ITW Thursday Roundup: Windstream, Unitas Global, Ciena, Sparkle

Ok, last ITW roundup (maybe), hopefully finally catching up as everyone makes their way back home.  Next year hopefully I’ll manage to make the trip in person.

Windstream Enterprise added to its SD-WAN portfolio this week. They have added a Fortinet-powered option that provide a complementary no-frills option that they hope will catch the fancy of new swaths of the enterprise market. They had already been using Fortinet’s firewall of course. The shift to SD-WAN is ongoing across all types of enterprises, but isn’t necessarily one-size-fits-all.

Unitas Global has added two new data centers to its cloud access platform over in Europe. They have hooked up to Iron Mountain’s facilities in London and Amsterdam, where they will be able offer enterprises the building blocks and managed services for a hybrid cloud solution.

Ciena has picked up a new subsea, or perhaps more accurately sub-lake, customer for its optical gear. CrossLake Fibre has picked the WaveLogic 6500 packet-optical platform to power its NYC/Toronto network, which includes a unique 131km span across Lake Ontario. That will give it 250Gbps wavelength capability, with expansion to 500Gbps in the future. Ciena’s Blue Planet software and Liquid Spectrum analytics platform will also be in the mix.

And over in Europe, Sparkle is working on a new optical backbone that will hook up Sicily with the rest of Europe. The new Nibble backbone will complement the existing BlueMed submarine cable and network infrastructure in the Balkans to create a system of pan-Mediterranean infrastructure. The first link will hook up Sparkle’s Palermo facility with the Milan Caldera data center, with additional phases coming online over the next year and a half.

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Categories: Cloud Computing · SDN · Telecom Equipment · Undersea cables