17 February 2014
CEF president James Walker says networks are seeing a number of major transitions under the pressure of mobility and the move to cloud services.
Cloud computing could become a victim of its own success unless the five key issues of virtualisation, automation, security, programmability and analytics (VASPA) are addressed. That’s according to the recently formed Cloud Ethernet Forum (CEF) which has called for the industry to work together to define global standards.Speaking at the CEF Regional Members’ Meeting held in Singapore last month, forum president James Walker said that VASPA represents the five fundamental principles that will be initially prioritised by the CEF and its working groups.
“Unless the industry – vendors, service providers and OTT providers included – really work together to define global standards and address these challenges, then cloud computing could fall victim to its own success,” he warned.
The CEF is already establishing working groups to address specific concerns. For instance, with virtualisation it says network service providers need to manage both the end-to-end transport of storage and VMs, and network virtualisation tunnels. But what needs to be established is how to make sure that a unified management layer can be rolled out across a network, and is able to meet the deterministic performance needs of cloud traffic. The CEF adds that the role of network function virtualisation in this process will also be considered.
In addition, the forum points out that while VMs can be established in seconds, network automation lags far behind. “Vendor independent protocols and standards are needed to accelerate network automation and delivery and creation of services, particularly across multiple service providers – such as in a hybrid cloud environment,” it says.
The forum also says that for the cloud to remain on its growth path it needs robust structures to ensure end-to-end security. Programming of network equipment (such as routers and switches) should be opened up to third-party APIs.
A continuous exchange of information between the network and the cloud service providers on network and application service performance is also needed.
