Alcatel announces milestone

Alcatel-Lucent has announced optical networking milestones, including a new optical transmission record and three photonic integrated circuits, reports Trading Markets.

The company has successfully transmitted 16.4 terabits per second of optical data over 2 550km.

This transmission was achieved using 164 Wavelength-Division Multiplexed channels modulated at 100Gbit/s.

As more networking jobs are outsourced either to domestic or overseas specialists, following the right career track and developing the right skill sets can mean the difference between a fast-tracked career and a pink slip, says SearchNetworking.

The overall model is to continue outsourcing, said Bobby Cameron, VP at Forrester Research. He says that regardless of industry or the area of the enterprise, if work does not require intimate knowledge of the business, it is a candidate for sending out of house.

In a survey conducted by Forrester last year, only 46% of enterprises said they would not be using offshore IT services within the next year.

High-speed networking is becoming a crucial element of so-called "virtual data centres" springing up as hosted services around the Web, states IT Business Edge.

Belgium's Q-layer has selected the Infiniband-based Grid Backbone switching platform from Voltaire as the unified fabric for its Virtual Private Data Centre, used by hosting companies to provide a self-service provisioning portal and virtual appliance technology to deliver data centre services to customers.

The Infiniband fabric is tied to a VMware ESX layer and the Q-layer virtualisation management stack to allow end-users to provision their own data centre services to suit their unique needs.