Netadmins, catch: Here's your weekly dose of networking intel

Microsoft's Ignite conference attracted some attention in the networking biz this week, with Fortinet and Riverbed putting up the jazz hands to get attention.

From Fortinet comes an expansion of its Azure security offerings.

FortiCASB – its Cloud Security Access Broker – is a subscription services providing “visibility, compliance, data security, and threat protection”. This is now supported on Azure.

Its FortiSandbox has also been extended to Azure. Its features include automated detection and mitigation of threats, designed for distributed enterprise networks.

Riverbed announced Azure integrations for its SteelConnect SD-WAN product, and SteelFusion for Microsoft Hyper-V.

SteelConnect allows Azure customers to automate local branch path steering for Microsoft Office 365. Riverbed's announcement notes that “users can extend software-defined policies for steering traffic for selected applications or digital services, users or entire locations.”

SteelConnect Manager can also take care of Azure Virtual WAN connections.

Extending its SteelFusion virtualisation, intelligent cache and WAN optimisation offering to Hyper-V is designed to simplify network edge operations, the company said.

Chipzilla ships silicon photonic transceivers for 5G apps

Intel says it's expanding its silicon photonic transceivers beyond the data centre.

Saying the latest in its range of 100 Gbps transceivers targets “5G fronthaul bandwidth needs”, Intel added they're designed to survive in the outdoors where base stations live, and provide optical transport at distances up to 10km.

Chipzilla's announcement says the devices are sampling now, with production due in the first quarter of 2019.

Wind River, Telit put heads together in IoT

Wind River and Telit have announced an expansion to a partnership begun in 2017.

Targeting industrial Internet of Things development, Telit's cloud-hosted deviceWISE lifecycle management offering now supports Wind River's IoT operating system.

Wind River has also given Telit its C and Python device-side agent software, pre-validated on its VxWorks and Linux operating systems.

Wind River's Michael Krutz said the “edge-to-cloud IIoT” is designed to help companies modernise their edge infrastructure, promote automation, and accelerate the evolution of autonomous systems.

Oracle net-watcher spots South Atlantic cable's go-live moment

Oracle's Internet Intelligence monitoring network last week spotted the go-live moment for the new South Atlantic Cable System (SACS).

Around midday on September 18, Doug Mallory wrote, the traffic passed directly between South America and sub-Saharan Africa for the first time.

The go-live was manifested in a two-thirds drop in latency between Angola carriers TVCABO (AS36907) and Movicel (AS37081), and South American cities in Brazil.

Mallory noted that the cable is the first new route in 18 years connecting South America to the outside world without a USA landing.

Barefoot emits programming studio for Tofino chip

Barefoot Networks has launched P4 Studio, a software development environment for its P4 (Programming Protocol-independent Packet Processors) language, used in its Tofino Ethernet ASIC.

The studio is designed to make it easier to “develop, debug and optimise P4 applications”, simplify integration with network operating system control planes and management planes.

The P4 Studio comes with production-ready P4 applications, APIs, and data plane visualisation tools.

The studio includes a compiler; a “register-accurate” simulation model for Barefoot's current and future ASICs so developers can prototype P4 applications before deployment; the P4 Insight dataplane visualisation tool, the Barefoot Runtime Interface (BRI) API that enables communications between the control and forwarding planes.

There's also the Barefoot Model-driven Abstraction Interface (BMAI) that lets developers create abstractions of P4 constructs; a suite of P4 applications; a Python-based packet test framework; and the Barefoot Unified Device Driver supporting “all current and future Barefoot ASICs”.

Ethernet Alliance releases plugfest results

The Ethernet Alliance's August Higher Speed Networking Plugfest results are out, and the industry group is feeling pleased with how things went.

The test, conducted at the University of New Hampshire's InterOperability Laboratory, covered “400 GbE, 100 GbE, 50 GbE, 25 GbE, and NRZ and PAM4-based interfaces and signalling”, said Intel's Dave Chalupsky in his capacity as plugfest chair.

The alliance's media release (PDF) noted: “Interoperability tests were performed using 10 different Ethernet variations at speeds of 25 GbE to 400 GbE. The event produced a high rate of positive results, with 98 percent of link configuration tests and 93 percent of Frame Error Rate (FER) tests passing”.

Low-power IoT WAN links stretched to 100 km

Ericsson and Australian carrier Telstra reckon the 40 km reach of the Internet of Things standards taken from the 3GPP isn't enough. This week, they showed off a Low Power WAN (LPWAN) Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) connection over a near-100 km stretch.

The connection demonstrated a Captis temperature sensor from Australian vendor mIoT talking to a Telstra base station 94 km away at the remote Mount Cenn Cruaich (for Australians, it's north of Gilgandra, about 500km by road from the Sydney CBD). ®