Here’s our gathering of the week’s news bits around software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), and related topics. Red Hat hosted its 2014 summit in San Francisco this week, so a good fraction of the news comes from there.

… Cumulus Networks' valuation in the wake of that Dell partnership grew to $300 million, figures analyst Scott Raynovich of The Rayno Report.

… ConteXtream is integrating Red Hat’s OpenStack orchestration with its own SDN and NFV fabric for carrier-SDN solutions. ConteXtream combined the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack platform with ContexNet, a carrier-grade SDN fabric, and demonstrated this capability for a virtual Gi-LAN at the summit.

… Also from Red Hat Summit: Storage producer Tintri demonstrated what it says is the industry's first VM-level storage for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. Tintri says its VMstore is the only hypervisor-neutral storage platform with VM awareness and adaptive learning capabilities to support hundreds of mixed workloads concurrently.

… Dell used TeraVM, a virtualized IP test solution from Aeroflex, to demonstrate the readiness of the Dell ecosystem for virtualized network functions (VNFs) in NFV. TeraVM runs virtualized tests orchestrated through Red Hat’s OpenStack cloud operating system as a VNF.

… The Optical Internetworking Forum is bringing its transport SDN workshop (PDF) to Europe. "Transport SDN - Enabling Technologies, Demonstrators, Field Trials, Deployments" will be open to the public in Berlin on May 19. The series of workshops kicked off in California in February and aims to develop specifications and standardization for SDN/NFV implementations.

… StarWind Software announced it secured $3.25 million in Series B funding. StarWind produces software-defined storage for Microsoft Hyper-V and Windows Server 2012. It says its upcoming release, StarWind SAN, will become the first solution running on the Windows platform that creates clusters of multiple hypervisor hosts without separate physical shared storage. Almaz Capital led the funding round, with participation from ABRT Venture and AVentures Capital.

… Brocade appointed former Cisco exec Matt Kolon as chief technology officer for Asia Pacific. Kolon will be responsible for leading the company's technology strategy and product roadmap within APAC, particularly in the areas of NFV and SDN. He will be based in Beijing.

… Marc Cohn of Ciena has been elected to the OpenDaylight Project board as a silver-member representative. He was chosen for a 12-month term by the 24 silver-level members of OpenDaylight last week. We wanted to point this out because Cohn has been so active in SDN circles, as chair of the Market Education Committee at the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) and, of course, as a prolific SDxCentral contributor. Congratulations, Marc!