From India to Intercloud
Following my presentation at the Futurenet Conference in Boston on May 6, 2009 entitled, “Disruption: Emerging Technologies and Business Models,” I flew to India to meet with customers and colleagues in New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. The atmosphere was rather electric as the country was in the midst of its national election. With Cisco Globalisation East, we are now embarking on developing architectures and solutions for what can be broadly termed as “Connected Societies,” under which comes “Intelligent Urbanisation.”
Wow clearly, what we see developing is not my grandfather’s Service Provider model, not all!
The only metric that matters now more than ever is the customer experience!
From India, I had an opportunity to present a paper I co-authored with a few Cisco colleagues entitled, “Blueprint for the Intercloud: Protocols and Formats for Cloud Computing Interoperability.”
What my co-authors and I have concluded is the following:
More and more Service Providers are constructing these new planet-scale virtualized data centers that are popularly called Cloud Computing. As software and expertise becomes available, enterprises and smaller Service Providers will build Cloud Computing implementations.
Active work needs to occur to create interoperability amongst varied implementations of these Clouds.
From the lower level, challenges around network addressing, to multicast enablement, to virtual machine mechanics; to the higher level interoperability desires of services; this is an area deserving of much progress and will require the cooperation of several large industry players.
We believe further that identifying a profile of protocols and formats is of part of the interoperability puzzle.
An illustration of the Intercloud vision, based on open standards is summarized as:
You will recall my earlier posting on cloud computing, as well as reading this post on Intercloud from my colleague James Urquhart who describes an evolutionary path towards Intercloud or a single public open cloud internetwork.
And so, the work continues!
Posted by Monique Morrow at 09:34AM PST
Maria Tseng Jun 5, 2009
This diagram of how the clouds interconnect is much more informative than the galaxy picture you showed in your Feb. article. (BTW, spiral galaxies like the Milky Way might be less ‘cloud-like’ than say, nebula type formations). Too bad Digital Equipment is no longer with us because Intercloud constructs seem to be the next incarnation of time-sharing and distributed computing.