Open Cloud Service Hubs

Gravatar for Migiel de Vos
TrackTrack 1 -- Lecture Hall X on the First Floor
SessionCloud
DescriptionHigher education and research institutions are now in the process of migrating their services into the ‘cloud’. For some of the cloud cases the regular Internet connection is sufficient, e.g. for remote collaboration or personal storage for students. In other cases, like backup-on-demand services, virtual machines in the cloud or Unified Communications an institute needs a connection with the characteristics of a lightpath to ensure service levels or logical separation from the Internet. Many R&E networks do not allow commercial vendors to connect to their networks or have such complicated policies due to which they become less interesting for CSPs. Therefore we present a new model on how CSPs can be connected to the R&E community.

 

More than ten years ago the first Open Lightpath Exchange (OLE) was initiated having the goal to facilitate international lightpath connectivity for the R&E community. The OLE allows any party to connect and does not have limitations on the possible cross connects, e.g. no policy on interconnecting within the exchange is in place, except for the fact that it is fully open. Cross-connects inside the OLE are made on layer 2 or below and bring a fully transparent service to its requesters. Nowadays a major part of the world can be reached with lightpaths via OLEs and their connectors.

 

OLEs used to facilitate research traffic only, but their openness allows for connecting commercial entities as well. The need of the R&E community to use cloud services with lightpath characteristics assigns a new role to the OLEs: a marketplace via which service provides can offer their services to other members of the exchange, e.g. the NREN, its institutions and their users.

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