Telecom Cloud Computing SCOPE Alliance Perspective

András VajdaWhitepaper Editor, Ericsson

OpenSAF Conference, May 17th, 2011

About Scope Alliance

Industry alliance committed to accelerating the deployment of carrier grade base platforms for service providers

Founded in 2006 by leading network equipment manufacturers

Close co-operation with PICMG, SAF, Linux Foundation

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www.scope-alliance.org

Cloud Computing – a telecom perspective

Based on a successful Scope Alliance workshop in May 2010

Whitepaper focus is on issues relevant for the telecom industry and Scope Alliance’s goals

Define and publicize the differentiating factors

Telecom perspective for standardization efforts

Define a common work agenda for the Scope Alliance

Available at

http://scope-alliance.org/sites/default/files/documents/CloudComputing_Scope_1.0.pdf

Editorial team

Ericsson (coordinator)

Alcatel-Lucent

Huawei

NEC

Nokia Siemens Networks

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Outline

Cloud computing and the telecom industry

Telecom grade cloud computing infrastructure

Differentiating factors for telecom grade cloud infrastructure

Principles for telecom grade cloud infrastructure

Foundation for standardization efforts– Scope Alliance agenda

The way forward4

Cloud Computing and Network Equipment Providers

Meet customer requirements

Business Agility

Efficiency of Service delivery

Efficiency of IT INFRASTRUCTURE

Telecom vendors

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Cloud Computing and Operators

CAPEX/OPEX reduction

new business opportunity

Flexibility

Improved Power efficiency

Operator

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Telecom Grade Cloud Infrastructure

telecom grade, real- time applications etc

… but also guiding principle on where NEPs and operators can differentiate themselves

CLOUD Infrastructure Suitable for the deployment of Applications with stringent

Availability, Reliability, QoS, Security

requirements

Computing Resource Pool

Storage Resource Pool

Network Resource Pool

Content Store

(Content Aggregation)

Content Store(Content Aggregation) App Store

（App Aggregation）

App Store（App Aggregation）

Application Providers & Consumers 

Capabilities/SLA Capabilities 

Components

Open 

Capabilities

Service 

Introduction

ComputingConnectivity Storage

Telecom Cloud

API

Enterprise Clouds (Private)

Secure Connectivity

Secure Connectivity

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Four Differentiating Factors

Concentration is unrealistic for clouds in telecom networks

transport represents bulk of the cost

traffic is set to increase in telecom networks

Telecom services have availability, real- time, QoS Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to fulfill

Customer data handling (often subject to legal requirements), strict identity and trust management, traceability requirements

Interoperability is a key ingredient of operator offerings

Locality

must be embraced by telecom clouds

SLA Management

is key in telecom clouds

DaTA Security, trust, iDENTITY, TRACEABILITY

in telecom clouds

Support for

Inter-Cloud

Operations of telecom clouds

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Six Principles of Telecom Clouds1. Data-centric computing - place data where it is used

2. Data-centric computing - place computation where the data is

3. Networking, computing and storage managed as one integrated resource – including the last mile

4. Make the SLA definition and enforcement framework the center-piece of telecom cloud infrastructure

5. Enforce security: tamper-resistant computing environment, data security mechanisms, tamper-resistant networking

6. Seamless VM and data inter-operability between clouds

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Data Centric Computing

Cost of data transfer is still not optimized

It’s exacerbated by latency and throughput requirements specific to telecom / real-time communication applications

Focus shall be on prioritizing networking versus computation

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“From a cost perspective, everything is pretty much freecompared to the price of moving bytes

around”

SLA Management (1)

Architecture of data-centers shall not be exposed…

… but applications must have standard mechanisms at hand to express their SLA constraints measure the fulfillment of these

Standardize on a specification level, differentiate on realization Improve portability across cloudsSupport applications with strict requirements

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SLA Management (2)

Standard SLA specification language Physical and logical affinity attributes Compute and storage relationships that define the dependencies

between applications (compute) and data Performance metrics

requirements in terms of network or storage bandwidth resources

Quality-of-service metrics

requirements in terms of end-to-end latency, jitter both for network and storage connectivity

Availability metrics

requirements in terms of availability of connectivity between compute resources and end-users or within individual data centers

High availability installations

will automatically protect applications with redundant compute and storage resources

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SLA Management (3)

Standard SLA fulfillment monitoring metrics End-to-end bandwidth allocation Latency and jitter encountered by a particular application

spanning both compute and network resources Computational load as seen by hypervisors Storage load as seen by storage devices and/or dedicated storage

networks Faults in compute, storage or network infrastructure components

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Networking

Virtualization exacerbates the scale of networkingNumber of virtual switches, MACs etc

There’s a need to rethink networking in the context of large scale, virtualized, distributed data centers

Promising approach: Open Networking Foundation OpenFlow based programmable switches Separation of simple packet switching mechanisms and

control functions Opportunity for a new way of coupling cloud computing and

the network fabric

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Inter-cloud

Learn from successful examples: re-use the experience from Internet for inter-operability of clouds

Need to establish a common set of Inter-Cloud Protocols for VM and storage interoperability and migration

We believe OVF is a good foundation to build on for enhanced inter-operability

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Security (1)

There’s no shortage of security related standards

… but we lack bundling and profiling of these for the cloud computing contextSecure data managementData lifecycleEnforcement and tracking of data placementData partitioning within the cloud and outside of itCompliance with legal requirements, specific to the telecom sector Integration of security SLAs with the rest of the SLA framework

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Security (2)

Need for overall security schema that defines security needs and requirements at different layers Network, hardware, hypervisor, VMs, OS, middleware

Standards for secure management of cloud infrastructures

Standards for auditing of cloud operations E.g. based on ISO 27001

Security attestation framework – similar to other security critical industries

Telecom Companies have the right track record for achieving this

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Conclusions

Cloud computing has Unresolved issues related to Networking, security, interoperability, soft real-time

Characteristics

Support for SLA Management, integrated cloud networking, Securityand cloud interoperability are key from telecom perspective

There’s a need to address these issues through standards that can gain Wide acceptance

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András

Vajda

Andras.vajda@ericsson.com

Blog: www.a-vajda.eu/blog

Thank YOU!

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