IBM expanded its cloud data operations with its SoftLayer division opening of a second center in the Netherlands designed to support expansion of IBM Cloud services in the region.
The new center in Almere is said to be securely connected by private network to all SoftLayer data centers around the world, including locations in North and South America, Asia, Australia and Europe. IBM noted this geographic diversity allows for greater mitigation of business risk.
IBM said Dutch telecom operator KPN is already taking advantage of the new data center, with plans to deliver value-added cloud services to more than 1 million enterprise customers using the new facility.
Telstra expands SDN platform
Australian-based telecom operator Telstra unveiled a software-defined networking platform targeting the Asian market designed to enable self-provisioning of network services across 25 points of presence worldwide. The launch followed Telstra’s recent acquisition of Pacnet.
The move builds upon Pacenet’s 16 initial POPs, with the PEN Platform now offered in eight countries, including Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, the United States and the United Kingdom.
“Telstra’s new PEN Platform reimagines the role of traditional telecommunications and enables organizations to complement traditional network approaches with SDN technology, which allows for bandwidth to be provisioned on demand, matched to application characteristics and deployed across the specific routes our customers need,” explained Darrin Webb, COO for global enterprise and services at Telstra. “The addition of network Function virtualization capabilities enhances the agility of the service and means customers can order network appliances – such as routers and firewalls – on demand, making the network less rigid and allowing our customers to respond quicker than ever before to unforeseen network resource requirements.”
Alcatel-Lucent launches Rapport software platform
Alcatel-Lucent recently launched its Rapport software-based platform that it said was designed to provide a communications management platform for larger enterprise customers and service providers.
The service is described as providing a platform for the hosting of virtualized services, including voice, chat, video conferencing and sharing functions across applications, websites and connected devices. Those functions can be accessed by application developers through open application programming interfaces and software development kits. The platform is said already support more than 800 developers and partners.
Alcatel-Lucent said the platform taps into a cloud and IP multimedia subsystem architecture to offer to provide a single software platform that can be deployed using commercial, off-the-shelf hardware, which is a key tenant of network virtualization. For service providers, Alcatel-Lucent said the platform can support voice over LTE, mobile, fixed and Wi-Fi services more efficiently at a reduced cost.
ON.Lab announces ONOS board
Open Network Lab recently announced AT&T, NTT DoCoMo, SK Telecom, Ciena, Cisco, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Huawei, Intel and NEC as the founding members of its Open Network Operating System Project’s board of directors.
ON.Lab said the members will provide “strategic direction, thought and community leadership” for the ONOS Project, as well as work with the technical steering team, use cases and solutions team, roadmap and release team, and community advocacy team.
“Having a board comprised of the networking industry’s seasoned visionary leaders ensures that ONOS stays on track in delivering a carrier-grade platform with the requisite scalability, high availability and performance along with a set of compelling service provider-focused use cases and solutions,” said Guru Parulkar, executive director at ON.Lab and chair of ONOS’ board. “The board also provides strategic direction towards building a vibrant open source community around ONOS that can grow and sustain efforts to help service providers transform their infrastructure and deliver real value to the end-users.”
ON.Lab launched the ONOS Project late last year initially targeting service providers with a SDN platform designed to provide a scalable SDN control plan “featuring northbound and southbound open APIs and paradigms for a diversity of management, control and service applications across mission critical networks.”
More recently, the ONOS Project launched its Blackbird platform focused on “performance, scale and high availability,” while also addressing the challenge of “effectively determining the ‘carrier-grade quotient’ of the SDN control plane.”
Prajakta Joshi, director of product at O.N. Lab, recently spoke with RCR Wireless News about the Blackbird release as part of the weekly NFV/SDN Reality Check show.
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