Happy Friday, everyone! Here’s our gathering of this week’s news bits around software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), and related topics.

... Following up on an April announcement, Big Switch Networks software is now shipping on Dell's S4810-ON switch and will being shipping on the S6000-ON switch later this month.

... The OpenDaylight Project welcomed Compass-EOS, Intracom Telecom, and Transmode as new project members.

... The Google Cloud Platform is turning Google into more of a service provider. At a San Francisco event on Tuedsay, the company announced a host of peering and interconnect deals and a virtual private network (VPN) service.

... Mirantis and Red Hat remain OpenStack partners but fundamentally disagree about what that partnership was about, as GigaOm reported from the OpenStack Summit in Paris.

... 6WIND demoed its Virtual Accelerator at Dell World this week. The first product in its new Speed Series family, the Virtual Accelerator is used to speed up virtual switching and networking features for virtual infrastructures, data center virtualization, as well as network appliance virtualization. It also improves performance more than 15 times over standard Linux flavors, 6WIND claims, giving operators enough bandwidth for service chains and compute-intensive virtual machines such as vEPC and vIPsec.

... Also announced at Dell World: Dell, Brocade, and Intel have joined forces to offer new NFV products for telecommunications service providers. This entails adding the Brocade Vyatta vRouter software to Dell's new NFV platform, which is powered by Intel's Data Plane Developers Kit and Xeon E5-2600v3 processor.

... The OpenStack Foundation board of directors elected Intel as the first new Platinum member since the creation of the Foundation in September 2012.

... F5 unveiled Silverline, a set of capabilities to help scale IT resources across cloud and data center deployments. Marking F5's arrival to the cloud services delivery arena, Silverline will feature extended security, optimization, and service availability from hosted and managed infrastructure.

... The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) and Open Networking Foundation (ONF) have been busy, announcing this week that they've held three worldwide events to highlight results from the joint Transport Software Defined Networking prototype demo.

... Pica8 named Niraj Jain, formerly of Vocera Communications, as vice president of business development.

... Brocade continued adding to its CTO office, hiring Kevin Shatzkamer as a distinguished engineer and CTO of mobile networking. Shatzkamer was previously a distinguished engineer at Cisco. You can read about some more of Brocade's high-profile hires here.

... StackStorm released StackStorm 0.5, open source software for operations automation. Although it's been in private beta since this spring, it is now open to companies to use so they can manage integration and automation of their environments.

... CENX added three new customers for its Cortx Service Orchestrator: one wireless service provider and two wireline providers. No names were disclosed.

... Docker Inc. named Marianna Tessel senior vice president of engineering. She was previously a vice president of engineering at VMware.

... Nutanix announced that its NX-3000 converged infrastructure platform is being used by NTT SmartConnect, a service provider owned by NTT.

... Nutanix also announced that its software is being used in the Dell XC series of converged appliances.

... PLUMgrid made a few announcements during the OpenStack Summit in Paris: First, its Open Networking Suite 2.0 (ONS), released just last week, received certification with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5. Second, PLUMgrid joined the SUSE PartnerNet Program, beginning the engineering certification work to add SUSE Cloud as the latest OpenStack distribution to be supported by PLUMgrid ONS. Lastly, the company said it has incorporated third party open source SDN capabilities from OpenContrail, Quagga, Bird, and pfSense on the PLUMgrid platform that will offer a single service insertion framework that speeds up the adoption of virtual network services.

Here's what else SDxCentral covered this week:

• Arista Earnings Soar in Q3, But Shares Tumble
• Juniper's MX Router Goes Virtual
• Pertino Cloud Network Engine to be Offered in Dell Cloud Marketplace
• Cisco Hedges Bets On Patent Reform With Campaign Cash
• Brocade Brings Scale-Out SDN to the Campus Network
• HP and Wind River Join Forces to Create Carrier Grade Products for NFV
• On.Lab Takes ONOS Open Source
• Siaras Targets the Orchestration Gaps in the Hybrid Cloud
• Analyst Report Points to Good News for Arista Earnings
• An OpenStack Networking Race: Midokura & Akanda Go Open Source