Happy Friday, everyone! Here’s SDxCentral’s gathering of the week’s news bits around software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), and more. Hold on to your butts:
RUMOR MILL
The hypervisor wars may get a new combatant. Nutanix, maker of data center platforms that converge management for virtual storage and compute, plans to debut its own hypervisor at its user conference in June, according to The Register. If you’re wondering why they’d build their own hypervisor, that makes all of us.
Enterprise collaboration firm Slack is raising a new round at a $2.8 billion valuation, according to sources cited by the Wall Street Journal. Since launching little more than a year ago, Slack’s group chat product has swept workplaces like fire, finding many fans among agile development and DevOps teams. The reported valuation would be more than double Slack’s $1.12 billion valuation just five months ago. (In a probably unrelated incident, Slack suffered a security breach disclosed on Friday.)
Intel is in talks to acquire FPGA giant Altera, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
LAUNCH PAD
Huawei unveiled applications for the Open Network Operating System (ONOS) at OFC in Los Angeles. The company demonstrated its ONOS-based Smart Network Controller and NetMatrix platform, using the centralized software system to remotely control a real network in Dallas constructed with Huawei-NE series routers and Huawei OptiX OSN-series smart optical devices. The applications Huawei presented included bandwidth-on-demand and transport network virtualization.
Red Hat launched a unified version of its open source software-defined storage portfolio. Its dual offerings are Red Hat Ceph Storage, targeted at cloud infrastructure workloads such as OpenStack, and Red Hat Gluster Storage for enterprise virtualization and analytics.
Red Hat also posted strong earnings this week, growing annual revenue 17 percent to $1.79 billion. CEO Jim Whitehurst credited the company’s focus on open hybrid-cloud technologies in a statement announcing the results.
Alcatel-Lucent’s industrial research arm, Bell Labs, is launching a consulting division focused on network evolution and strategies.
Accedian Networks launched an NFV approach for enterprise-to-data-center connectivity. The company’s SkyLIGHT VCX now controls virtual network functions on small, programmable hardware modules, which can be tailored to assure SLAs for public and private data center connections.
SingleHop launched a disaster-recovery service compatible with VMware’s ESX and Microsoft‘s Hyper-V hypervisors.
JOINING FORCES
Ericsson and Canonical signed a three-year partnership deal making Canonical’s Ubuntu Server OS the host operating system for Ericsson’s Cloud System platform.
Cisco, Juniper, Arista, Broadcom, and others launched the Consortium for On-Board Optic (COBO) to develop standards for on-board optical modules in network switches. COBO aims to create standards for modules that are mounted on network switch or adapter motherboards, rather than on faceplates.
Oracle and Intel launched a carrier-grade NFV platform based on OpenStack. Oracle announced that it has optimized products from its orchestration framework for Intel’s Open Network Platform using OpenStack’s infrastructure management software.
FINDING FUNDING
InAuth, a mobile application and browser fraud detection firm, raised $20 million. Bain Capital Ventures led the Series A round.
BetterCloud, a New York-based maker of security and management tools for cloud-based applications, has raised a $25 million Series D. Accel Partners led the round.
Security Innovation, a Massachusetts-based enterprise software security firm, has raised $4 million in additional venture funding led by Brook Venture Partners.
PEOPLE MOVES
Ixia hired HP veteran Hans-Peter Klaey as senior vice president of global sales. Klaey, who led the global field organization for HP’s software group from 2011 to 2014, will spearhead Ixia’s sales organization and channel development targeting large enterprise and carrier customers.
The nonprofit Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium named Harry D. Raduege, Jr. as CEO. Raduege replaces founding CEO Carl G. O’Berry, who is retiring.
Here’s what else SDxCentral covered lately:
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