Alcatel-Lucent adds networking to enhance the cloud
Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 3:41PM Alcatel-Lucent has developed an architecture that addresses the networking aspects of cloud computing. Dubbed CloudBand, the system will enable operators to deliver network-enhanced cloud services to enterprise customers. Operators can also use CloudBand to deliver their own telecom services.
“As far as we know there is no other system that bridges the gap between the network and the cloud"
Dor Skuler, Alcatel-Lucent
Alcatel-Lucent estimates that moving an operator's services to the cloud will reduce networking costs by 10% while speeding up new service introductions.
“As far as we know there is no other system that bridges the gap between the network and the cloud," says Dor Skuler, vice president of cloud solutions at Alcatel-Lucent.
In an Alcatel-Lucent survey of 3,500 IT decision makers, the biggest issue stopping their adoption of cloud computing was performance. Their issues of concern include service level agreements, customer experience, and ensuring low latency and guaranteed bandwidth.
Using CloudBand, a customer uses a portal to set such cloud parameters as the virtual machine to be used, the hypervisor and the operating system. Users can also set networking parameters such as latency, jitter, guaranteed bandwidth and whether a layer two or layer three VPN is used, for example. The user can even define where data is stored if regulation dictates that the data must reside within the country of origin.
Architecture
CloudBand uses an optimisation algorithm developed at Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs. The algorithm takes the requested cloud and networking settings and, knowing the underlying topology, works out the best configuration.
“This is a complex equation to optimise,” says Skuler. “All these resources - all different and in different locations - need to be optimised; the network needs to be optimised, I also have the requirements of the applications and I want to optimise it on price.” Moreover, these parameters change over time.
"We recommend service providers have tiny clouds that look like one logical cloud yet have different attributes"
According to Alcatel-Lucent, operators have an advantage over traditional cloud service providers in owning and being able to optimise their networks for cloud. Operators also have lots of locations - central offices and exchanges - distributed across the network where they can site cloud nodes.
Having such distributed IT resources benefits the end user by having more localised resources even though it makes the optimisation task of the CloudBand algorithm more complicated. “We recommend service providers have tiny clouds that look like one logical cloud yet have different attributes,” says Skuler.
At the heart of the architecture is the management and orchestration system (See diagram). The system takes the output of the optimisation algorithm, and provisions the cloud resources - moving the virtual machine to a particular site, turning it on, assuring its performance, checking the service level agreement and creating the required billing record.
Once assigned a service is fixed, but in future CloudBand will adapt existing services as new services are set up to ensure continual cloud optimisation.
Benefits
"Not every [telecom] service can be virtualised but overall we believe we can shave 10% out of the cost of the network,” says Skuler.
Alcatel-Lucent has already implemented its application store software, content management applications and digital media for use in the cloud. Skuler says video, IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and the applications that run on the IMS architecture can also be moved to the cloud, while Alcatel-Lucent's lightRadio wireless architecture, announced earlier this year, can pool and virtualise cellular base station resources.
But Skuler says that the real benefit for operators moving services to the cloud is agility: operators will be able to introduce new cloud-based services in days rather than months. This will reduce time-to-revenue and costs while allowing operators to experiment with new services.
CloudBand will be ready for trialling in operators’ labs come January. The system will be available commercially in the first half of 2012.
Reader Comments (2)
Great article. However I would also be interested how service providers can increase revenue using cloud services. Apart from cost reduction is there any more information about service monetization?
Manu, below is Alcatel-Lucent's Dor Skuler's response to your query.
Apart from the substantial cost efficiency benefits gained, the carrier cloud allows service providers to dramatically accelerate the introduction of new cloud services developed both in-house or by leveraging the white label cloud services of third parties.
Offering consumers social media, games, etc. from the cloud helps to drive consumption of the network to generate revenue. But perhaps the biggest cloud market opportunity is with enterprises.
An Alcatel-Lucent research study of over 3,500 global IT decision makers completed in September -- one of the most in-depth industry surveys to date -- reveals enterprises will pay for premium cloud enhancements, such a low latency and bandwidth.
Among the findings:
- Carrier-grade public cloud services have 10x the revenue potential of basic cloud services
- Carrier-grade services are 4x more attractive to enterprises than existing cloud services
Service providers have a considerable footprint advantage with enterprises. They have already become important partners to enterprises as a trusted source of business communication services routinely backed up by guaranteed service level agreements (SLAs).
New revenue can be generated by offering enterprise-grade cloud services that dynamically orchestrate threat management, delivery of latency sensitive applications, improved bandwidth control and guaranteed Quality of Service.