Ericsson strengthens its agreement for 5G research and development with NIB

Ericsson is announcing that it has signed an agreement for credit facility with the Nordic Investment Bank (NIB) for USD 150 million, maturing in 2025. Of these new funds, 98 million will replace credit with NIB that was set to mature in 2021.

In addition to strengthening Ericsson’s balance sheet and financial flexibility, the loan has been granted for the purpose of financing Ericsson to support investments in research and development (R&D) in relation to the development of 5G technology during the years 2020-2022.

Key for success in the telecom industry is the delivery of future-proof, high-quality networks and solutions. To build on its technology leadership, Ericsson invested SEK 38 billion in R&D in 2018. This has enabled the company to be the leading contributor in the development of open telecom standards, with some 49,000 patents.

"Our increased investments to secure technology leadership in 5G, IoT and digital services have enabled us to reach nearly 80 commercial 5G agreements and contracts with unique operators, 24 of which are live networks - more than any other company,” said Erik Ekudden, Ericsson chief technology officer. “In the coming years, we will see 5G networks going live around the world, with major deployments from 2020 and we expect the global number of 5G subscriptions to top 2.6 billion in 2025. The technologies that we are investing in are fundamentally changing the way we innovate, collaborate, live and do business.”

GigaSpaces Version 15.0 set to operationalize and optimize machine learning; gain actionable insights from data

GigaSpaces announced this week availability of GigaSpaces Version 15.0, including InsightEdge Platform and XAP, to operationalize and optimize machine learning with the required speed, scale, accuracy and management tools. GigaSpaces Version 15.0 powers machine learning operations (MLOps) initiatives, helping enterprises maximize the business value derived from big data. 

Deploying machine learning models in production remains a major challenge for many enterprises. The Gartner Accelerate Your Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Journey Using These DevOps Best Practices says that, “according to the 2019 Gartner CIO Survey, AI and ML continue to be viewed as the No. 1 game-changing technology by CIOs. However, most organizations underestimate how long it will take to move AI and ML projects into production.”

GigaSpaces delivers fast in-memory computing platforms for real-time insight to action and extreme transactional processing.  With GigaSpaces, enterprises can operationalize machine learning and transactional processing to gain real-time insights on their data and act upon them in the moment.  

The always-on platforms for mission-critical applications across cloud, on-premise or hybrid, are leveraged by organizations across various verticals, including financial services, retail, transportation, telecom and healthcare. GigaSpaces offices are located in the US, Europe and Asia.

GigaSpaces Version 15.0 simplifies integrating AI workloads with the organization’s core infrastructure, accelerating machine learning deployment and enabling enterprises to more readily experience the business benefits of machine learning models.

GigaSpaces Version 15.0 introduces a new enterprise-grade monitoring and administration tool, Ops Manager, that provides visibility into the components of systems running models including logs, inputs, outputs and exceptions, using different performance visualization techniques. 

The Ops Manager enables continuous monitoring of machine learning pipelines, starting at the cluster level and drilling through to individual services so users can maintain accurate data models and ensure that problems are resolved before they affect overall performance. 

The new AnalyticsXtreme Batch Indexing included in GigaSpaces InsightEdge Version 15.0 optimizes and automates data access and storage with the added ability to move data between the more frequent (cold data) access and infrequent (archive data) access tiers on data lakes and data warehouses.  

The performance of ML models is enhanced since frequently accessed cold data can be retrieved 80 times faster directly from data lakes and processing costs are reduced as data access patterns change. 

GigaSpaces Version 15.0 also provides a native smart space client in Kubernetes that supports remote CRUD operations, task execution, and event-driven analytics providing high throughput and fast serialization, as well as automatic load balancing. Writing and updating of data without a predefined schema allows easy changes to the data model, while ensuring compatibility with JDBC and BI tools so code can be integrated more reliably and faster with lower administrative overhead.

“Machine learning is becoming an essential component of mission critical applications to optimize operations and deliver superior real time customer experiences,” said Yoav Einav, VP product at GigaSpaces. “GigaSpaces Version 15.0 provides enterprises with the machine learning model management capabilities, speed and scale that they need to accelerate their machine learning and artificial intelligence journey.”

Martello completes initial phase of testing its SD-WAN offering on ENCQOR 5G

Martello Technologies announced this week that it has completed the initial phase of testing for its SD-WAN solution as part of a project with ENCQOR 5G, Canada’s initial pre-commercial fifth-generation (5G) wireless network for open innovation. 

Among the first SD-WAN vendors in Canada to initiate a project on the ENCQOR 5G testbed, Martello aims to demonstrate that its SD-WAN solution can deliver stable and predictable handling of unified communications (UC) and other real-time IoT traffic on 5G networks.

Launched in March last year, ENCQOR 5G is funded by the Government of Canada through the Strategic Innovation Fund, along with the Governments of Quebec and Ontario as well as leading industry players Ericsson, Ciena, Thales, CGI and IBM. ENCQOR 5G is coordinated by Innovation ENCQOR, and delivered in Ontario by Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) and in Quebec by Innovation ENCQOR, CEFRIO and Prompt.

ENCQOR 5G brings together SMEs, industry, government, researchers and academia in both Quebec and Ontario to collaborate on the commercialization of disruptive products, processes, and services, providing a first-to-market advantage and to improve the ability of SMEs to scale.

According to Gartner, in 2020, worldwide 5G wireless network infrastructure revenue will reach $4.2 billion, an 89% increase from 2019 revenue of $2.2 billion1. The enterprise will increasingly become the focus of 5G services, expanding into new real-time and mobile IoT applications such as autonomous vehicles, remote healthcare, the mobile office, and agriculture and retail sector applications.

The project with ENCQOR 5G underpins current Martello projects and the development of new solutions, while fostering collaboration with companies within the alliance. Following on Martello’s successful mobile SD-WAN for autonomous vehicles proof of concept with BlackBerry QNX in May 2019, the project with ENCQOR 5G leverages the Company’s leadership and unique expertise in network connectivity for real-time and mobile IoT applications.

In the initial phase of the project, Martello has demonstrated compatibility with LTE-A, a precursor to 5G; in later phases, Martello will test UC traffic specifically, over LTE-A and 5G.

Martello’s SD-WAN and link balancing technology provides network connectivity in challenging environments, including in developing regions with a limited telecom infrastructure. With 5G emerging as the next generation network, Martello is future-proofing its SD-WAN solution to ensure that challenging mobile IoT applications on 5G networks, such as autonomous vehicles and the distributed, mobile office, stay seamlessly connected to mobile networks.

“Through our work with the ENCQOR 5G testbed, we have an opportunity to engage with many of the world’s top technology players, from Ericsson to CGI, in accelerating Canadian innovation in 5G,” said John Proctor, president and CEO of Martello. “ENCQOR 5G is central to Martello’s strategy, giving us the ability to integrate solutions at the earliest points in the development cycle and demonstrate Martello’s 5G readiness.”

“Martello is leading SD-WAN innovation on 5G networks with ENCQOR 5G,” said Claudia Krywiak, president and CEO, Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE), the coordinating member of ENCQOR 5G for Ontario. “Businesses like Martello are paving the way to Canada’s 5G future, with the support of private industry, federal and provincial governments.”

Mushroom Networks comes together with Aethra Telecommunications to provide SD-WAN for service providers, system integrators

Mushroom Networks and Italian telecom firm Aethra Telecommunications, jointly announced their partnership to provide universal-CPE (uCPE) based SD-WAN solutions for service providers and system integrators worldwide.

The uCPE, with integrated fiber and copper ports, embedded VDSL2 modems and an embedded LTE modem, is capable of running VNFs (Virtual Network Functions) on VMs (Virtual Machines). When combined with Mushroom Networks' SD-WAN software, this creates an ideal platform for service providers and integrators. 

The SD-WAN solution enables intelligent management of the application traffic flows and the orchestration of the WAN connections to optimize end-user experience both for inter-office communications as well as Internet applications served by private, public or hybrid clouds. 

The combined solution enhances the performance of the network and increases network reliability by dynamically steering packets based on advanced algorithms that learn and adapt depending on network conditions. This cognitive and adaptive approach to SD-WAN facilitates setting the networks on autopilot to work around and shield network problems without any human intervention.

The uCPE with SD-WAN solution is now available in Europe, Central America, the Middle East and Northern Africa regions.

Qualstar works on a prototype enterprise class library solution with Sony Imaging

Qualstar Corp., provider of data storage systems, has developed a prototype enterprise class library solution with Sony Imaging Products & Solutions.

The highly scalable enterprise class library solution leverages Qualstar’s expertise and experience in designing efficient robotic-based storage systems. Utilizing Sony’s Optical Disc Archive Generation 3 technology, a single library will scale from 4.7 PB up to 50 PB. It can scale out to multi-library cluster configurations capable of managing hundreds of petabytes of archive data.

Through a wholly owned subsidiary, Qualstar also provides high efficiency and high density power supplies under the N2Power brand. Its N2Power power supply products provide compact and efficient power conversion for a wide variety of industries and applications, including but not limited to telecom, networking, broadcast, industrial, lighting, gaming, and test equipment.

“Today’s supercomputing environments need high capacity, scalable data storage solutions to archive data for a longer period of time,” said Arun Vaishampayan, Qualstar’s Vice President of Global Sales. “Sony’s Optical Disc Archive Generation 3 storage platform fulfills the needed requirements of this market.”

“We are delighted with the progress of this project,” said Steven N. Bronson, CEO of Qualstar. “We believe the jointly developed product will serve the needs of our valued customers and open new markets for optical devices.”

NTT Electronics contributes Goldstone - open source network OS for disaggregated coherent transponders to telecom infra project

NTT Electronics delivered on Wednesday its Goldstone Network Operating Software (NOS *1) for disaggregated coherent transponders to the Telecom Infra Project’s NOS Software Project hosted by the Open Optical and Packet Transport project group. Launched in February 2016, TIP was started with the goal of accelerating the pace of innovation in the telecom industry.

Goldstone utilizes many existing open source components which have been developed in Open Compute Project (OCP *2) and Telecom Infra Project (TIP *3) including Open Network Linux (ONL *4), SONiC *5, Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI *6) and Transponder Abstraction Interface (TAI *7) to provide a full-fledged open source solution. ONL is used as the base operating system and provides a wide range of open network device support. 

NTT Electronics (NEL) has been developing and commercializing optical communications devices since 1995. It has complete portfolio of optical and electronics products to cover the industry needs for 100G-and-beyond link systems, ROADM components and FTTH networks.

On top of ONL, Kubernetes *8 is employed to enable containerized application management, which realizes flexible and modular software composition. SONiC/SAI is deployed as a fleet of containers when the target hardware comprises Ethernet switch ASIC, whereas TAI is used when the target hardware has coherent transponder components. 

Due to its modular architecture, Goldstone can be extended to support networking devices, which don’t have Ethernet ASIC, but may include conventional transponders, ROADMs or amplifiers in the future.

Goldstone was originally started as a prototype NOS for Edgecore’s Cassini Platform by the proposal from NTT Electronics. This has led to a production deployment by mixi in Japan. 

More than five industry partners are using Goldstone for evaluation on the Cassini platform. It is also being incorporated in Wistron’s Galileo platform.

The NOS is planned to be contributed to TIP Open Optical Packet Transport (OOPT *9) group as an open source project. Goldstone is planned to be part of a live running demonstration at the TIP Summit 2019.