Category: Networking

Data center operator Q9 Networks announced on Thursday it has been selected by NYSE Technologies, the commercial technology unit of NYSE Euronext, to host a secure financial transaction infrastructure access center.

The agreement will extend the SFTI backbone into Q9′s Toronto data center, enabling Canadian customers to directly access services over the global capital markets network.

Developed in 2002 for the financial services community, SFTI is built to facilitate large quantities of electronic quotes, trades and market data traffic while ensuring reliable, ultra-low latency access to NYSE Euronext’s markets and other global trading venues and firms, including more than 1,300 market participants.

Facebook has invested more than $1 billion in the infrastructure that powers its social network, which now serves more than 845 million users a month around the globe. The company spent $606 million on servers, storage, network gear and data centers in 2011, and expects to spend another $500 million this year, Facebook revealed Wednesday in its filing for an initial public stock offering.

The company’s massive armada of servers and storage must work together seamlessly to deliver each Facebook page, the company said. “Loading a user’s home page typically requires accessing hundreds of servers, processing tens of thousands of individual pieces of data, and delivering the information selected in less than one second,” the company said.

Cisco (CSCO) announced it has updated its switching portfolio with 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GE) and 40 GE capabilities, the next speed limits for networking. These new capabilities provide a holistic architectural approach across campus, data center and service provider environments.

IBM and NEC announced that the originators of the OpenFlow protocol will deploy IBM and NEC’s solution in a parallel network to test OpenFlow’s applicability to the university’s production environment. Cisco (CSCO) announced that Argentina-based bank Supervielle has selected Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) to extend the power of virtualization, unifying servers, and the network and storage in a single system in its new data center. Talari Networks announced it has secured $4.5 million in financing from current backers including Menlo Ventures, Silver Creek Ventures and private investors. F5 Networks (FFIV) announced that the latest release of the F5 BIG-IP product family has been certified by ICSA Labs as a network firewall, helping customers protect their public-facing websites from today’s massive cyber attacks.

Intel’s wireless ambitions go beyond smartphones and tablets. It’s set its sights on the guts of the mobile network as well. By embracing a new network design concept called Cloud-RAN, Intel believes it can reshape wireless networks from highly-specialized architectures into more generic computing platforms that run over its off-the-shelf silicon. And in the world’s largest operator, China Mobile, Intel sees the opportunity to make that vision happen. China Mobile has a massive network of 700,000 GSM and 220,000 3G base stations built into towers throughout China’s vast landscape. The base station is easily the most expensive element of the wireless network, and as China Mobile looks to the next wave of wireless technology, LTE, it doesn’t want to repeat that enormous infrastructure investment by installing pricey hardware at the bottom of every tower. Instead, it’s looking for Intel’s help to ...

RiT Technologies (News - Alert), a provider of data center network management solutions, has launched RiT CenterMind Solution, which is designed to offer real-time consolidated view of data center IT assets, connectivity, power and environmental conditions. RiT CenterMind Solution, according to company officials, is a new approach to data center infrastructure management (DCIM). This is a single solution that is capable of monitoring and managing high volume and array of information in today's resource-hungry data centers through centralized management. By centralizing management of data center network and infrastructure, RiT CenterMind enables data center managers to optimize data center performance and earn faster ROI. The solution combines environment, power, connectivity and security management, so eliminating the need for complex and costly integration.

Equinix continues to enhance its offerings for carrier Ethernet services. Today it announced a partnership with Neutral Tandem, another emerging player in the carrier Ethernet ecosystem, that will make it easier for Equinix customers to expand into additional markets.

Amazon Web Services has expanded its AWS Direct Connect service, which allows customers in select data centers around the globe to establish a private network connection to the Amazon cloud that can reduce network costs and increase throughput. The service will make it easier for hundreds of enterprise customers to access Amazon’s cloud services. Amazon is expanding the service to a CoreSite Realty’s One Wilshire facility in Los Angeles, the TelecityGroup’s Sovereign House data center in London, and to Equinix facilities in Tokyo and Singapore. Amazon launched Direct Connect in August in a major Equinix connectivity hub in Ashburn, Virginia. Equinix, Telecity and CoreSite are currently the only data center providers offering the Direct Connect service.

January 10, 2012 -- Web hosting provider Online Tech announced on Tuesday it has completed a new fiber optic build-out between its Ann Arbor and Mid-Michigan data centers. Online Tech's Ann Arbor data center opened in October. The new fiber build also provides a higher speed connection between data centers and additional connectivity to four carriers including Savvis, Level 3, Global Crossing ...

The world’s congested mobile airwaves are being divided in a lopsided manner, with 1 percent of consumers generating half of all traffic. The top 10 percent of users, meanwhile, are consuming 90 percent of wireless bandwidth. Arieso, a company in Newbury, England, that advises mobile operators in Europe, the United States and Africa, documented the statistical gap when it tracked 1.1 million customers of a European mobile operator during a 24-hour period in November.

NTT America’s Technology and Infrastructure Assets Drive Global Business Growth January 3, 2012 1 Comment » NTT America, a global infrastructure services provider and wholly-owned subsidiary of NTT Communications Corporation, today announced the company’s continued progress in keeping customers ahead of the curve and supporting customer investments during 2011. Throughout the year, company efforts focused on critical business trends including cloud computing, energy efficiency, and customers’ g

Facebook has hired Google's former "green energy czar" Bill Weihl, in a move designed to demonstrate the company's commitment to low-carbon computing and renewable energy. Weihl will begin the new post in January 2012, Facebook confirmed. Weihl reportedly told online magazine Fresh Dialogues that he plans to "advance sustainability" at Facebook. While his job title and responsibilities at have not been decided, the focus will be on sustainability, clean energy and energy efficiency, he said. The news comes just as Greenpeace winds up a long-running campaign calling on Facebook to "unfriend coal" as a source of energy for its data centres. The environmental campaign group singled out Facebook because of the company's decision to site its first wholly-owned data centre in Oregon, using electricity from PacificCorp - an energy company which makes two thirds of its power using coal.

CenturyLink has won a $250 million, multi-year order for the Department of Defense, while Verizon Business will support the Army National Guard with a $28.8 million networking solution. CenturyLink CenturyLink (CTL) announced it has won a multi-year task order valued at more than $250 million from the Defense Information Systems Agency/Defense Information Technology Contracting Organization (DISA/DITCO) to provide private line services for dedicated high-speed connections between military installations. With its nation-wide backbone and private line services from DS-0 through OC-768 CenturyLink will provide the Department of Defense connections dedicated for military use. “CenturyLink will deploy its optical network infrastructure to deliver highly reliable and capable private line services to support the critical and growing needs of our Defense customers,” said Diana Gowen, senior vice president and general manager of CenturyLink Government, which is headquartered in Arlington, Va. “CenturyLink’s private line services have extensive geographic coverage that ...

Did you know that the proceeds from cyber weekend sales surpassed the entire budget of Bulgaria? Or that people will create 1.2 trillion GB of data this year -- that's equivalent to 75 billion 16 GB iPods. These and other nuggets courtesy of Emerson Network Power.

“Ethernet is the backbone of the Cloud. “ Bold statement? Not at all. Any data center, cloud or otherwise, depends on its Ethernet network to allow servers, storage systems and other devices to talk to each other. No network means no data center. Today, as IT departments prepare to deploy internal cloud environments, it’s significant to evaluate how network infrastructure choices will impact the cloud’s ability to meet its service level agreements (SLAs). Terms commonly used to describe cloud-computing capabilities, such as agility; flexibility and scalability should absolutely apply to the underlying network as well. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some recommendations for simplifying a private cloud network. You can consider this post a Cliffs Notes’ version of a white paper Intel completed recently. Consolidate Ports and Cables Most cloud environments are heavily virtualized. So virtualization has been a big driver of increasing server ...