Here are the top stories SDxCentral wrangled this week related to SDN, NFV, cloud, and virtualization infrastructure:

4 Reasons a Telco Cloud Is Hard to Build - Telcos have a few problems with VNFs that are unique to their realm.

Verizon Likes Pod Architecture for Data Centers - Pods solve five needs for the carrier.

AT&T’s Saxena Details OpenStack Implementation in Network - The carrier's integrated cloud will eventually spread to 1,000 zones.

Here are the week’s strays and stragglers we roped for you:

Bill Fathers, head of VMware's public cloud efforts, is leaving the company, Fortune reported. VMware is narrowing vCloud Air's charter as the public cloud turns into a game of giants such as Amazon Web Services. Fathers will be replaced by "co-general managers" Allwyn Sequeira and Laura Ortman.

Intel promoted Diane Byrant to executive vice president. Since 2012, she's been senior vice president and general manager of the company's Data Center Group.

IBM announced a major enterprise customer for IBM Cloud: Kimberly-Clark, the Kleenex and Huggies people. The company used IBM Bluemix to develop an app called Intelligent Restroom. No, really.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory built a private cloud based on the Red Hat OpenStack Platform. And the University of Cambridge selected Red Hat to support its OpenStack-based high performance computing (HPC) initiatives.

Nuage Networks (now part of Nokia) announced that its Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) platform is now certified for Accelerite CloudPlatform. Accelerite recently acquired CloudPlatform from Citrix.

6WIND Virtual Accelerator, which is hypervisor acceleration software, will integrate a Mirantis OpenStack Fuel plugin for increased application throughput and efficiency in KVM environments.

Criterion Networks announced its SDCloud Platform, which will let its users provision their OpenStack cloud with a selection of SDN controller options.

Aricent launched its Virtual Network Function Manager Framework.

EBSCO Information Services deployed Avi Networks on OpenStack to create an automated private cloud and software-defined data center.

NxtGen Data Center & Cloud Services deployed a new network that included Brocade’s vRouter and VDX6470T switches.

Cloud security vendor Zscaler announced Zscaler Private Access, pitching it as an alternative to VPNs for remote access.

Nexenta added container support to its software-defined storage.

Amid a broader announcement about networking, Dell noted that OS10, its latest networking operating system, has been optimized to work with F5 application delivery controllers (ADCs) and Silver Peak software-defined wide-area networks (SD-WAN). OS10 also integrates the Ansible tool from Red Hat, and parts of the OS are being contributed to the Microsoft Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) effort, Dell announced.

Here are the other stories SDxCentral covered this week:

  • VMware NSX & Cisco ACI Aren’t Mutually Exclusive
  • HPE Won’t Ignore Open Source NFV MANO
  • Juniper Reports Q1 on the Lower End of Guidance
  • Amazon Web Services Cracks $10B Run Rate
  • Think SDN & OpenStack Can’t Scale Massively? Wanna Bet?
  • Innovium Settles Broadcom Suit & Raises $15M
  • Quantifying Benefits of Network Virtualization in the Data Center
  • Swisscom’s Elastic Cloud Uses PLUMgrid OpenStack SDN
  • CoreOS’s Stackanetes Puts OpenStack in Containers
  • Riverbed Debuts an SD-WAN Product
  • AT&T Uses vEPC to Fuel European IoT Business
  • TIA’s NFV Security Group Reflects Carriers’ Unease With Open Source
  • AT&T Integrated Cloud to Include 105 Data Centers by Year’s End