Welcome to another week's worth of news in software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), and related topics.

1. Optical Gear at SC13 in Denver

ADVA and Juniper demonstrated how OpenFlow can help transport big data. The demo combined Juniper's PTX Packet Transport Router with ADVA's FSP 3000, communicating at 100 Gb/s over a long-haul span. The OpenFlow part is nice, but the real meat here is that they connected the two boxes without any intermediate routers or optical-transport shelves.

Separately, Calient showed off its S320 all-optical switch in an Infiniband environment for high-performance computing. The big attraction of a supercomputing conference, though, is the SCinet network that gets temporarily assembled. These days, it gets into 1-Tb/s territory.

2. Internet2's Cloudy Forecast

Internet2 announced plans for a hybrid cloud for research and education institutions to share. NET+, as it's called, combines the Rackspace public cloud and an OpenStack-based private cloud and is being developed by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas at San Antonio, and the University of Notre Dame.

Last year, Internet2 launched its 100-Gb/s backbone, which included OpenFlow switching capabilities and could potentially be used as a venue for experimenting with software-defined networking (SDN).

3. Riverbed Wants a New Image

With WAN optimization becoming a shrink-wrapped, commodity market, Riverbed announced its arrival into what it calls application performance infrastructure. The acronym API is already taken, but luckily, Riverbed introduced another term: location-independent computing, which can be abbreviated LiC, as The Register helpfully points out.

What it really means is that Riverbed is trying to coalesce its products into one strategy. The plan includes Steelhead (WAN optimization), Stingray (an application delivery controller), Granite (storage control), and Cascade and Opnet (different types of performance management). As these products get more tightly integrated, Riverbed will have a deeper view into networks and applications, or so the theory goes.

4. Ixia's Got Good News and Bad News

Ixia introduced two network monitoring switches: the Net Tool Optimizer 2112 and 2113. In an unrelated development, Ixia got a warning from Nasdaq about being late with its latest 10-Q filing for quarterly earnings. The delay is due to an "email review" and "additional procedures" in the wake of Victor Alston being ousted as CEO.

5. It's a good time to be Splunk

On Thursday, Splunk beat third-quarter estimates and gave a sunny fourth-quarter forecast. By midday Friday, Splunk shares were trading up $12.54 (21%) at $72.44, giving Splunk a market capitalization of $7.7 billion.

6. And Furthermore

... Former Cisco executive Charles Giancarlo joined the board of ServiceNow, an enterprise IT cloud company. Giancarlo, once assumed to be a CEO candidate at Cisco, is now in private equity at Silver Lake Partners and has been keeping up with new trends in networking. He's on the board of Arista and was an angel investor in Big Switch Networks.

... CenturyLink acquired Tier 3 Inc., reportedly for $200 million.

... Ciena announced a program to train U.S. military veterans in Carrier Ethernet and optical communications.

7. It's a White Box World

Finally, in case you missed it, we'd like to provide links to the stories we ran this week on white-box switching, also called bare-metal switching.

• How Cumulus and Pica8 Plan to Start the Revolution
• Centec Wants Switches to Be Even More Open-Source
• How Cheap Is 'Commodity?'
• Chip Startups Take Aim at Broadcom