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

... It was apparently "Partner With Telefónica" week, especially around Mobile World Congress.

• Alcatel-Lucent, wielding its CloudBand platform, will work with Telefónica to advance NFV development.
• Ericsson struck a partnership to develop network virtualization with Telefónica.
• Huawei also signed a deal with Telefónica to work on SDN and NFV.
• Finally, Infinera and Telefónica research subsidiary Telefónica I+D announced a successful demonstration of network-as-a-service (NaaS) in a multilayer environment using an SDN approach. The demo showed how end users could define MPLS services for dynamic allocation and configuration of associated networking resources at both the IP/MPLS layer and the transport layer.

... Martin Casado, chief scientist at VMware, told an RSA Conference audience that the hypervisor is in the Goldilocks zone (meaning "just right") to handle security services. It's able to discern context from the application, but it's far enough away to provide the isolation that security craves. Read his thoughts at SearchSDN and Dark Reading.

... Napatech introduced a new four-port, 10-Gb/s network analysis adapter designed to provide higher throughput with multiport appliance solutions. Eight of the adapters can be combined into one 320-Gb/s stream. Throughput is important because carriers increasingly want an end-to-end services view, which means monitoring multiple points of the network at once — which pushes up the throughput needs for network visibility.

... VSS Monitoring launched its System Software 3.3. Among the relevant advances: 40-Gb/s support, and load balancing across up to 16 security ports.

... Microprocessor maker Tilera announced a series of products for data center and network security. Among them is TILE-OVS, an optimized open vSwitch that provides offload for NFV deployments in data center and telco networks. Separately, the DPI-on-a-NIC, powered by Procera’s NAVL engine, is a high-performance blade designed to filter more than 350,000 URLs per second and apply DPI at up to 80 Gb/s.

... Startup A3Cube announced a “brain-inspired” data plane encapsulated in a NIC that it claims will bring supercomputing benefits to storage networking. It operates using fancy topologies such as the torus and the hypercube.

... Radware announced a new line of SDN- and NFV-related products for mobile carriers and service providers. The line aims to enable more flexible and cost-effective GiLANs and includes control plane and data plane products that can be integrated with SDN ecosystems.

... Cumulus Networks is expanding into Europe through a partnership with European storage distributor Hammer. The partnership brings Cumulus Linux and bare metal networking to the European market.

... The drama between Riverbed and hedge fund Elliott Management reached a new chapter. As you'll recall, Elliott is offering to buy Riverbed in a transparent attempt to force Riverbed to consider other, better offers. On Tuesday, Elliott upped its bid to $21 per share, or $3.3 billion. On Friday, Riverbed rejected the offer, leaving Elliott none too pleased.

... In an ostensibly unrelated move, Satya Natella resigned from Riverbed's board. Something about a new job.