Oracle kicks off the year by snapping up some software-defined networking (SDN)-- specifically wide-area network (WAN) SDN technology provider Corente, a company Oracle acquires for an undisclosed sum.

No doubt a strike against the likes of Cisco and IBM, the acquisition provides Oracle with Cloud Services Exchange, a software-defined WAN virtualisation platform covering the deployment of cloud-based applications and services across global private networks.

According to a company statement the platform delivers, secures and manages distributed applications over diverse networks to any site over any IP networks regardless of transport, application or provider.

by Robert Dolin, VP and Chief Technology Officer, Echelon Corp.

The Internet of Things will be an important part of the future in most industries and especially Smart Buildings. Here Robert Dolin, CTO of Echelon Corp., shares a vision on how IoT will come in “different flavours.”

Echelon Corporation develops, markets and supports the world's most proven, open standard, multi-application energy control networking platform. Echelon’s vision from its inception 20 years ago is one of low-cost embedded monitoring and control technology in every electrically controlled device in the world. Today Echelon’s technology platform is embedded in more than 100 million devices, 35 million homes, and 300,000 buildings.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has become an expansive concept, encompassing a broad range of application areas. The IoT is not a single, homogenous entity, however. It can be broken down into the human IoT (HIoT) and the commercial and industrial IoT (IIoT). The IIoT can be further divided into machine-to-machine (M2M) and machines-to-machines (Ms2Ms) segments. Read more...

Network connectivity, monitoring and management solution vendor Emulex joins the InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA), the organisation taking care of the InfiniBand specification. 

The company is a voting member of the steering committee with a charter to define and promote the RDMA standard, the technology behind the RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) standard.

RoCE promises improvements in application performance and costs by improving data centre communication efficiency and resource utilisation. It uses Infiniband transport to provide RDMA platforms running on mainstream data centres over 10/40GbE and beyond.  Read more...

VMWare shows off the results of July 2012 acquisition Nicira at VMworld 2013-- the company launches NSX, a software-defined networking (SDN) platform turning switches, routers, firewalls and load balancers into software. 

The platform combines Nicira assets with VMware's own vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS), and promises to "unleash the power of network virtualisation" by decoupling the networking and security in Layers 2 - 7 from the underlying hardware. The result? More easily programmable, more agile and faster networking infrastructure, at least according to VMware.

The company also says NSX improves over the likes of its own VXLAN, with better scaling and interoperation with non-VMware hypervisors such as Microsoft HyperV and KVM.  Read more...