4% sequentially in 1Q14, to $549 million
• CNAs continue to account for the majority of revenue, followed by iSCSI adapters and universal adapters
• Thanks to its recent acquisitions, QLogic is expected to move into the #2 spot in the converged data center network adapter market in 2Q14
• In an effort to grab market share, converged data center network adapter vendors are reaching for the cloud, software-defined networking (SDN), and network functions virtualization (NVF)
• The shift to cloud-architected data centers with automated deployment of virtual workloads is driving a long-term trend toward a converged network with storage and application traffic on Ethernet in the data center.

http://www.infonetics.com/pr/2014/1Q14-SAN-and-Converged-DC-Network-Equipment-Market-Highlights.asp

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TE Connectivity to Acquire Measurement Specialties for Sensor Business

TE Connectivity agreed to acquire Measurement Specialties (NASDAQ: MEAS), a leading supplier of sensors, for $86 cash per share or a total transaction value of approximately $1.7 billion (including assumption of net debt).

Measurement Specialties, which expects revenue of $540 million in its current fiscal year, offers a broad portfolio of sensor technologies including pressure, vibration, force, temperature, humidity, ultrasonics, position and fluid, for a wide range of applications and industries.  The company is based in Fremont, California.

"The acquisition of Measurement Specialties is a key part of our strategy to be a leader in the very attractive, high-growth sensor industry and adds nearly $40 billion to our addressable market," said Tom Lynch, TE Connectivity Chairman and CEO. "We are excited about this acquisition as it enables TE to provide customers with an unmatched range of connectivity and sensor solutions that are essential in a world where everything is increasingly connected. We look forward to combining Measurement Specialties' strong breadth of products and technologies with our deep customer relationships and global scale. We are also delighted to welcome their talented team to TE."

Frank Guidone, CEO of Measurement Specialties, said, "The sensor market is quite strong, with both the number of applications and the content per unit increasing every year. We are excited to expand our product offerings to customers around the world through TE's unparalleled go-to-market capabilities. We look forward to working with TE toward a seamless integration for our customers and employees, and becoming the supplier of choice for customers' sensing requirements."

http://investors.te.com
http://www.meas-spec.com/

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VeloCloud Raises $21 Million for its Cloud-WAN Vision

VeloCloud Networks, a start-up based in Los Altos, California, announced $21 million in funding for its Cloud-Delivered WAN vision.

VeloCloud plans to use a Cloud Orchestrator to provide centralized, enterprise-wide configuration and real-time monitoring of WAN connections.  The goal is to dramatically simplify the WAN by delivering virtualized services from the cloud to branch offices and mobile users.

The funding was led by leading venture capital firms New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Venrock as well as incubator firm, The Fabric.

“VeloCloud aims to fundamentally alter the economics of the WAN while simplifying and automating network operations for distributed enterprises,” said VeloCloud co-founder and CEO, Sanjay Uppal. “We are delighted to have the support of top-tier venture partners and are poised to build our channels, scale business development activities and create a strong ecosystem.”

http://www.velocloud.com/

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Cyan Intros Planet Orchestrate Application for Cloud and NFV Services

Cyan introduced its Planet Orchestrate, a multi-vendor and multi-domain, NFV and Cloud orchestration application for its Blue Planet SDN platform. The application combines the power of WAN service creation and automation with the orchestration of virtual resources.  The goal is to help network operators quickly introduce, automate, and operationalize new virtualized services between data centers, on top of existing network services, and across the WAN.

Specifically, Planet Orchestrate provides multi-domain orchestration, cloud services orchestration, and NFV orchestration (based on the ETSI NFV ISG Management and Orchestration framework). This new Blue Planet application utilizes open APIs to ensure interoperability with different OSS/BSS platforms, cloud management systems, SDN controllers, and virtualized network function (VNF) managers.

Cyan highlighted the following key features:

• Multi-Domain Service Orchestration: Planet Orchestrate enables seamless service delivery across multiple domains. It can leverage existing SDN controllers (e.g., Cyan’s Blue Planet SDN Platform, OpenDaylight, etc.) and management platforms (e.g. cloud managers, network managers, element managers) to deploy end-to-end services. Through a single “pane-of-glass”, Planet Orchestrate can help break down management silos and enables network operators to provision and manage services across networks comprised of both legacy and new SDN/NFV-enabled components. Multi-Domain Service Orchestration supports service-chaining between VNFs and physical network functions (PNFs) to allow operators to efficiently deploy services across networks. PoCs and trials are currently underway.  Commercial release is expected in Q3.
• NFV Orchestration: Planet Orchestrate is designed to fulfill the roles of the orchestrator and VNF manager functionality described in the ETSI NFV ISG architecture. Planet Orchestrate NFV orchestration is both VNF vendor and function neutral, providing a platform for operators to deploy and manage a variety of VNFs at varying degrees of scale and performance. Planet Orchestrate supports VNF management and orchestration across one or more data centers, as well as distributed architectures where VNFs may be deployed at the customer premise edge. Furthermore, the NFV orchestration engine supports intelligent VNF placement to maximize performance within a virtualized infrastructure. PoCs and trials are currently underway.  Commercial release is expected in Q3.
• Cloud Orchestration: Planet Orchestrate enables network operators to offer flexible data center service offerings, such as IaaS, PaaS, etc. and coordinate that across a wide area network. Operators will be able to offer their customers the ability to dynamically instantiate new cloud resources, such as virtual machines, new tenant networks, and storage, on-demand through an enterprise portal with the ability to control network (bandwidth-on-demand) and virtual (VM) resource allocation. PoCs and trials are currently underway.  Commercial release is expected in Q4. 

“Planet Orchestrate combines the capabilities of a WAN service automation and network management system with an SDN controller and orchestrator to enable network operators to deliver new services, on both physical and virtual infrastructure, more quickly and at a lower cost,” said Michael Hatfield, President, Cyan. “Developed in collaboration with network operators and other industry-leading Blue Orbit partners, Planet Orchestrate is ahead of the market and has already proven its viability and interoperability via multiple real-world trials and proof-of-concept demonstrations.”

Cyan also noted that its Blue Planet platform is currently deployed and providing SDN control and service automation in over 120 networks today.

http://www.cyaninc.com

Earlier this month, Cyan announced that CenturyLink is sponsoring an ETSI NFV ISG-approved proof of concept (PoC) solution based on RAD’s dedicated customer-edge D-NFV equipment running Fortinet’s Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) and Certes Networks’ virtual encryption/decryption engine as Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) with Cyan’s Blue Planet system orchestrating the entire ecosystem.

The companies said their D-NFV allows the placement of VNFs where they will be both most effective and least expensive, including at the customer edge. The model enables service providers to quickly and easily roll out new services and implement advanced capabilities without having to put capital expenditures upfront into the data center or redesign the network.

Cyan's Blue Planet can orchestrate both NFV and multi-vendor Ethernet services.

VNFs at the customer edge are implemented with RAD’s ETX-2, a D-NFV empowered NID, the cornerstone of RAD’s Service Assured Access solution. RAD's solution integrates an x86 server platform to host value-added service capabilities, as well as network functionalities that run on virtual machines. 

Fortinet and Certes Networks provide VNFs that are instantiated on RAD’s ETX-2 by Cyan’s Blue Planet SDN Platform. Fortinet’s FortiGate-VM enforces next-generation firewall security functions that provide network and application layer protection. Real-time security updates are pushed to the FortiGate-VM by FortiGuard subscription services to ensure it is aware of and enforcing protection from the latest security threats. FortiGate-VM is managed by Fortinet’s FortiManager-VM and FortiAnalyzer-VM, which provide centralized configuration, control and security analytics.

The virtual Certes Enforcement Point (vCEP) is a virtual encryption solution that secures data in motion over any public or private network. vCEPs can be dynamically provisioned to create Certes’ CryptoFlow VPNs, fully meshed multi-point VPNs safeguarding data in physical, virtual and Cloud environments. CryptoFlows protect critical data for any application with automatically enforced policies and simplified control of encryption keys.

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Cisco to Acquire Tail-f for Network Mgt and Service Orchestration

Cisco agreed to acquire privately held Tail-f Systems, a leader in multi-vendor network service orchestration solutions for traditional and virtualized networks, for approximately $175 million in cash and retention-based incentives.

Tail-f, which is based in Stockholm, Sweden, is known for its multi-vendor configuration management and network automation software.  The Tail-f Network Control System (NCS) provides a single network-wide interface to all network devices and all network applications and services, as well as a common modeling language and datastore for both services and devices. Engineers can use NCS to gain fine-grained control over multi-vendor equipment using a single tool.

The Tail-f ConfD software for on-device management provides automatic rendering of all northbound interfaces. It implements the NETCONF protocol and YANG modeling language.

Cisco said the acquisition of Tail-f accelerates its cloud virtualization strategy while supporting its commitment to open standards, architectures, and multi-vendor environments.  With Tail-f’s network service orchestration technology, Cisco’s service provider cloud and virtualization portfolio will simplify and automate the provisioning and management of both physical and virtual networks.

“With a rapidly increasing number of people, devices, and sensors connecting across the Internet of Everything (IoE), service providers require new capabilities to deliver value-added, cloud-based services and applications,” said Hilton Romanski, senior vice president, Cisco Corporate Development. “Our goal is to help to eliminate the bottleneck caused by operational complexity within the network. The acquisition of Tail-f’s network services configuration and orchestration technology will extend Cisco’s innovation in network function virtualization, helping service providers reduce operating costs and the time it takes to deploy new services, making agile service provisioning a reality.”

Upon completion of the acquisition, Tail-f employees will join Cisco’s Cloud and Virtualization Group led by Gee Rittenhouse, vice president and general manager. The deal is expected to close in Q4.

http://www.tail-f.com/
http://newsroom.cisco.com/release/1438152

• In October 2013, Tail-f Systems announced its NCS plugin for the Havanna release of OpenStack.  This helps organizations to automatically provision a multi-vendor network in response to OpenStack Cloud Network configuration changes. Tail-f said its NCS plugin allows OpenStack networking to simultaneously utilize the variety of layer 2 networking technologies found in complex real-world data centers.
• In February 2014, AT&T announced the first group of companies selected to participate in its  Domain 2.0 supplier program, which was announced in September 2013.  This group included Tail-f Systems.

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AWS Adds Lower-Cost SSD Storage

Amazon Web Services announced the availability of a new, lower cost SSD-backed volume type for Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). Customers can now choose between three Amazon EBS volume types: General Purpose (SSD), Provisioned IOPS (SSD), and Magnetic volumes.

AWS said the new General Purpose (SSD) volumes are designed to support the vast majority of persistent storage workloads and are the new default Amazon EBS volume.  AWS cites five nines of availability and the ability to burst 3,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) per volume, independent of volume size, to meet the performance needs of most applications and also deliver a consistent baseline of three IOPS per gigabyte. Prices start at $0.10/GB.

Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes are designed for I/O-intensive applications such as large relational or NoSQL databases where performance consistency and low latency are critical. With Provisioned IOPS (SSD) volumes, customers choose the amount of IOPS they require, up to 48,000 IOPS per Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, and they only have to provision and pay for the storage they need.

Customers can launch General Purpose (SSD) volumes using the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or AWS SDKs. General Purpose (SSD) volumes are available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Brazil (Sao Paulo) Regions.

http://aws.amazon.com/ebs

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Instart Logic Builds a New Framework for Web Acceleration

Instart Logic, a start-up based in Mountain View, California, introduced its InstantLoad cache optimization and SmartVision, a new computer vision-based image analysis technology - both of which are aimed at improving web application delivery performance. The company says these features enable its software-defined application delivery service to boost application performance up to 50 percent across all device form factors using its delivery framework.

Instart Logic has developed a new communications protocol, IPTP (Interproxy transport protocol) to overcome inefficiencies of TCP, HTTP, and HTTPS over global distances. It leverages open-source protobuf technology, which Google uses extensively for implementing its own internal communication protocols.  Once dynamic assets enter the Instart Logic network, a persistent matrix of ramped-up IPTP connections are established to Instart Logic serving locations.   On the client side, Instart Logic uses an HTML5-based, thin virtualization layer that is injected into the browser. Instart's cloud-based software manages the control plane for application delivery

The new InstantLoad features leverages this client-cloud architecture and browser caching improvements defined by HTML5 to accelerate web application performance. The company says InstantLoadis particularly useful for SaaS applications that use a lot of JavaScript and CSS — content types that are critical to fast page load performance and typically directed to the slowest cache in default browser configurations. InstantLoad redirects heavily used CSS and JavaScript to faster caches, delivering visibly faster page response.

SmartVision is a new technology that enhances Instart Logic's Image Streaming service feature. SmartVision uses advanced computer vision algorithms to analyze the content of an image and determine how much of an image must be initially streamed for a user to recognize the image on their device without perception of degraded image quality. This allows web applications to send up to 70 percent less image data to the browser for initial loads, reducing time-to-interaction even as the full image quality data continues streaming down in the background to provide a full fidelity experience.

"The future of application delivery is being driven by software and algorithms," said Peter Blum, vice president of product management, Instart Logic. "The strong customer responses we’ve seen to InstantLoad and SmartVision are prime examples of how software-based approaches are trumping older hardware-centric approaches like CDNs, WAN Optimization and ADCs."

http://www.instartlogic.com

• Instart Logic is funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sutter Hill Ventures, Tenaya Capital and several notable Silicon Valley angel investors. 
• Instart Logic was founded by Manav Mital, Raghu Venkat and Hariharan Kolam, all previously with Aster Data, a pioneer in Big Data analytics that was acquired by Teradata Corp. 

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Radisys' WebConnect JAVA Bridges to SIP

Radisys introduced WebConnect JAVA, a JSR-309 compliant adapter which is compatible with the entire Radisys Media Resource Function (MRF) product family.

Radisys WebConnect translates JSR309 media processing requests, in a Java EE environment, into Session Internet Protocol (SIP) and Media Server Markup Language (MSML RFC 5707) XML-based control commands – which are compatible with any Radisys MRF.

The new capabilities mean that Radisys MRF resources can be used for IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS)  services as well as Over The Top (OTT) and WebRTC services delivered on web application servers based on traditional Internet communication and programming standards, such as Java.

“Adding support for JSR309 was a simple decision as many of the leading web application server platforms on the market today are Java EE based,” said Grant Henderson, VP of Marketing and Product Management at Radisys. “In addition, the world has far more computer programming professionals with expertise in Java programming than telecommunication service developers with expertise in SIP. Radisys WebConnect is focused on opening up this market by delivering first-class media processing capabilities to the broad community of IT professionals developing real-time communication services using Java platforms be they WebRTC, video or audio based.”

http://www.radisys.com/2014/radisys-extends-market-leading-media-processing-capabilities-9-million-java-developers-worldwide/

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