Networking the Cloud: Enabling Enterprise Computing and Storage
K. K. Ramakrishnan
AT&T Labs Research, Florham Park, NJ
Cloud computing has been changing how enterprises run and manage their IT systems. Cloud computing platforms provide customers with flexible, on demand resources at low cost. It also offers the opportunity to lower costs for enterprises in deploying disaster recovery solutions. However, while existing offerings are useful for providing basic computation and storage resources, they have not provided the transparency, security and network controls that many enterprise customers would like. This lecture will start with a brief introduction on Cloud Computing.
We propose a Virtual Cloud Pool abstraction to logically unify cloud and enterprise data center resources, and present the vision behind CloudNet, a cloud platform architecture which utilizes Virtual Private Networks to securely and seamlessly link cloud and enterprise sites. CloudNet opens new opportunities for cross data center load balancing and dynamic application placement based on metrics like latency to users or energy cost.
Cloud hosting promises economies of scale and on-demand provisioning that are a perfect fit for the infrequent yet urgent needs of disaster recovery. We build on CloudNet to solve the difficult problem of disaster recovery to Cloud sites that are geographically separated from the enterprise’s primary site. The WAN latency between a cloud site and an enterprise can become a major performance bottleneck when synchronously replicating an application’s data into the cloud. I will describe our proposal called ‘Pipelined synchrony’ to address this problem.
Speaker Bio
Dr. K. K. Ramakrishnan is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Labs-Research. He joined AT&T Bell Labs in 1994 and has been with AT&T Labs-Research since its inception in 1996. Prior to 1994, he was a Technical Director and Consulting Engineer in Networking at Digital Equipment Corporation. Between 2000 and 2002, he was at TeraOptic Networks, Inc., as Founder and Vice President.
Dr. Ramakrishnan is an AT&T Fellow, recognized for his fundamental contributions on communication networks and lasting impact on AT&T and the industry, including his work on congestion control, traffic management and VPN services. He is an IEEE Fellow, and has received other awards. His work on the “DECbit” congestion avoidance protocol was recognized in the 1995 retrospective issue of ACM Sigcomm Computer Communication Review as one of the 16 most important papers published over the previous 25 years in ACM Sigcomm publications. The work once again received the ACM Sigcomm Test of Time Paper Award in 2006. He has published nearly 200 papers and has more than 108 patents issued in his name. K.K. has been on the editorial board of several journals and has served as the TPC Chair and General Chair for several networking conferences and has been a member of the National Research Council Panel on Information Technology for NIST.
K. K. received his MS from the Indian Institute of Science (1978), MS (1981) and Ph.D. (1983) in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park, USA. His web page can be found at: (https://www.research.att.com/people/Ramakrishnan_Kadangode_K/ )
The event is hosted at Mini Auditorium, SNDT Women’s University, Sir Vithaldas Vihar, Santacruz(W), Mumbai 400 039.