American Tower to buy CoreSite for $10B

American Tower agreed to acquire CoreSite for $170.00 per share in cash, an enterprise value of $10.1 billion when including the assumption and/or repayment of CoreSite’s existing debt.

CoreSite, which as of Q3 2021 consisted of 25 data centers, 21 cloud on-ramps and over 32,000 interconnections in eight major U.S. markets, generated annualized revenue and Adjusted EBITDA of $655 million and $343 million, respectively, in Q3 2021. CoreSite has averaged double-digit annual revenue growth over the past five years.

American Tower said it expects to leverage its strong financial position to further accelerate CoreSite’s attractive development pipeline in the U.S., while also evaluating the potential for international expansion in the data center space. The acquisition is also expected to be transformative for American Tower’s mobile edge compute business in advance of the proliferation of 5G low-latency applications throughout the cloud, enterprise and network ecosystems, establishing a converged communications and computing infrastructure offering with distributed points of presence across multiple edge layers. 

Tom Bartlett, American Tower’s Chief Executive Officer stated, “We are in the early stages of a cloud-based, connected and globally distributed digital transformation that will evolve over the next decade and beyond. We expect the combination of our leading global distributed real estate portfolio and CoreSite’s high quality, interconnection-focused data center business to help position American Tower to lead in the 5G world. As the convergence of wireless and wireline networks accelerates and classes of communications infrastructure further align, we anticipate the emergence of attractive value creation opportunities within the digital infrastructure ecosystem. We look forward to welcoming CoreSite’s talented team to American Tower and working together to capitalize on those opportunities to drive enhanced long-term value creation for our customers and shareholders as we continue to connect billions of people across the globe.”

CoreSite’s Chief Executive Officer, Paul Szurek, stated, “We are excited to partner with American Tower to expand its communications infrastructure ecosystem and accelerate its edge computing strategy through the addition of CoreSite’s differentiated portfolio of U.S. metro data center campuses. The combined company will be ideally positioned to address the growing need for convergence between mobile network providers, cloud service providers, and other digital platforms as 5G deployments emerge and evolve. In addition, we expect the enhanced scale and further geographic reach to provide a platform for the combined company to accelerate its growth trajectory and expand into additional U.S. metro areas, as well as internationally, leveraging American Tower’s extensive presence across the globe. CoreSite’s outstanding team, interconnection platform and data center campus portfolio are a highly complementary fit with American Tower’s existing communications sites, and we believe this partnership delivers significant value to CoreSite’s stockholders and will create an exciting new chapter for our customers, employees and partners.”

American Tower intends to finance the transaction in a manner consistent with maintaining its investment grade credit rating and has obtained committed financing from J.P. Morgan. 

https://investors.coresite.com

https://americantower.com/investor-relations/investor-presentations/

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KKR and Global Infrastructure Partners to acquire CyrusOne for $15B

KKR, a leading global investment firm, and Global Infrastructure Partners agreed to acquire CyrusOne for $90.50 per share in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $15 billion, including the assumption of debt.

The $90.50 per share purchase price reflects a premium of approximately 25% to CyrusOne’s unaffected closing stock price on September 27, 2021, the last full trading day prior to published market speculation regarding a potential sale of the Company.

CyrusOne operates more than 50 data centers worldwide providing mission-critical facilities for approximately 1,000 customers, including approximately 200 Fortune 1000 companies. Services include colocation, hyperscale, and build-to-suit environments.

“This transaction is a testament to the tremendous work by the entire CyrusOne team. We have built one of the world’s leading data center companies with a presence across key U.S. and international markets supporting our customers’ mission-critical digital infrastructure requirements while creating significant value for our stockholders,” said Dave Ferdman, Co-Founder and interim President and Chief Executive Officer of CyrusOne. “KKR and GIP will provide substantial additional resources and expertise to accelerate our global expansion and help us deliver the timely and reliable solutions at scale that our customers value.”

“Today’s announcement is the culmination of a robust strategic review process conducted by the CyrusOne Board of Directors to determine the best path forward for the Company and maximize stockholder value,” said Lynn Wentworth, Chair of the CyrusOne Board of Directors. “This transaction provides CyrusOne stockholders with significant value and simultaneously positions the Company to even better serve its customers to meet their needs in key markets around the world.”

https://cyrusone.com

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Xilinx intros FPGA data center accelerator card for HPC

Xilinx introduced a data center accelerator card and a new standards-based, API-driven clustering solution for deploying FPGAs at massive scale for high performance computing (HPC) and database workloads. 

The new Alveo U55C accelerator, which is Xilinx’s most powerful Alveo accelerator card to date, delivers more parallelism of data pipelines, superior memory management, optimized data movement throughout the pipeline, and the highest performance-per-watt in the Alveo portfolio. The Alveo U55C card is a single-slot full height, half length (FHHL) form factor with a low 150W max power. 

The company says the new card offers superior compute density and doubles the HBM2 to 16GB compared to its predecessor, the dual-slot Alveo U280 card. The U55C provides more compute in a smaller form factor for creating dense Alveo accelerator-based clusters. It’s built for high-density streaming data, high IO math, and big compute problems that require scale-out like big data analytics and AI applications. Leveraging RoCE v2 and data center bridging, coupled with 200 Gbps bandwidth, the API-driven clustering solution enables an Alveo network that competes with InfiniBand networks in performance and latency, with no vendor lock-in. MPI integration allows for HPC developers to scale out Alveo data pipelining from the Xilinx Vitis unified software platform. 

“Scaling out Alveo compute capabilities to target HPC workloads is now easier, more efficient and more powerful than ever,” said Salil Raje, executive vice president and general manager, Data Center Group at Xilinx. “Architecturally, FPGA-based accelerators like Alveo cards provide the highest performance at the lowest cost for many compute-intensive workloads. By introducing a standards-based methodology that enables the creation of Alveo HPC clusters using a customer’s existing infrastructure and network, we’re delivering those key advantages at massive scale to any data center. This is a major leap forward for even broader adoption of Alveo and adaptive computing throughout the data center.”

CSIRO, Australia’s national research organization along with the world’s largest radio astronomy antenna array, is utilizing Alveo U55C cards for signal processing in the Square Kilometer Array radio telescope. Deploying the Alveo cards as network-attached accelerators with HBM allows for massive throughput at scale across the HPC signal processing cluster. The Alveo accelerator-based cluster allows CSIRO to tackle the massive compute task of aggregating, filtering, preparing and processing data from 131,000 antennas in real time. The 460Gbps of HBM2 bandwidth across the signal processing cluster is served by 420 Alveo U55C cards fully networked together across P4-enabled 100Gbps switches. The Alveo U55C cluster delivers processing performance with overall throughput at 15Tb/s in a compact power and cost efficient footprint. CSIRO is now completing an example Alveo reference design in order to help other radio astronomy or adjacent industries achieve the same success.

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Astera Labs' module enables copper-based Smart Electrical Cables at up to 800 GbE

Astera Labs introduced its new Taurus Smart Cable Module portfolio to overcome performance bottlenecks in data center Switch-to-Switch and Switch-to-Server interconnects running up to 100G/Lane for 200/400/800 GbE. 

The Taurus SCM enables cloud system integrators and cable assembly vendors to rapidly develop and deploy cost-effective, copper-based Smart Electrical Cables (SEC) with purpose-built intelligence capabilities to reliably address reach, signal integrity, security, fleet management, and bandwidth utilization issues in hyperscale data centers.

“Our new Taurus Smart Cable Module solution tackles hyperscalers’ emerging 50G and 100G/Lane Ethernet design challenges, which impact reach, signal integrity, physical constraints, power budgets and bandwidth utilization,” said Sanjay Gajendra, CBO, Astera Labs.

• Taurus Smart Cable Module Portfolio – key features:
• Supports 100G PAM4 (106.25 Gbps), 50G PAM4 (53.125 Gbps), 25G NRZ (26.5625 Gbps and 25.78125 Gbps), and other Ethernet line rates.
• Resolves rate mismatch between NICs and Switches with 50G-to-100G PAM4 & 25G-NRZ-to-50G-PAM4 Aggregation and Disaggregation with gearbox capabilities.
• Enables 36-dB reach extension for 3-meter reach over thin (up to 34AWG) copper cables, ensuring sufficient cable length and flexibility.
• Ultra-Low-Latency.
• Advanced fleet management capabilities with full CMIS features, security, and deep diagnostics.
• Qualified with leading cable vendors to enable Smart Electrical Cables (SECs) in QSFP-DD and OSFP form factors.

“Advanced PAM-4 100G/Lane Ethernet connectivity solutions must overcome complex design challenges such as reach, latency and power efficiency while keeping the cost per bit low to accelerate 400GbE and 800GbE deployments in data centers,” said Alan Weckel, Founder and Technology Analyst at the 650 Group. “Astera Labs Taurus Smart Cables™ play an important role in enabling intra rack connectivity based on active copper cables for the 800GbE interconnect ecosystem.”

Furthermore, Taurus SCMs enable a flexible supply chain of Smart Electrical Cables by qualifying with leading cable vendors to support SECs in QSFP-DD and OSFP form factors, allowing any cable OEM to integrate intelligent Taurus capabilities into their 200/400/800GbE solutions.

http://www.AsteraLabs.com

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Megaport offers Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN

Megaport is now offering the Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN Platform on Megaport Virtual Edge (MVE) for enabling  branch-to-cloud connectivity via Megaport’s global SDN.

Aruba EdgeConnect customers can now leverage Megaport’s worldwide ecosystem of more than 700 data centres and over 360 service providers, with 230+ cloud on-ramps including Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and Salesforce. 

MVE is a globally distributed compute and network service, and customers can host Network Function Virtualisation instances on-demand at the point of use, managing them globally from a single pane of glass. A built-in transit gateway provides highly scalable access for connecting networks, via the public internet, to Megaport’s private SDN. Virtualized devices hosted on MVE can create connections between the Megaport SDN and their distributed sites via the transit gateway.

“Integrating the Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN platform with Megaport’s SDN will enable joint customers to achieve better network and application performance while reducing cloud costs,” said Vincent English, CEO of Megaport. “Since MVE is available in 22 metro areas across North America, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, traffic can be localized allowing data termination to be optimised for performance.“

https://www.megaport.com/services/megaport-virtual-edge/

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Netography raises $45M for cloud-native network detection and response

Netography, a start-up based in Annapolis, Maryland, raised $45 million in Series A funding for its SAAS network security offering.

Netography’s cloud-native SaaS NDR ingests network metadata from on-premise as well as multicloud infrastructure to provide visibility and attack detection in a much simpler and easier to manage package than traditional network detection and response (NDR) solutions. The company’s technology deploys, runs, and scales using the full power of the cloud, without introducing additional physical or virtual sensors or appliances to manage, and without the challenges of unwieldy full packet capture and deep packet inspection solutions.

The new funding was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and SYN Ventures, with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Mango Capital, Harpoon Ventures, and Wing Venture Capital. 

The company reports strong traction signing customers in the federal government and defense, aerospace and travel, financial services, utilities, and manufacturing verticals.

In September, Netography announced the appointment of Martin Roesch as CEO, and co-founder Barrett Lyon, network security pioneer, moved into the role of Chief Architect. Roesch is the creator of the open-source project Snort and the former Founder, CEO, and CTO of network security firm Sourcefire, which Cisco acquired. 

“The adoption of the Zero Trust model of security with its concomitant utilization of pervasive network encryption requires rethinking how the capabilities of network security can be delivered in the atomized networks of today. The appliance model and deep packet inspection will provide less and less utility as we move forward, and it’s time for a new architecture that addresses the needs of modern network environments,” said Roesch. “By upending this model and approaching security with the mindset of securing atomized networks, Netography provides security teams the protection they actually need for the way their networks look today and going forward as they embrace a distributed, Web 3.0 world.”

https://netography.com/overview/

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Santec acquires JGR Optics and OptoTest for optical test

Japan-based Santec Corporation has acquired JGR Optics Inc. (Headquarters: Ottawa, Canada), and OptoTest Corp. (Headquarters: Camarillo, CA). Both companies will continue to operate under their existing brands as subsidiaries of Santec. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Both JGR Optics and OptoTest are recognized leaders in fiber optic test solutions for measuring insertion and return loss of cable assemblies and components. 

Santec is a leading manufacturer of advanced optical components, tunable lasers, optical test equipment and OCT systems.

“We’re excited to enter the fiber testing market with the acquisitions of JGR Optics and OptoTest. Both companies have a proven track record of delivering high performance return loss, insertion loss and polarity measurement systems as well as optical switches to fiber optic cable assemblies and components productions" said Mototaka Tei, Chief Executive Officer of Santec Corp. "Santec is a leading supplier of test and measurement systems for Optical Telecom and Datacom and with this acquisition we widen our footprint the growing market for fiber optics production equipment. JGR and OptoTest both have complementary technology to Santec. The acquisitions will not only allow us to operate in adjacent markets, but will enable us to expand our product offering by integrating their technology into Santec's products and solutions.” 

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Video: xApps will become the Secret Sauce for Mobile Operators

https://youtu.be/yHYfz_uXxrw
 

xApps are critical for mobile operators to differentiate themselves and add value for their customers. In this video, Shamik Mishra, CTO, Connectivity at Capgemini Engineering, discusses why Open RAN and Virtual RAN is the most important innovation in the mobile network today and how mobile operators can make the best use of Open RAN.

Download the 2021 Open RAN Report here: https://ngi.how/o-ran-2021

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AT&T Cybersecurity delivers new managed SASE with Cisco

AT&T is expanding its global, managed Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) portfolio with a new offering powered by Cisco.

AT&T SASE with Cisco is a converged network and security management solution that connects and protects enterprises with SD-WAN and security capabilities. The service includes expert policy design and configuration, and 24/7 network management.  

AT&T SASE with Cisco is immediately available through AT&T Business.   

Rupesh Chokshi, VP, AT&T Cybersecurity, states: "As a leading MSSP and trusted advisor, it’s important to provide customers with a choice of managed SASE solutions to meet their unique needs. Through our collaboration with Cisco, we’re offering an integrated, modern solution that addresses the connectivity and security demands of a multi-cloud, network environment while enabling innovation." 

Shailaja Shankar, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cisco Security Business Group, states: "The shift to remote work has accelerated the need for SASE solutions so that users and devices are secure anywhere they work.  The AT&T SASE with Cisco offer will provide customers with an innovative way to gain seamless, secure access to any application, from any location in a way that is straightforward to procure, easy to set up, and simple to use and manage through a single cloud dashboard." 

https://cybersecurity.att.com/products/sase-with-cisco

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Malbec cable system links Brazil and Argentina

Meta, in partnership with GlobeNet, has launched Malbec, a 2,500 km terrestrial and subsea cable system that initially connects the Brazilian cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The second phase connects Porto Alegre, Brazil to Buenos Aires. 

The cable landing station based in Las Toninas, Province of Buenos Aires, is operated by GlobeNet’s subsidiary in Argentina.

Malbec is an Argentinian wine.

The new Malbec calbe is expected to double the previous capacity to Argentina. 

https://engineering.fb.com/2021/11/11/connectivity/malbec-subsea-cable/

https://globenet.com/en/

GlobeNet's Malbec Subsea Cable links Rio and Buenos Aires

Saturday, March 14, 2020  GlobeNet  

GlobeNet is in the final stages of the construction of its new Malbec subsea cable system, which will link the Brazilian cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo with Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The 2,500 km Malbec cable will be fully integrated into GlobeNet's regional network, offering seamless connectivity between the Southern Cone and the rest of the GlobeNet's network to Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Bermuda and the United States.

The Malbec system will use Spatial Division Multiplexing (SDM) and the latest generation in repeaters and transponders.  The system is expected to be ready for service in July.

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Vodafone picks VMware for automation and orchestration across Europe

Vodafone has selected the VMware Telco Cloud Platform to automate and orchestrate all workloads running on its core networks across Europe, starting with 5G standalone (5G SA).

Vodafone has already begun the rollout of VMware Telco Cloud Platform in eight markets – Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Romania, and U.K. – and will expand to all 11 of its European markets over time. 

VMware Telco Cloud Platform is a cloud-native platform that enables service providers to rapidly deploy and efficiently operate multi-vendor CNFs and VNFs with agility and scalability across 5G and other networks that span from the core and the edge to the radio access network (RAN). The two fundamental elements of this architecture are VMware Telco Cloud Infrastructure and VMware Telco Cloud Automation – both of which Vodafone will deploy across its European markets.

Vodafone previously announced its selection of VMware Telco Cloud Infrastructure as its Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) platform. Last year, Vodafone completed the rollout of Telco Cloud Infrastructure across all its European business and 21 markets in total. 

Johan Wibergh, Chief Technology Officer, Vodafone, said, “We’ve made great strides in modernizing and virtualizing our core network. Now we must turn our attention to layering in automation, software engineering and cloud-native principles to simplify operations and accelerate how quickly we can deploy new applications. VMware Telco Cloud Platform will help us achieve these goals and reach our Tech 2025 targets faster.”

“As service providers modernize their networks to transition to 5G, they require a single platform to automate and streamline delivery of multi-vendor network functions across network core, RAN and edge. VMware Telco Cloud Platform provides this unifying platform to simplify operations, accelerate automation and increase feature velocity across all parts of the network,” said Sanjay Uppal, senior vice president and general manager, Service Provider and Edge, VMware. “Through its partnership with VMware, Vodafone is modernizing its network infrastructure with automation built in, setting them up for long-term success as they roll out 5G services to even more markets in the coming years.”

https://news.vmware.com/releases/vodafone-and-vmware

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IQM opens quantum fabrication center in Espoo, Finland

IQM, which is building Finland’s first commercial 54-qubit quantum computer with VTT, opened a new state-of-the-art fabrication and cryogenic characterization facility in Espoo.

The EUR 20 million facility, which measures 560 m2, is expected to substantially accelerate the company’s quantum processor design cycle and increase its microelectronics fabrication capacity. A pilot line at this facility will be ramped-up over the coming months, and it is expected to reach maximum production capacity during 2022.

“We continue to see increasing demand for our on-premises quantum computers across Europe and globally. Today, we are announcing our largest-ever investment in production to dramatically increase our quantum processor supply and build quantum computers of the future,” said Dr. Jan Goetz, CEO and co-founder of IQM Quantum Computers.

“This investment in equipment, infrastructure and our workforce increases our fabrication, new material research, 3D integration and product delivery capabilities. Today, we’ve started the first phase of our fabrication facility and we plan to continuously learn, and invest in further expansion.”

https://www.meetiqm.com

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WSJ: U.S. Companies Aid China’s Bid for Chip Dominance

The Wall Street Journal looks at recent investments in China's semiconductor sector by U.S. venture capital firms, such as Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix Partners and Redpoint Ventures, as well as Intel, and other key players. 

The article also discusses possible changes in U.S. national security policies led by officials in Washington who are alarmed by the deals which are said to have raised billions of dollars, potentially boosting Beijing's ambition to dominate the global semiconductor sector. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-firms-aid-chinas-bid-for-chip-dominance-despite-security-concerns-11636718400?

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SpaceX launches 53 more Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral

On Saturday, November 13 at 7:19 a.m. EST, Falcon 9 launched 53 Starlink satellites to orbit from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. 

This was the ninth launch and landing of this Falcon 9 first stage booster, which previously launched Crew Demo-2, ANASIS-11, CRS-21, Transporter-1, and now five Starlink missions.

SpaceX has now launched nearly 2,000 Starlink satellites to date.

https://www.spacex.com/launches/index.html

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Vodafone to transfer its 55% interest in Vodafone Egypt to Vodacom

Vodafone Group Plc agreed to transfer its 55% shareholding in Vodafone Egypt to Vodacom, its sub-Saharan African subsidiary. The deal values Vodafone’s 55% shareholding in Vodafone Egypt at €2,722 million on a debt free, cash free basis, implying a multiple for the last twelve month period ended 30 September 2021 of 7.3x Adjusted EBITDAaL and 12.2x Adjusted OpFCF2.

The companies said the transaction will generate clear benefits:

• Vodafone simplifies the management of its African holdings;
• Vodacom gains exposure to another leading business in an attractive market, diversifying its portfolio and accelerating its growth profile; and
• Vodafone Egypt will benefit from closer co-operation with Vodacom, enabling it to accelerate growth in financial services and IoT.

https://www.vodafone.com/news/press-release/egypttransfer

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Nokia milestone: 4,000 5G essential patent families

Nokia reached the milestone of 4,000 patent families declared as essential to 5G standards.

Nokia said its patent portfolio is built on more than €130 billion invested in R&D since 2000 and over three decades of driving cellular standardization and contains around 20,000 patent families (each patent family consists of multiple individual patents).

Jenni Lukander, President of Nokia Technologies, said: “We’re proud to have reached the milestone of 4,000 high quality patent families declared as essential to 5G but the work does not stop there. Our focus is on innovating for the future. Driving the development of the next generation of cellular standards and enabling entire industries to build upon our inventions.”

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GSMA forms 5G mmWave Accelerator Initiative

The GSMA has formed a global accelerator initiative to drive awareness of 5G mmWave technology. 

The operators, China Unicom, NTT DOCOMO, Telstra, TIM and, Verizon, and vendors Ericsson and Qualcomm Technologies Inc. will share mmWave intelligence, best practices and use cases to educate and inspire stakeholders around the world (companies listed in alphabetical order). The accelerator initiative aims to underline the role that mmWave plays in unlocking the full potential of 5G.

“We’re excited to be assisting our members and partners in unlocking the huge potential of 5G, of which mmWave is a key element. This GSMA accelerator initiative, will demonstrate what harnessing 5G mmWave can achieve and inspire others as to its many benefits,” said Alex Sinclair, Chief Technology Officer, GSMA.

https://www.gsma.com/newsroom/press-release/gsma-announces-formation-of-5g-mmwave-accelerator-initiative-as-part-of-continued-5g-global-support/

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Blueprint: Reimagining Metro Networks for Edge Computing and Beyond

by Julius Francis, Sr. Director, Product Marketing, Juniper Networks

As new advancements are made in 5G, Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing, doors are opening for network operators to play a more prominent role in the delivery of next generation consumer and enterprise services. However, these opportunities come paired with new challenges. Specifically, these new services and requirements drive increased traffic and diverse traffic patterns throughout networks, demands that will have the most significant impact on metro networks. 

Metro networks will play an increasingly critical role in service delivery innovations; where all services accessing the network converge (e.g., mobile devices, laptops, gaming consoles, IoT devices and sensors, etc.). Traditionally, metro networks were built to funnel traffic into centralized edge and core resources – a characteristic that is rapidly evolving as edge service technologies are increasingly virtualized and instantiated across new cloud resources. The result is more efficient use of metro facilities as more and more workloads remain in the metro reducing latency and improving user experiences. As a result, metro traffic is projected to grow four times faster than anywhere else in the network by 2025.  

To leverage this opportunity, network operators must rethink how metro networks are architected to unleash new digital experiences – from how they’re designed, to how they’re used, to how their resources are allocated. And operators must fully embrace automation to make this new level of orchestration possible. Focusing on this transformation will help operators deliver better user experiences, helping them play a more prominent and profitable role in the digital ecosystem.

Drivers of Change

Over the next five years network traffic growth will continue, driven largely by the increased adoption, virtualization and prominence of edge applications. Cloud computing resources are increasingly being deployed across cloud resources in parallel with the metro, moving the execution of edge services from regional data centers to the cloud – a trend that is expected to increase over the next decade. Many next-generation edge applications and services require low latency and customized SLAs, which legacy networks based on regional data centers may struggle to provide. 

Further, the proliferation of high-quality and mobile video content will increase demands on metro networks. Video content will increasingly be cached within the metro and distributed to users locally rather than from central cache locations within the core. 

As new distributed 5G and edge services push more workloads out to distributed cloud resources, existing metro networks built for conventional networking will no longer be sufficient to leverage the benefits associated with cloud-based edge computing. All of these issues are driving the need for change in network architecture, infrastructure and operation. 

Reimaging Metro Network Design

Many legacy metro networks are designed using ring topologies, which enable metro networks to carry traffic from access nodes, across an aggregation network, to regional data centers. While there are many instances where the ring design can solely provide adequate performance, operators are turning to a new industry trend to achieve the flexibility and agility needed to handle increasing network traffic and fully leverage the advantages of edge computing – the ring topology paired with spine-leaf. In a spine-leaf topology, each network element has a dedicated connection point, which reduces the transit traffic and throughput requirements on each device. Therefore, this combination provides more scalable, flexible and resilient bandwidth and allows metro networks to handle higher rates of traffic and bandwidth needs while leveraging the power of two topologies. 

By reimagining their metro network design, operators can future proof their organizations for the challenges of the 5G, IoT and cloud era. To attain a next-generation metro network, network operators must stay laser focused on achieving the following:

• New network architectures. To keep pace with shifts in metro network requirements and support the dramatic growth in traffic, metro topologies can leverage ring topologies, spine-leaf topologies, or a hybrid of both networking architectures.
• Scalability and flexibility. To achieve elastic scalability, new routers and network architectures with scalable bandwidth, real-time service monitoring and control, and end-to-end automation must be implemented.
• Service and application intelligence. Next-generation metro networks leverage network slicing to intelligently steer traffic to the right physical and virtualized resource by identifying the most efficient path across the network to optimize user experience. Future-proofed metro networks must have cloud computing levels of orchestration and automation to keep pace with evolving services, applications and user expectations.
• End-to-end automation. Network automation is necessary to reduce complexity and help engineers manage the increased traffic load and simplify operations. Manual operations are no longer capable of keeping pace with the dynamics of a next-generation metro network.
• Converged multiservice metro networks. To manage the increasing scope, scale and complexity onto one common network, next-generation metro networks will need to eliminate siloes from legacy networks to focus less on process and more on end-user outcomes.

Metro Networks for Next-Gen 5G, Edge and IoT Services 

The 5G, IoT and cloud era brings incredible opportunity in every market vertical, but there will be growing pains along the way. The key to addressing new bandwidth, latency and orchestration challenges will be for operators to advance and modernize their network architecture. A metro network designed for yesterday’s static transport and aggregation needs simply won’t be capable of supporting the service delivery needs of 2021 and beyond.

By incorporating architectures built for automation and scale, metro networks that offer flexible network slicing, service-aware technologies and cloud-scale capabilities, will exceed user expectations for every service they deliver—while reducing the complexity of operations.

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ADVA positions FSP 3000 OpenFabric1200 for 400G metro aggregation

ADVA introduced its FSP 3000 OpenFabric1200 for 400G metro aggregation.

The FSP 3000 OpenFabric Series combines open 400 Gbps pluggable coherent technology with OTN switching on a blade, enabling client services to be groomed into 400 Gbps wavelengths. The platform features 1200 Gbps interface capacity and supports Ethernet and OTN services from 10 Gbps to 400 Gbps.

ADVA says the open switchponder card can be added to any network without requiring additional adaptors. In addition, the FSP 3000 OpenFabric1200 can work in multiple operation modes: ADM on a blade, DWDM muxponders, or OTN cross-connect. 

“The strain on today’s transport infrastructure is growing like never before. Today’s operators need new solutions that can meet rapidly rising data demand while also driving down costs. That’s why we’ve developed our FSP 3000 OpenFabric1200. It offers a simple way to dramatically increase fiber efficiency by supporting lower-speed service grooming at the network edge. By deploying OpenFabric1200 in ring or hub-and-spoke topologies, operators can significantly reduce switching and cross-connect requirements in the core,” said Christoph Glingener, CTO, ADVA. “What’s more, our open Terabit-scale switchponder solution can be easily added to any network.”

https://www.adva.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/20211111-adva-launches-new-traffic-grooming-solution-to-reduce-metro-costs

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Marvell shipping SONiC-enabled switch silicon to tier-1 clouds

Marvell confirmed that it is shipping SONiC-enabled production switch silicon of its Teralynx 9K and Prestera 8K devices in high-volume to tier-1 cloud customers. 

Marvell's Teralynx and Prestera devices support Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) and Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC), which is an open-source network operating system (NOS) based on Linux. 

Marvell says SONiC running on its Teralynx and Prestera switch silicon brings greater flexibility and choice to cloud data centers grappling with the demand for greater bandwidth as data growth continues to surge.

"Marvell remains deeply committed to open systems and will continue to invest in and support SONiC solutions for our customers," said Guy Azrad, senior vice president and general manager, Switch Business Unit at Marvell. "Marvell's high-volume shipping of SONiC-enabled production switch silicon to tier-1 cloud providers showcases our technology leadership in combining our advanced packet processing architecture with the power of an agile, open network operating system."

"We have deployed Teralynx based switches in production across multiple data centers with the SONiC network OS. These switches deliver high performance, low-latency and rich telemetry required to run modern applications in our infrastructure," said Shawn Zandi, head of Network Engineering at LinkedIn. "With Innovium's acquisition by Marvell, we look forward to benefiting from greater investment into the Teralynx roadmap and Marvell's continued commitment to SONiC."

"Celestica delivers open disaggregated solutions that offer customers flexibility and compelling total cost of ownership," said Gavin Cato, VP, Celestica Hardware Platform Solutions. "We have been collaborating with Marvell to build high performance switch systems that are now deployed at scale by top cloud service providers, addressing the ever increasing need for bandwidth."

"Edgecore looks forward to the continued collaboration with Marvell to bring leading networking solutions for our service provider, data center, and enterprise customers," said Heimdall Siao, president of Edgecore Networks. "With Marvell's technology and Marvell's proactive support of the open SONiC software ecosystem, Edgecore is able to provide high performance and cost-effective solutions using community based open networking solutions which allows our customers and partners to achieve more."

https://www.marvell.com/company/newsroom/marvell-shipping-high-volume-sonic-enabled-production-switch-silicon-into-tier-1-clouds.html

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