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

… Sales of SDN products for the data center and enterprise nearly tripled in 2013 compared with 2012, research firm Infonetics reported. Analyst Cliff Grossner forecast the market for SDN Ethernet switches and controllers to reach $9.5 billion in 2018.

… Former Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens has surfaced at Google as vice president of cloud platforms. He posted his new title to LinkedIn, and ZDNet noticed it. Stevens had quit Red Hat abruptly in August.

… EMC denied a report that it's considering selling its 80 percent stake in VMware. The report appeared in the New York Post Thursday.

… Another acquisition rumor: CenturyLink wants to buy Rackspace, according to a Bloomberg story last weekend. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about this, as Barb Darrow of GigaOm writes.

… PeerApp and Sandvine showed off what they’re calling the industry’s “first virtualized content caching solution.” The product combines PeerApp’s UltraBand caching engine and Sandvine’s Policy Engine. The joint solution ran on Dell-hosted virtual machines at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco this week.

… ZNYX Networks introduced a high-density, top-of-rack switch platform for security and NFV. The B1 platform promises to provide enough performance for line-rate service chaining of applications in the data path. Backed by a 400-Gb/s switch fabric with 24 10-Gb/s ports and four 40-Gb/s ports, the B1 couples an Ethernet switch with an Intel Atom processor C2000 and two Intel Xeon E5-2600 v2 processors.

… Chef launched Chef 12, the newest release of its DevOps platform. It merges Chef’s open source version with its premium version into a single source code base. Chef 12 comes with a tiered subscription model for enterprise and integrates with Windows PowerShell DSC, VMware vCloud Air, and Amazon Web Services.

… The market for OpenStack-related products is expected to quadruple in size to $3.3 billion by 2018, according to a new report from 451 Research. The company based its forecast on analysis of more than 60 vendors that support OpenStack or base their products or services on the OpenStack framework. Current OpenStack revenue overwhelmingly comes from the service-provider space, but the company expects revenue to increase in all segments.

… Cyan rolled out upgrades to its Z-Series Packet-Optical Transport (P-OTP) and Blue Planet SDN platforms. The Z-Series P-OTP packet switching and transport modules now include traffic policing and shaping, and they support hitless software upgrades. (Optical nerd alert: They also support 100-Gb/s coherent CFP modules.) In addition, new APIs and MPLS-TP support promise more scalable SDN-enabled packet-optical networks better capable of deploying 100G in the metro or delivering MEF-compliant Carrier Ethernet 2.0 services, Cyan says.

… Ixia launched a virtualized version of its IxLoad test equipment for mobile operators. IxLoad emulates the behavior of mobile subscribers and virtualized network functions (VNFs) to validate different elements of virtualized wireless network performance and quality.

… Nokia Networks launched what it’s calling the first examples of Operations Support System (OSS) as a Service. The company is offering two OSS tools as a service: Performance Manager to manage 2G, 3G and LTE networks, and Service Quality Manager to provide real-time views of service quality across mobile broadband and IT networks.
 Nokia says overall operator costs can be 19 percent lower with OSS-as-a-service compared with conventional business models. It should be noted that Nokia's press release does not use the acronym OSSaaS, for which we should all be grateful.

… Also from Nokia: The company is teaming up with Red Hat to provide an OpenStack telco cloud for mobile operators. The agreement combines Nokia’s carrier-grade virtualized core applications and cloud application management products with Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. The companies expect joint products to be available commercially in early 2015.

… Avaya claims to be one step closer to the holy grail of automated configuration. The company has teamed up with Wind River to create “hands-free” vSwitch network services configuration. The technology has an automatic service configuration code embedded into open vSwitches; after the vSwitch is activated, the code automatically configures it into a unique network-wide service. Avaya and Wind River plan to submit the innovation to the Open vSwitch initiative.

… Wi-fi vendor Meru launched what it says is the first OpenFlow-enabled SDN product for Microsoft Lync. Designed to optimize Microsoft Lync over multivendor networks, Meru Collaborator is built on top of an OpenDaylight controller designed to work with any OpenFlow-enabled wired or wireless network.

…Mirantis rolled out the 2.0 version of its OpenStack private-cloud-as-a-service just months after it launched version 1.0 in June. While Mirantis OpenStack Express (MOX) 1.0 was based on OpenStack Havana, 2.0 is based on Icehouse and catches MOX up with core OpenStack release cycles.

…Finally, OpenDaylight has chosen some familiar SDxCentral contributors to be part of its first class of OpenDaylight Ambassadors who will help support and grow the project worldwide. Brent Salisbury, Colin Dixon, and Tom Nadeau, join a group of 11 SDN leaders recognized for their expertise and willingness to share their knowledge for the betterment and growth of the community.

If you missed them, here are the other top stories from SDxCentral this week:

• Intel Supports Geneve to Help Unify VXLAN & NVGRE
• Juniper MetaFabric Gets a Security Boost, Claims 5,000 Customers
• Nuage Networks Will Have a Hand in Alcatel-Lucent's Optical SDN
• Tabula's '3D' FPGA Gets Into 100G Switches
• Featured: Cisco ACI + Splunk = Single-Pane Visibility Across the Data Center
• HP Handing the Cloud Reins to Eucalyptus' CEO
• To Take on Broadcom, Startup Xpliant Needed a Helping Hand