Vendor Bytes: Infinera, Napatech, Juniper, Ericsson, Cisco

Lots of news from vendors lately, here’s a quick survey: 

Infinera won a key contract in the data center interconnection market. Equinix will be using their flagship DTN-X gear in Frankfurt, Toronto, and Singapore to scale capacity efficiently. The necessary scale for network interconnection fabrics these days is huge, and Equinix is of course at the center of it. As such exchanges spread out across metro areas and beyond, data centers seem to be taking on more characteristics of network operators.

At the component level, Napatech yesterday announced a 200G throughput solution for packet capture and analysis. Along with the bigger pipes of 100G and beyond comes a need to process the transmitted data at equivalent speeds. Napatech’s 200G solution pairs two of their 100G accelerators with a direct hardware interconnection through which they can exchange data, giving appliance vendors better throughput options for keeping up with nextgen network upgrades.  The advent of NFV has given the network appliance world more visibility lately.

In the routing world, Juniper has unveiled a pair of new routers and a software upgrade. The ACX500 and ACX5000 routers are targeted at the mobile vertical, better enabling IP/MPLS and Carrier Ethernet solutions in that context. The smaller of the two goes after small cell routing and will be available in Q2, while the larger features high density aggregation via Carrier Ethernet and come to market this quarter.

Over in the internet-of-things, the Global M2M Association and Ericsson have demonstrated a connectivity solution that crosses national borders. The multi-domestic service is another necessary piece of the M2M puzzle, which operators are assembling but without having the final picture to look at as a reference. The Global M2M Association consists of six operators, 4 based in Europe (DT, Teliasonera, Orange, Telecom Italia Mobile), one in North America (Bell Mobility), and one in Asia (Softbank Mobile).

And Cisco had two IOT announcements today worth a look, both aimed at more of a municipal sort of application. They launched a city operations center software solution that puts all the sensor data, applications, and video feeds onto a single pane of glass for the benefit of city managers and such. And they also took aim at transportation headaches with a solution aimed at bringing together various transportation monitoring systems and vehicle applications under one umbrella. Lots more work to do on both fronts I’d say, neither sounds like an easy problem to tackle.

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Categories: IoT, M2M · Telecom Equipment