Transforming Network Infrastructure Week in Review: Docker, Fiber Mountain, Huawei

Docker, Fiber Mountain, and Huawei are some of the most important movers and shakers in network transformation today. And they’ve had some significant news in recent days.

Linux container company Docker this week announced it has raised $95 million in a Series D round.

Insight Venture Partners led the round; Coatue, Goldman Sachs and Northern Trust were new investors this time around. Existing Docker investors include Benchmark, Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Trinity Ventures, and Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures.

Linux containers promise better performance, portability, and speed than virtual machines, Scott Johnston, senior vice president of product at Docker, told transformingnetworkinfrastructure and INTERNET TELEPHONY in a recent interview. Docker, he added, is the first company to make Linux containers widely available and usable. Because Linux containers are not as large as VMs, he explained, network operators realize a 10:1 performance improvement plus better speed. The down side of Linux containers, however, is that you’re trading API and application complexity for those benefits because more containers equates to more things to manage. Containers are also 100 percent portable, he added, so when a developer writes an application on a container, that app can be moved from a laptop, to a data center, to the cloud – and all that can happen without altering the app in any way. By enabling this portability, Johnston suggested, Linux containers help drive new service creation and innovation.

As for Fiber Mountain, it was one of the 27 finalists in the Best of Interop awards. The company’s Glass Core solution was a top contender in the data center category.

The Fiber Mountain Glass Core architecture eliminates or reduces switches to simplify the network; increases capacity; and significantly reduces latency, power consumption, heat dissipation, space, and maintenance costs.

Speaking of data centers, Huawei has announced its Data Center 3.0 architecture, which leverages resource pooling, software-defined networking, and all-optical interconnection to significantly improve the real-time data processing ability of data centers.

Huawei was the fastest-growing provider in the global data center switch market in 2014, with a growth rate of 137 percent, according to IDC. As discussed in the May cover story of INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine, this is just one product category in which Huawei is a leader, and now the company is moving into U.S. carrier networks with a focus on the rural service providers.