Violin Memory's All Flash Array Scales to 280TB per Rack

Violin Memory unveiled its Concerto 7000 All Flash Array along with new software that adds synchronous and asynchronous replication and metro cluster capabilities.

Violin's Concerto 7000 All Flash Array scales to 280TB in a fully configured, super-dense 18RU, low power footprint. The platform delivers micro-second latency for up to 20x faster application response times.  Flash also uses 90 percent less floor space, power and cooling.

Violin's Concerto enterprise data services software also offers continuous data protection, WAN optimized replication and in-flight encryption that can be configured on a LUN-by-LUN basis. The advanced software capabilities ensure long flash life with array-wide flash management, wear leveling and vRAID.

“The Concerto 7000 All Flash Array helps our customers deliver ‘Business in a Flash’, by transforming IT resources into competitive assets that create new possibilities based on the performance, data protection, and transactional capabilities we design into our all-flash solutions,” said Violin Memory CEO Kevin DeNuccio.

http://www.violin-memory.com/

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IEEE Forms Study Group to Address Automotive Ethernet

A new IEEE 802.3 Single Twisted Pair 100 Mb/s Ethernet Study Group has been formed to explore the market opportunities and needs for a 100 Mbps speed for Ethernet in automotive networking.

The IEEE said that many vehicle manufacturers, and their suppliers, desire IEEE 802.3 standards-based interoperable solutions in order to enable and extend a multi-vendor eco-system for the automotive industry.

“A 100 Mb/s single twisted pair solution provides another option for Ethernet used in networking automotive technology systems. The new study group expects to lay the groundwork for another single twisted pair technology standard and ‘future proof’ these systems, while maintaining traditional Ethernet compatibility with higher-performance 1000BASE-T1 links that may also be used in the car,” said Thomas Hogenmüller, chair of the IEEE 802.3 Single Twisted Pair 100 Mb/s Ethernet Study Group and team manager, E/E-Architecture Engineering Communication Technologies, with Robert Bosch GmbH. “The 100 Mb/s option will also allow for a more rapid adoption of driver assist and other vehicle safety systems into low to mid-range vehicles.”

“Automotive manufacturers and suppliers require standards-based networking to enable and extend the industry’s multi-vendor eco-system,” said David Law, chair of the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet Working Group and distinguished engineer with HP Networking. “This study group will provide the opportunity to explore the possible development of a single twisted pair 100 Mb/s Ethernet standard supporting automotive applications, as well as broader transportation and distributed applications.”

http://www.ieee.org

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NTT Com Opens 4th Data Center in Malaysia

NTT Communications opened its Malaysia Cyberjaya 4 data center in Cyberjaya, Selangor.

The new data center, which is NTT Communications’ 146th data center worldwide. is a self-owned, self-built and self-operated facility that measures 87,000 square feet -- twice the size of Cyberjaya 3.  The data center is connected via NTT Com's Asia Submarine-cable Express (ASE) to its data centers in Singapore.  The Malaysia Cyberjaya 4 Data Center is certified to the latest global standards, including TIA-942 Tier 3 equivalence, ISO27001:2005, GBI, LEED and PCIDSS.

http://www.ntt.com/aboutus_e/news/data/20140423.html

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Mellanox to Acquire Israel's Integrity Project

Mellanox Technologies announced its intent to acquire privately-held Integrity Project, which includes an accomplished team of software technology veterans.

Based in Ramat-Gan, Israel, Integrity Project was formed out of an elite military technology unit, specializing in the fields of connectivity, low-level development, real-time applications, and security.

Mellanox said the acquisition will broaden its customer base by adding software solutions designed to enable customers to achieve optimal performance from all interconnect components.

“The new and emerging Web 2.0 and cloud applications that influence our daily lives depend on the rapid handling of data,” said Eyal Waldman, president and CEO of Mellanox Technologies. “We expect that the Integrity Project acquisition will further enhance our software team’s capabilities to provide the best compute and storage platforms, such as CloudX™, to enable our customers to best meet the growing demands of applications and the usage of the data within high-performance, Web 2.0, cloud, and storage environments. We welcome the talented team from Integrity Project and look forward to their contribution to Mellanox’s continued growth.”

http://www.mellanox.com
https://he-il.facebook.com/IntegrityProject

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Agilent Collaborates with China Mobile on 5G

Agilent Technologies agreed to collaborate with China Mobile Communications on the next–generation 5G wireless communication systems.

Agilent will actively support the research and development programs on 5G, led by China Mobile, and provide test and measurement solutions for next-generation 5G wireless communication systems.

As the deployment and commercial operation of 4G systems are speeding up, technologists worldwide have begun searching for next-generation wireless solutions to meet the anticipated demands in the 2020 era given the explosive growth of mobile Internet, and this will lead us to the fifth generation 5G.

The 5G research areas of CMRI will focus on the major technical aspects of 5G, including large-scale antenna systems (LSAS), full-duplex radio, energy efficiency and spectral efficiency co-design, and new signaling/control mechanisms to achieve the main theme of "green and soft."

"Our strong collaboration with CMRI on the 5G research will allow us to lead the technology exploration of next-generation wireless communication systems," said Andy Botka, Agilent vice president and general manager of the Microwave and Communications Division. “We will provide the CMRI research teams with the measurement expertise required to design, develop and validate their new 5G systems and set up the 5G prototype test-bed."

http://www.agilent.com/find/5G

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Intel Unveils Knights Landing Processor and Omni Scale I/O Fabric

Intel announced microarchitecture and memory details of its next-generation Intel Xeon Phi processor (code-named Knights Landing) and an end-to-end interconnect fabric optimized for fast data transfers, both aimed at powering High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems.

Knights Landing, which is expected to debut in the second half of 2015, will include up to16GB high-bandwidth, on-package memory at launch – designed in partnership with Micron – to deliver five times better bandwidth compared to DDR4 memory, five times better energy efficiency and three times more density than current GDDR-based memory. Knights Landing will be available in a PCIe-based card option, or mounted directly on the motherboard socket to remove the bandwidth bottlenecks of data transfer over PCIe, common in GPU and accelerator solutions.

Powered by more than 60 HPC-enhanced Silvermont architecture-based cores, Knights Landing is expected to deliver more than 3 TFLOPS of double-precision performance and three times the single-threaded performance compared with the current generation.

Intel's new Omni Scale fabric, which is built upon a combination of enhanced acquired IP from Cray and QLogic along with tis own in-house innovations, addresses the I/O requirements of the HPC sector.  Intel Omni Scale Fabric is an end-to-end I/O solution encompassing adapters, edge switches, director switch systems, cables and management software. Intel intends to replace traditional electrical transceivers in the director switches with silicon photonics, enabling increased port density, simplified cabling and reduced costs. Intel Silicon Photonics-based cabling and transceiver solutions may also be used with Intel Omni Scale-based processors, adapter cards and edge switches.

Intel noted continued market gains in powering the HPC sector.  The company said its current generation of Xeon processors and Xeon Phi coprocessors powers the top-rated system in the world – the 35 PFLOPS "Milky Way 2" in China, and its designs account for 85 percent of all supercomputers on the 43rd edition of the TOP500 list.

http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2014/06/23/intel-re-architects-the-fundamental-building-block-for-high-performance-computing

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Micron Collaborates with Intel on Knights Landing

Micron Technology is working with Intel to deliver an on-package memory solution for Intel's next-generation Xeon Phi processor, codenamed Knights Landing. The on-going collaboration leverages fundamental DRAM and stacking technologies also found in Micron's Hybrid Memory Cube products.

The on package memory combines high-speed logic and DRAM layers into one optimized package that will set a new industry benchmark for performance and energy efficiency. Intel said Knights Landing will deliver 5X the sustained memory bandwidth versus DDR4 with one-third the energy per bit in half the footprint.

"Intel's many integrated cores (MIC) architecture and Micron's high performance memory is a formidable combination," said Tom Eby, vice president for Micron's compute and networking business unit. "Intel's and Micron's advanced technologies successfully marry the processor to a memory system that delivers the very rare coupling of low power and extreme bandwidth."

"The next-generation Intel® Xeon Phi processor, codenamed Knights Landing, will launch with up to 16GB of high performance, on-package memory that delivers dramastically improved the sustained memory bandwidth versus DDR4 and brings tremendous power-efficiency and space-savings. It is the first Intel HPC processor to use this new high performance on package memory," said Charles Wuischpard, Vice President, General Manager, Workstations and High Performance Computing Data Center Group at Intel. "This will allow the world's leading researchers, scientists, and engineers to run larger workloads faster while maintaining current code investments. We're pleased to be working with Micron to deliver it."

http://investors.micron.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=856057


More on Micron's Hybrid Memory Cube

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NVIDIA and Partners Develop GPU-accelerated ARM64 Servers for HPC

NVIDIA is seeing progress in leverage its GPU accelerators in supercomputers.  Multiple server vendors are now developing 64-bit ARM development systems integrating its NVIDIA GPU processors for high performance computing (HPC).

The new ARM64 servers feature Applied Micro X-GeneARM64 CPUs and NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPU accelerators.  The systems use the hundreds of existing CUDA-accelerated scientific and engineering HPC applications by simply recompiling them to ARM64 systems.

The first GPU-accelerated ARM64 development platforms will be available in July from Cirrascale Corp. and E4 Computer Engineering, with production systems expected to ship later this year. The Eurotech Group also plans to ship production systems later this year. System details include:

• Cirrascale RM1905D - High-density two-in-one 1U server with two Tesla K20 GPU accelerators; provides high-performance, low total cost of ownership for private cloud, public cloud, HPC, and enterprise applications.
• E4 EK003 - Production-ready, low-power 3U, dual-motherboard server appliance with two Tesla K20 GPU accelerators, designed for seismic, signal and image processing, video analytics, track analysis, web applications and MapReduce processing. 
• Eurotech - Ultra-high density, energy efficient and modular Aurora HPC server configuration, based on proprietary Brick Technology and featuring direct hot liquid cooling.

"We aim to leverage the latest technology advances, both within and beyond the HPC market, to move science forward in entirely new ways," said Pat McCormick, senior scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. "We are working with NVIDIA to explore how we can unite GPU acceleration with novel technologies like ARM to drive new levels of scientific discovery and innovation."

http://nvidianews.nvidia.com/News/NVIDIA-GPUs-Open-the-Door-to-ARM64-Entry-Into-High-Performance-Computing-b52.aspx

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Sprint Launches HD Voice Nationwide, Adds 28 LTE Markets

Sprint announced nationwide availability of HD Voice, as well as 28 new 4G LTE markets and three new Sprint Spark markets.

Sprint HD Voice is currently supported on 28 postpaid smartphones and 33 prepaid phones. The company estimates approximately 16 million of its customers are currently using an HD Voice enabled device. In addition to a fuller, more natural-sounding voice, the service uses noise-cancelling technology to minimize background noise from places like busy roads or crowded restaurants.


Sprint's new activated LTE markets, including Seattle, Cleveland, and San Jose, bring its nationwide 4G LTE footprint to 471 cities covering more than 225 million people. Sprint expects to reach 250 million with 4G LTE coverage by mid-year.

Sprint Spark has been activated in three new markets (St. Louis, Winston-Salem and Greensboro, N.C.). The enhanced LTE network is designed to deliver average wireless speeds of 6-15Mbps and peak wireless speeds of 50-60Mbps today on capable devices, with increasing speed potential over time. Sprint plans to reach 100 million people by year-end with the service. T

Sprint is currently field testing 8T8R radios for improved coverage and signal strength at 2.5 GHz. Commercial deployment of these radios is expected this summer.

Sprint will be adding International WiFi calling in the coming weeks.  This will enable customers to make calls and send texts via WiFi in more than 100 countries.

In addition, Sprint will begin offering a 30-day trial period for new customers to test out their service. If customers aren’t completely satisfied with the Sprint experience within the first 30 days, Sprint will refund the cost of their device and waive all service and activation charges.

“We believe customers will be delighted with the Sprint retail experience, our customer service, and the performance of America’s newest network,” said Dan Hesse, Sprint Chief Executive Officer, “so we’re guaranteeing it.”

http://www.sprint.com

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Mavenir's Evolved Packet Data Gateway Bridges Calls from LTE to Wi-Fi

Mavenir Systems announced the availability of its Evolved Packet Data Gateway (ePDG). For subscribers using Wi-Fi, the ePDG provides a secure connection to the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) network and enables seamless mobility between LTE and Wi-Fi. This enables seamless coverage whether the subscriber is in an LTE coverage areas or using Wi-Fi at public hotspots, at the office or in the home. As subscribers arrive in the office, for example, the ePDG ensures that data sessions remain active and voice calls stay up while the device switches from LTE to Wi-Fi access.

The ePDG is an integral part of Mavenir’s IMS converged voice solution that is used by mobile operators for both Voice over Wi-Fi (VoWi-Fi) and Voice over LTE (VoLTE).

Mavenir said its approach enables operators to leverage their investments in VoLTE, and extend service reach as well as improve indoor coverage by launching VoWi-Fi. Apple’s recent announcement that iOS 8 will support Wi-Fi Calling,  significantly increases the number of devices compatible with mobile operators’ VoWi-Fi service and  accelerating adoption.

“Globally, operators are trying to manage mobile subscribers’ demand for ubiquitous service access while dealing with tremendous surge in mobile data usage,” said Pardeep Kohli, Mavenir’s President and CEO. “We believe ePDG and converged access to IMS are logical extensions of VoWi-Fi, as mobility is becoming a key differentiator for operators.”

http://www.mavenir.com

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Microsoft Offers 1TB Cloud Storage to Office 365 Consumers

Microsoft will extend its offer of 1 TB of OneDrive storage to all versions of Office 365, including the 5-person home version that costs $9.99 per month and the personal version costing $6.99 per month.

Microsoft said the landscape for online services is quickly changing and that merely providing cloud storage is table stakes.  By providing 1 TB with Office 365, Microsoft effectively supercedes the storage-only providers.  For those who only want online storage and not Office 365, OneDrive pricing has been cut 70% to $1.99 for 100GB and $3.99 for 200GB.

https://blog.onedrive.com/new-onedrive-storage-plans/

• In April 2014, Microsoft first announced the 1TB cloud storage deal for Office 365 ProPlus subscribers.
• In its latest quarterly report released in April, Microsoft stated that Office 365 revenue grew over 100% year-over-year, and commercial seats nearly doubled, demonstrating strong enterprise momentum for Microsoft’s cloud productivity solutions.

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TeliaSonera IC Upgrades Pan-European Network with Ciena

TeliaSonera International Carrier (TSIC) has selected Ciena's 5400 Reconfigurable Switching System for the pan-European segment of its global fibre network.

Ciena’s 5400 Reconfigurable Switching System is fully modular and leverages the company's WaveLogic  coherent optics, which allows TSIC to quickly deploy this network as foreign wavelengths over its existing line system.

The companies said the deployment creates a scalable and flexible OTN-based network that promotes TSIC's vision to support service providers with bandwidth- and network-on-demand transport services. Financial terms were not disclosed.

“We´re continuously upgrading our extensive network, enabling mission critical solutions for operators and content providers. Developing an even more scalable and flexible network is not only about meeting the bandwidth demands of today but also ensures the bandwidth demands of tomorrow," stated Mattias Fridström, Vice President, Head of Technology at TeliaSonera International Carrier.

http://www.ciena.com
http://www.teliasoneraic.com/

• TeliaSonera International Carrier (TSIC) is using Infinera's DTN-X platform with Instant Bandwidth capability for its North American network

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Top 500 Supercomputer List for June 2014

A new list of the Top 500 Supercomputer Sites has just been published and for the third consecutive year the most powerful designation goes to the Tianhe-2 supercomputer at China's University of Defense Technology with a performance of 33.86 petaflops delivered by its 3.1 million Intel Xeon cores.

A few highlights from the list:

• Total combined performance of all 500 systems has grown to 274 Pflop/s, compared to 250 Pflop/s six months ago and 223 Pflop/s one year ago. This increase in installed performance also exhibits a noticeable slowdown in growth compared to the previous long-term trend.
• There are 37 systems with performance greater than a Pflop/s on the list, up from 31 six months ago.
• The No. 1 system, Tianhe-2, and the No. 7 system, Stampede, use Intel Xeon Phi processors to speed up their computational rate. The No. 2 system, Titan, and the No. 6 system, Piz Daint, use NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate computation.
• A total of 62 systems on the list are using accelerator/co-processor technology, up from 53 from November 2013. Forty-four of these use NVIDIA chips, two use ATI Radeon, and there are now 17 systems with Intel MIC technology (Xeon Phi). The average number of accelerator cores for these 62 systems is 78,127 cores/system.

The full listed is posted here:

http://www.top500.org/lists/2014/06/

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Overture Launches Harmony NFV Partner Ecosystem

Overture has launched its "Harmony" ecosystem of hardware, software and services partners focused on accelerating service provider’s automation and network functions virtualization (NFV) initiatives at the metro service edge.

The initial partners in the Harmony ecosystem are:

• 6WIND  
• Aeroflex 
• Brocade 
• Dell 
• EnterpriseWeb 
• Intel 
• JDSU 
• Metaswitch Networks
• Qosmos 
• Wind River 

http://www.overturenetworks.com/harmony

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Kumu Networks: Opening the Door to Full Duplex Wireless

Born out of a class project at Stanford University, Kumu Networks is commercializing self-interference technology and full-duplex wireless. In this video, co-founder Steven Hong explains how radio self-interference has been a problem since the earliest days of wireless communications. The Kumu approach is the first to cancel out this interference by subtracting the transmitter's signal from its own receiver.

Kumu Networks, backed by top venture firms in Silicon Valley, now aims to apply its technology to applications such as small cell backhaul. In field testing, Kumu significantly boosts spectral efficiency.

See video:  http://youtu.be/VeKU5jD7i-8

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Rackspace Launches Bare-Metal Cloud Servers

Rackspace Hosting announced offering bare-metal cloud servers that can be provisioned dynamically "as quickly as a VM."

The Rackspace OnMetal Cloud Servers are API-driven, single-tenant Infrastructure-as-a-Service servers designed for customers with rapidly growing infrastructure footprints who seek the agility and elasticity of cloud along with the simplicity and performance of colocation. Testing is underway and general availability of the service is expected in July via the Rackspace data center in Northern Virginia.

OnMetal Cloud Servers are built with Open Compute Project spec’d hardware and powered by OpenStack. The servers come in three different sets of specifications, each custom designed and built for workloads commonly associated with large web scale applications:

Compute-optimized configuration – 20 threads and 32GB RAM; can be used to power large-scale web servers, application servers, queue processors and load balancers.
Memory-optimized configuration – 24 threads and 512GB RAM; can be used to power caches, search indexes and in-memory analytics.
I/O-optimized configuration – 40 threads, 128GB RAM, 3.2TB PCIe flash drive that can be used to power large NoSQL data stores, traditional SQL databases and OLTP applications.

“The rising complexity of the multi-tenant cloud affects applications in a variety of ways,” said Taylor Rhodes, president of Rackspace. “Virtualization and sharing a physical machine are fantastic tools for specific workloads at certain scale; however, we’ve learned that the one-size-fits-all approach to multi-tenancy just doesn’t work once you become successful, so we created OnMetal to simplify scaling for customers to stay fast and lean with a laser-sharp focus on building out their product.”

“We’ve all been trained to think of the cloud as generic virtual machines on demand. VMs have had their decade. The future ‘Cloud’ will be built with containers deployed across bare-metal servers provisioned via API,” said Zack Rosen, CEO of Pantheon, a Rackspace customer in the early access program of OnMetal Cloud Servers. ”We believe Rackspace’s OnMetal service is the future of Infrastructure-as-a-Service. It’s simply more efficient — you get the performance and cost-efficiency of single-tenant servers and agility with containers that blows away what you can do with VMs.”

http://www.rackspace.com/onmetal

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IBM and Pure Storage Announce Patent and Cross-License Agreements

Pure Storage has acquired over 100 storage and related technology patents from IBM and the companies have signed a patent cross-license agreement.  Financial terms were not disclosed.

“This transaction significantly increases the number of Pure’s patents, creating a more robust and strategic patent portfolio that will allow our customers to benefit even more from our focus on advancing storage innovation,” said Joe FitzGerald, vice president, Legal for Pure Storage.

“This agreement with Pure Storage demonstrates the value of IBM’s patented inventions and our dedication to encouraging innovation by licensing access to our extensive patent portfolio  IBM's extensive R&D investment and the industry's largest storage array patent portfolio are key drivers behind our flash storage leadership,” said Dr. William LaFontaine, General Manager, Intellectual Property, for IBM.

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/44199.wss

• In April, Pure Storage, a start-up based in Mountain View, California, closed a $225 million Series F funding round, at a pre-money valuation of over $3 billion, to support its all-flash enterprise storage array strategy.  The round included contributions from previous public market investors including T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and Tiger Global and new investor, Wellington Management Company. The round also included participation from prior venture capital investors Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, and Sutter Hill Ventures. The new funding brings the company’s total capital raised to $470 million to date.

• Pure Storage offers all-flash enterprise arrays for high performance workloads, including server virtualization, desktop virtualization (VDI), database (OLTP, real-time analytics) and cloud computing.  The company's approach combines proprietary data deduplication and compression technologies with affordable multi-level cell (MLC) flash memory.

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TierPoint Acquires Another Data Center -- its 6th Acquisition

TierPoint has expanded its national data center footprint with the acquisition of Philadelphia-based Philadelphia Technology Park, which operates a 25,700 sq. ft. data center within the Philadelphia Navy Yard.  The data center is an SSAE 16 Type II audited facility with N+1 power delivery systems.

The acquisition is the sixth for TierPoint, LLC, previously known as Cequel Data Centers. With its prior acquisitions - including facilities in Dallas, Spokane, Seattle, Oklahoma City, Tulsa and Baltimore - TierPoint now owns and operates more than 141,000 square feet of raised-floor, data center space.

http://www.tierpoint.com/news/tierpoint-acquires-philadelphia-technology-park

• Earlier this month, Cequel Data Centers, the parent company of TierPoint, announced today that it has been acquired by an investor group comprised of management and experienced investors across the communications infrastructure industry. The investor group includes Chairman Jerry Kent, RedBird Capital Partners, The Stephens Group, Jordan/Zalaznick Advisers, Inc., and Thompson Street Capital Partners. Terms were not disclosed.

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Huawei Announced Metro WDM Contract with China Mobile Sichuan

China Mobile has selected Huawei to deploy WDM-based full-service metropolitan bearer networks in over 10 cities across Sichuan Province, including the capital, Chengdu. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Sichuan Mobile estimates that the bandwidth demand from its metro aggregation sites will exceed 100G over the coming three years. The project to deploy full-service metropolitan bearer networks uses Huawei's Packet Optical Transport System (POTS).

"The 'WDM/OTN to the edge' idea advocated by Huawei perfectly matches China Mobile's strategic plan to deploy full-service metropolitan bearer networks. They focus on future readiness, providing protection for bandwidth investment, and facilitating fixed mobile convergence," said Jack Wang, President of Huawei's Transmission Network Product Line.

http://pr.huawei.com/en/news/hw-346337-ict.htm

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NTT Com Bolsters its WideAngle Managed Security Services

NTT Com Security (formerly Integralis) announced improved threat detection and analysis functionality for its Managed Security Services (MSS) platform delivered under the WideAngle brand.

The enhancements, which include Time Based Analysis Intelligence and a Correlated Log Analysis (CLA) service, will provide significantly improved detection rates of up to 500% of unknown security threats for NTT Com Security customers worldwide. They will also enable better correlation of threat intelligence from different sources and between security and non-security devices, including authentication servers, web proxy servers, databases and networks devices, as well as conventional security devices like firewalls, IPS and anti virus.

Additional functionality includes Enhanced Packet Capture (PCAP) support for IDS/IPS vendors, delivering improved analysis and fewer false positives to customers. In addition, newly developed Intelpacks – sets of algorithms implemented within the MSS analysis engine – provide tailored detection and ensure organisations stay up to date with the very latest attack methods and tools.

http://www.ntt.com/aboutus_e/news/data/20140618.html

• NTT Communications acquired Integralis AG in 2009 for its IT security expertise.

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