Courts approve Nortel, Ericsson deal

Nortel Networks' principal operating subsidiary received approvals from Canadian and US courts on the proposed sale of its CDMA business and LTE Access assets to Ericsson for $1.13 billion, reports MarketWatch.

As a part of the deal, Ericsson will offer employment to about 2 500 Nortel employees.

The sale is expected to close later this year.

IBM is building on its partnerships with networking vendors Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks and Brocade Communications Systems in a push to advance its vision of a more integrated data centre environment, states eWeek.

The partnerships with Cisco, Juniper and Brocade range from OEM relationships to reseller deals.

The announcement is also an indication of how IBM plans to differentiate itself from Cisco and Hewlett-Packard in a converged data centre, with IBM relying more on offering customers flexibility and strong management software.

Cisco has updated its MDS 9000 line of storage networking products designed to improve security and speed up wide-area data traffic, says ZDNet.

The MDS 9000 family is aimed at companies using storage-area networks based on IBM's System z mainframes, but can also be used with third-party SANs, Cisco says.

The updates, to be made available at the end of July, include a data traffic acceleration technology called XRC Acceleration that was co-developed with IBM. XRC Acceleration, designed for use with IBM's z/OS Global Mirror mirroring technology, speeds up data traffic travelling distances up to 20 000km, Cisco said.