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

Verizon to Add 16 Data Centers to Telco Cloud in 2016 — The Tier 1 carrier is further along with virtualization than you might think.

Arista Builds a ‘Universal Spine’ for Hyperscale Clouds — Its new 7500R line of switches creates an extra layer intended for hyperscale deployments.

Open Source Groups Invited to Play Ball With AT&T — Will existing open source groups working on SDN and NFV want to cease their separate existences?

SDxCentral Hires Marek as VP of Content — Give a warm welcome to Sue Marek, the newest member of the SDxCentral editorial team!

And here are the week's strays and stragglers we roped for you:

ZTE signed an agreement to partner with China Unicom on SDN and NFV as part of the telco's Cloud-Oriented Ubiquitous-Broadband Elastic Network (CUBE-Net 2.0) strategy.

Fujitsu says it's supporting NTT Docomo’s network virtualization, using its SDN technology with integrated virtual network function management software.

SDN Essentials and Raisecom joined the OpenDaylight Project at the silver level.

Calix joined the Open Networking Operating System (ONOS) project to work on creating an Apache Kafka northbound interface within ONOS.

ECI added a network automation app to its LightAPPS family of SDN applications.

Iron.io named Bart Schachter as chief operating officer. He joins the company from Docker Inc., where he worked on partnerships and acquisitions.

Apcera added Kubernetes support to its cloud platform.

Container security company Twistlock named Jacinta Tobin as chief revenue officer and added Gene Kim, former CTO of Tripwire, as a strategic advisor.

Quali open-sourced its Shells plug-ins for cloud sandboxes.

And here are the other stories SDxCentral covered this week:

  • CoreOS & Intel Stuff OpenStack Into Containers
  • Carriers Do Care About MEF’s Lifecycle Service Orchestration
  • Microsoft Azure Takes On AWS’s Lambda
  • HPE’s Composable Plans Include Orchestration & Persistent Memory
  • CloudRouter Achieves 650 Gb/s & Expands Into SDN
  • PLUMgrid Touts Containers & CloudApex in 5.0 Release
  • Rancher Releases v1.0 of Its Docker Management Platform
  • Brocade Buys DevOps & Automation Startup StackStorm
  • 2016 NFV Infrastructure and MANO Report Available Now