Rouge Group

Qualcomm (QCOM) made two significant announcements at the recent CES event: Enhance its Qualcomm Network IOT Connectivity Platform to allow network devices to simultaneously use Wi-FI, Bluetooth, CSRmesh connectivity and low-rate wireless personal area networks (LR-WPANs) or 802.15.4 and enhancements to its Wi-Fi Self Organizing Network (SON) solution for management of distributed wired and wireless networks. These announcements can have a significant impact on the Internet of Things (IoT) market. By consolidating and simplifying the managements of diverse and complex technologies and devices, these platforms open opportunities for developers and partners to build new solutions that deliver seamless connectivity for IoT devices and a consistent experience to the users.

Simplicity and consistency of connectivity addresses the fundamental challenge of IoT solutions and creates real value proposition for an IoT platform. Qualcomm is one of the largest suppliers of chips that enable phones to communicate with cell networks. In recent years Qualcomm, has moved to diversify its business to automotive, Internet of Things (IoT) and Connected Devices markets – acquisition of NXP for $47 billion in 2016. By extending and further opening its platform, Qualcomm can attract developers and OEMs to its platform thus creating a “network effect” and expand its addressable market.

Open Source Era: What makes OpenStack Valuable?

According to a recent survey, 91% of Internet of Things (IoT) projects are Open Source based. The open source version of cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) – OpenStack,  is gaining broad adoption in enterprises and service providers. OpenStack has matured from an experimental platform to a viable option for organizations. Despite its challenges and complexities, there are significant…

The unbridled growth of Internet of Things (IOT), hyperscale data centers, cloud computing, automotive, and Power over Ethernet (PoE) among others requires Ethernet and BASE-T Ethernet solutions that are cost-effective, power-efficient and operate at a variety of speeds. The IEEE released a series of four new standards that will address a variety of needs including the needs of the harsh…

Finding Business Value in The Internet of Things (IoT)

More and more devices will be Internet-connected, driving the revolution of online data to an entirely new level. According to Forester and IDC there will be 20 – 30 billion connected devices by 2020 – while others claim up to 200 billion connected devices. It is estimated that Internet of Things (IoT) devices will generate 5 trillion gigabytes of data every year, creating revenue opportunities…

Is NFV Risky for Operators; Steps to NFV Compliant Telco’s Public Network

Original post at: Rouge Group Blog

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) will have extensive implications for operators as they progress toward an All-IP networking – as part of their digital transformation strategy. It is paramount that they leverage proven technologies to minimize risks of service disruptions as they adopt new processes – a given for the…

VMware is preparing (we think) to announce a layoff of up to 5% of its workforce ~900 jobs. EMC Federation owns ~85% of VMware pre Dell – EMC merger. There are potentially several factors in play here, including the standard stuff: disappointing last quarter earnings; Dell and EMC positioning for close of $67 billion acquisition and jumping through hoops to try to manage the investors, especially VMware investors.  We already saw layoff announcement at EMC earlier and recently at VCE - as it was folded into EMC as a business unit and got a new CEO.

Acquisition of Virtustream by EMC has a significant part to play here. Recent changes in plans, of joint 50-50 ownership of Virtustream by EMC and VMware have evolved into VMware vCloud Air business to be merged into Virtustream business unit within EMC. It remains to be seen how vCloud Air business vs. Virtustream will evolve.

Other key factors that have effect on VMware are: maturing of the OSS cloud platforms like OpenStack etc. and underlying virtualization technologies. These OSS choices seemingly provide a low-cost alternative to vSphere and provide customers a sense of flexibility, openness and interoperability to build a cost-effective and open cloud environment.  

Yet another factor is maturation of Microsoft as a provider of virtualization (Hyper-v) technologies and cloud infrastructure (Azure). This takes away some of the competitive advantage of VMWare and also takes away some of its lunch.

In a recent Barron’s blog, Tiernan Ray talks about a bigger – across the industry layoff, by Trip Chowdry of Global Equities Research. Chowdry predicts 330,000 layoffs in the next twelve months across the following companies: Cisco (CSCO), EMC (EMC), F5 Networks (FFIV), HP Enterprise (HPE), HP Inc. (HPQ), IBM (IBM), Juniper (JNPR), Microsoft (MSFT), Network Appliance (NTAP), Oracle (ORCL), Symantec (SYMC), VMware (VMW), Yahoo (YHOO), Yelp (YELP).

It sounds pretty scary and spreads doom and gloom. His argument is that this is because of “shift-to-cloud” computing, which eliminates a lot of IT talent that is focused on “back-end” operations of IT. While some layoffs will happen as a result of this shift, this year, but I doubt it numbers will be this high. Having successfully managed / survived through at least two technology disruptions, I disagree with his premise. It will take much longer in the enterprise for such fundamental transition. Remember there are still a lot of legacy products in the data centers. Which need support and maintenance and generate $100s of million if not billions in revenue for these manufacturers.

VMware is preparing (we think) to announce a layoff of up to 5% of its workforce ~900 jobs. EMC Federation owns ~85% of VMware pre Dell – EMC merger. There are potentially several factors in play here, including the standard stuff: disappointing last quarter earnings; Dell and EMC positioning for close of $67 billion acquisition and jumping through hoops to try to manage the investors, especially VMware investors.  We already saw layoff announcement at EMC earlier and recently at VCE - as it was folded into EMC as a business unit and got a new CEO.

Acquisition of Virtustream by EMC has a significant part to play here. Recent changes in plans, of joint 50-50 ownership of Virtustream by EMC and VMware have evolved into VMware vCloud Air business to be merged into Virtustream business unit within EMC. It remains to be seen how vCloud Air business vs. Virtustream will evolve.

Other key factors that have effect on VMware are: maturing of the OSS cloud platforms like OpenStack etc. and underlying virtualization technologies. These OSS choices seemingly provide a low-cost alternative to vSphere and provide customers a sense of flexibility, openness and interoperability to build a cost-effective and open cloud environment.  

Yet another factor is maturation of Microsoft as a provider of virtualization (Hyper-v) technologies and cloud infrastructure (Azure). This takes away some of the competitive advantage of VMWare and also takes away some of its lunch.

In a recent Barron’s blog, Tiernan Ray talks about a bigger – across the industry layoff, by Trip Chowdry of Global Equities Research. Chowdry predicts 330,000 layoffs in the next twelve months across the following companies: Cisco (CSCO), EMC (EMC), F5 Networks (FFIV), HP Enterprise (HPE), HP Inc. (HPQ), IBM (IBM), Juniper (JNPR), Microsoft (MSFT), Network Appliance (NTAP), Oracle (ORCL), Symantec (SYMC), VMware (VMW), Yahoo (YHOO), Yelp (YELP).

It sounds pretty scary and spreads doom and gloom. His argument is that this is because of “shift-to-cloud” computing, which eliminates a lot of IT talent that is focused on “back-end” operations of IT. While some layoffs will happen as a result of this shift, this year, but I doubt it numbers will be this high. Having successfully managed / survived through at least two technology disruptions, I disagree with his premise. It will take much longer in the enterprise for such fundamental transition. Remember there are still a lot of legacy products in the data centers. Which need support and maintenance and generate $100s of million if not billions in revenue for these manufacturers.

VMware is preparing (we think) to announce a layoff of up to 5% of its workforce ~900 jobs. EMC Federation owns ~85% of VMware pre Dell – EMC merger. There are potentially several factors in play here, including the standard stuff: disappointing last quarter earnings; Dell and EMC positioning for close of $67 billion acquisition and jumping through hoops to try to manage the investors, especially VMware investors.  We already saw layoff announcement at EMC earlier and recently at VCE - as it was folded into EMC as a business unit and got a new CEO.

Acquisition of Virtustream by EMC has a significant part to play here. Recent changes in plans, of joint 50-50 ownership of Virtustream by EMC and VMware have evolved into VMware vCloud Air business to be merged into Virtustream business unit within EMC. It remains to be seen how vCloud Air business vs. Virtustream will evolve.

Other key factors that have effect on VMware are: maturing of the OSS cloud platforms like OpenStack etc. and underlying virtualization technologies. These OSS choices seemingly provide a low-cost alternative to vSphere and provide customers a sense of flexibility, openness and interoperability to build a cost-effective and open cloud environment.  

Yet another factor is maturation of Microsoft as a provider of virtualization (Hyper-v) technologies and cloud infrastructure (Azure). This takes away some of the competitive advantage of VMWare and also takes away some of its lunch.

In a recent Barron’s blog, Tiernan Ray talks about a bigger – across the industry layoff, by Trip Chowdry of Global Equities Research. Chowdry predicts 330,000 layoffs in the next twelve months across the following companies: Cisco (CSCO), EMC (EMC), F5 Networks (FFIV), HP Enterprise (HPE), HP Inc. (HPQ), IBM (IBM), Juniper (JNPR), Microsoft (MSFT), Network Appliance (NTAP), Oracle (ORCL), Symantec (SYMC), VMware (VMW), Yahoo (YHOO), Yelp (YELP).

It sounds pretty scary and spreads doom and gloom. His argument is that this is because of “shift-to-cloud” computing, which eliminates a lot of IT talent that is focused on “back-end” operations of IT. While some layoffs will happen as a result of this shift, this year, but I doubt it numbers will be this high. Having successfully managed / survived through at least two technology disruptions, I disagree with his premise. It will take much longer in the enterprise for such fundamental transition. Remember there are still a lot of legacy products in the data centers. Which need support and maintenance and generate $100s of million if not billions in revenue for these manufacturers.

 SUNNYVALE, CALIF. — PLUMgrid, the worldwide leader of secure cloud networks for public and private clouds, today announced the general availability of the PLUMgrid OpenStack Networking Suite and its deployment at leading IT solutions and telecom service provider Swisscom(SCMN.VX).

As market acceptance and deployments of OpenStack increase, the need for a secure, scalable and multi-tenant cloud networking solution has become essential. Customers today want a flexible and agile software solution that is open and holistic, solving networking issues throughout the cloud lifecycle.

“PLUMgrid is the first company to deliver a comprehensive cloud networking suite to help our customers build OpenStack clouds without worrying about scale, performance and security,” said Awais Nemat, Co-founder and CEO at PLUMgrid. “Our solution reduces the time to build clouds, lowers overall cost and accelerates delivery of new services to market.”

The PLUMgrid OpenStack Networking Suite is a secure, comprehensive and open software solution that delivers terabits of performance and scales across tens of thousands of workloads. Built on thePLUMgrid Platform and IO Visor™ technology, it provides highly automated workflows that significantly reduce the deployment time of OpenStack clouds and enables users to create privateVirtual Domains™ for applications and projects. Virtual Domains provide isolation, security and policy enforcement across tenants.

The PLUMgrid OpenStack Networking Suite simplifies operations with built-in monitoring, analytics and troubleshooting tools. Its distributed architecture and high-availability features ensure that maintenance and upgrades can be performed with no downtime. The PLUMgrid OpenStack Networking Suite is integrated with the leading OpenStack distributions and is certified with Red Hat OpenStack 4.0.

"Many enterprises adopting private cloud, as well as service providers offering public cloud, have a genuine need for network infrastructure that is closely aligned with the performance, scalability, security and automation requirements that cloud demands," said Brad Casemore, Director of Research for Datacenter Networks at IDC. "These customers also have operational models that are different from those of traditional enterprises with more conventional client-server workloads. PLUMgrid is focused exclusively on this cloud opportunity, correctly perceiving that cloud implies a set of requirements that traditional approaches to networking, architectural and operational, were not designed to solve."

PLUMgrid is the first company to introduce key networking innovations for OpenStack cloud. They include:

 Encrypted Virtual Domain - end-to-end data plane encryption for all network traffic within a Virtual Domain. This unique capability provides cryptographic isolation across tenants, removes threats of cross-contamination and security exposure, and helps businesses meet compliance requirements.

Terabits of Performance - 40Gbs of throughput per server and terabits of scale-out performance by leveraging hardware offload capabilities within x86 servers and NICs. Details of integration and results of performance benchmarks with Mellanox are available atwww.plumgrid.com.

Cloud Scale - PLUMgrid’s unique distributed architecture allows users to scale to thousands of Virtual Domains and tens of thousands of workloads across multiple racks and locations to build large-scale cloud networks.

 PLUMgrid is also announcing the completion of its Series B round of financing, totaling $16.2 million. Longworth Venture Partners led the investment, with participation from U.S. Venture Partners, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Qualcomm Ventures and Swisscom Ventures. The additional funding will help PLUMgrid grow its global sales and marketing efforts, and continue to innovate for new markets.

“PLUMgrid addresses a hard problem for cloud infrastructure - how to deliver secure, scalable and automated cloud networks,” said Nilanjana Bhowmik, PLUMgrid board member and partner atLongworth Venture Partners. “The PLUMgrid team brings together solid leadership, great technology, customer focus and impeccable execution. We see a broad set of use cases for their technology, and strong capabilities to continue to lead the market.”

Supporting quotes

“Much of the discussion around cloud computing today is focused on finding ways to deploy cloud environments faster, and cloud operators know networking is slowing it down. Today, PLUMgrid’s open software solution helps to remove networking pains, allows for faster deployment of OpenStack clouds, and enables customers to maintain scale, performance and security.” - Bob Laliberte, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group

"PLUMgrid is delivering security, scale and performance for OpenStack networking. The PLUMgrid OpenStack Networking Suite promises to simplify building and operating cloud infrastructure by delivering virtualized network services at scale to solve cloud networking issues in the modern data center.” - Nick Lippis, Co-Founder and Co-Chair, Open Networking User Group

“The PLUMgrid team has clearly claimed the leadership in innovative technologies in the network virtualization infrastructure space and has now demonstrated its benefits in production environments. USVP partners with entrepreneurs that have a strong vision and want to build big companies. PLUMgrid is the first and only company to tackle the cloud network virtualization challenge head-on and holistically. An end-to-end solution in this space will go a long way in getting service providers and enterprises to adopt public and private clouds at large scale.” - Jacques Benkoski, PLUMgrid board member and Partner, U.S. Venture Partners

About PLUMgrid

By Jim Duffy : NetworkWorld | Jun 25, 2014 1:00 AM

 SDN start-up PLUMgrid launched networking software forOpenStack, a high profile customer and a new round of funding.

PLUMgrid announced the general availability of its OpenStack Networking Suite. The OpenStack Networking Suite is designed to provide secure, multitenant networking for public and private clouds based on the OpenStack orchestration framework.

The OpenStack Networking Suite supports tens of thousands of workloads, PLUMgrid says. It is built on the company’s previously announced PLUMgrid Platform and IO Visor technology, and is designed to automate and reduce the deployment time of OpenStack cloud networks.

 The software lets users create private, encrypted Virtual Domains for applications and projects that are designed to provide isolation and policy enforcement across tenants. It includes monitoring, analytics and troubleshooting tools, in-service upgrades, integration with OpenStack distributions and certification with Red Hat OpenStack 4.0.

The OpenStack Networking Suite provides 40Gbps on throughput per x86 server that scales to terabits, PLUMgrid says. Virtual Domains can scale into the thousands, the company says.

Swiss telecom operator Swisscom is using the PLUMgrid OpenStack Networking Suite to build a multitenant virtual network with Virtual Domains and reduce the provisioning time from weeks to seconds, PLUMgrid says.

PLUMgrid is also announcing the completion of its Series B round of financing, totaling $16.2 million. Longworth Venture Partners led the investment, with participation from U.S. Venture Partners, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Qualcomm Ventures and Swisscom Ventures.

By Mikael Rickna$?s :  IDG News Service | Oct 24, 2013 11:28 AM

 Virtual network infrastructure vendor PLUMgrid is bringing its platform to OpenStack Havana, adding better resiliency and scalability in large environments.

PLUMgrid's goal is to allow network administrators to completely replicate the functions of a physical network in a virtual environment, while at the same time making these networks more agile. The idea is to allow complex network topologies to be created, provisioned and migrated in an automated way.

To offer that on OpenStack, PLUMgrid has developed a plug-in that uses the Neutron (previously known as Quantum) project to integrate its software with the Havana release of the open source cloud platform. The networking capabilities built into OpenStack are only designed to provide basic functionality for configuring flat networks or simple VLAN isolation, but Neutron allows for these features to be extended by opening the door for integration with third-party networking services, including PLUMgrid's, the company said.

So-called virtual domains are the basic building blocks in a PLUMgrid-based network. They are self-contained environments that can be set up for projects, business units or cloud customers. In each virtual domain administrators can, for example, set up routers, switches, load balancers and firewalls.

There are two editions of PLUMgrid's platform: Lite and Pro. The former is priced from US$1,650 per month, and is a good fit for smaller private clouds or test and development environments, according to PLUMgrid's website. The website didn't provide any pricing for the Pro version, but it is aimed at larger private clouds and public clouds, as well as hosting virtual desktops.

On Thursday, PLUMgrid announced that it had joined the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network, as well.

PLUMgrid also integrates with VMware vSphere and vCenter to offer similar networking functionality.

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MANAGING CLOUD Perspective

How to optimize virtual infrastructure and cloud resources?

MANAGING CLOUD Perspective

How to optimize virtual infrastructure and cloud resources?

Faster to market, enhanced customer service and reduced cost are the primary imperatives driving businesses today. Enterprises as well as service providers are turning to cloud-based application to meet these goals. To drive increased agility, lower cost, and higher service levels organizations are implementing new methodologies for application development. Agile software development and DevOps are two of the most talked about methodologies. They potentially have the ability to deliver the promised land, but before you embark on either of these journeys, it is necessary to understand that it is not sufficient to try to implement an agile process or create a DevOps team. A cultural shift across.....