MEF Seeks Carrier Ethernet Refinements to Support Cloud Services

CEN Feature (Sep 6 2011) Cloud

1. 

   We often hear that Carrier Ethernet services are well suited for supporting cloud services. To get some insight on that, CEN checked in recently with Margaret Chiosi, executive director of Ethernet and Optics at AT&T Labs, as well as the leader of the Metro Ethernet Forum group on Carrier Ethernet in the Cloud provider market.

   “Carrier grade Ethernet services for access can provide the quality of service, security, reliability, scale and availability businesses need to access cloud applications,” said Chiosi. “In addition, separate virtual local area networks (VLANs) can be used to segment the access for connectivity to different services, providing a lot of flexibility to the enterprise customer.”

   Carrier Ethernet standards also support multiple classes of service (COS), enabling service providers to offer service level agreements (SLAs) that vary from best-effort to real-time — and that, Chiosi said, “means customers can choose the class of service appropriate to support the cloud service applications they are using. “

   Public and private clouds

   Chiosi noted that there are several different models of cloud service delivery — including private cloud, where an organization operates its own data center; public cloud, where an organization uses applications in a data center operated by a service provider; and hybrid cloud, which enables an application to be delivered from either a public or private cloud platform.

   Hybrid clouds, she said, often require back-end connectivity between physically separate hosting centers. “Carrier grade Ethernet services can provide the ability to extend server segments (i.e. LANs) across multiple data centers in a reliable and scalable manner,” said Chiosi. “Back-end connectivity between servers or storage can be achieved efficiently by making remote locations appear as if they are on a common VLAN.”

   Some hybrid cloud use cases may run an application simultaneously in multiple cloud locations and globally load-balance user traffic between them, Chiosi noted. High-performance back-end connectivity between these locations may be needed to keep databases synchronized and carrier Ethernet could be well suited to that task, Chiosi said.

   Some cloud service providers boast about being carrier-agnostic, while those that provide both communications services and cloud services say they have an edge because there are advantages to buying both services from the same provider. When asked which position was the correct one, Chiosi said both could be true, depending on the use case.

   For private clouds, she said, buying the network and cloud services from the same provider can be advantageous. She noted, for example, that a virtual private cloud can be an extension of the customer’s MPLS VPN, “and take advantage of features such as end-to-end COS, monitoring and reporting, inherent any-to-any connectivity and the associated security model that MPLS provides.”  

   But if the target audience for the cloud service is Internet eyeballs, as it is sometimes is for public cloud services, you clearly need to reach the entire Internet, said Chiosi. “The downside is that managing end-to-end performance is difficult, since you own and have access to only one side of the user session.”. She also noted that providers of public cloud services might need private networking to support back-end administrative access.

   The future

   A key enhancement to Carrier Ethernet that would be beneficial to cloud services is dynamic responsive Ethernet, Chiosi said. That capability, currently being defined within the MEF, aims to give Carrier Ethernet the ability to seamlessly grow and move Ethernet bandwidth around, enabling smooth changes that tap the “elasticity” available within the cloud, she explained. “This model encompasses choices of COS and SLAs for latency, jitter, packet delivery and availability” and AT&T is leading this effort, she said.

   In addition, Chiosi said continued work to standardize Ethernet network-to-network interfaces would help enable a transition to cloud services and facilitate growth in network/cloud connections, wherever Ethernet is available.

   The MEF’s Carrier Ethernet in the Cloud Provider market has three goals, noted Chiosi. One is to create a reference framework and terminology for how Ethernet as a Service (EaaS) supports cloud consumer access to the cloud provider. Another is to identify any MEF standard that may need refinements for this market. The third is to review the MEF framework with cloud standards bodies and cloud product vendors to determine whether it fits in with the cloud standards framework, as well as to understand any gaps in the MEF standards.

   “We aim to define Phase 1 for the reference framework by the end of 2011,” Chiosi said.

   Bookmark or Share this article

Login to comment