Today IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization advancing technology for humanity, introduced the founding members of the IEEE Intercloud Testbed project. The IEEE Intercloud Testbed is developing cloud-to-cloud interoperability and federation capabilities to enable cloud services to become as ubiquitous and as mainstream as the internet.
Results from the project will also assist in the development of the forthcoming IEEE P2302 Standard for Intercloud Interoperability and Federation, which is developing standard methodologies for cloud-to-cloud interworking.
The IEEE Intercloud Testbed’s founding members include 21cloud and network service providers, cloud-enabling companies, and academic and industry research institutions from the United States, the Asia-Pacific region and Europe. The members have volunteered to provide their own cloud implementations and expertise to a shared testbed environment. They will also collaborate to produce a working prototype and open-source global Intercloud. C-DAC from India is among the 21 collaborating organizations in the project.
“We are immensely pleased to introduce our founding members and thank them for their lab and engineering contributions, which are the backbone of this effort,” said Steve Diamond, chair of the IEEE Cloud Computing Initiative. “The IEEE Cloud Computing Initiative is advancing an ecosystem in which clouds and cloud services can federate to enable new services and increase the value of cloud computing to industry and end users. By joining the IEEE Intercloud Testbed, these member organizations are providing the invaluable resources and capabilities needed to realize this vision. We appreciate their participation and collaboration in this fundamental and important work.”
Other founding members are – CITIC Telecom International CPC, Cloud scaling, ComputeNext. DOCOMO Innovations, Inc., Fraunhofer FOKUS, Global Inter-Cloud Technology Forum (GICTF), The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, JT, Juniper Networks, Orange, Second University of Naples (SUN), ServiceMesh, 6fusion, Telx Group, University of Essex, The University of Melbourne, University of Stavanger, University of Ulster and Virtustream.
The members have formed an executive committee to manage the IEEE Intercloud Testbed organization and technical and engineering work have begun. Activities underway include the initial design and implementation of Intercloud protocols as well as provisioning of the testbed topology.
According to Dr. Prahlada Rao, Joint Director, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC),“Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) India is proud to be a founding member of the IEEE Intercloud Testbed interoperability initiative. This collaboration will help to bring in new innovations on standards for interoperability and Inter cloud platforms to improve cloud adoption across the globe.”
“The cloud is rapidly evolving and maturing to support a wide variety of enterprise and consumer applications and real-world applications. It inevitably will require a variety of ecosystem players: cloud service providers, network service providers, brokers, markets, exchanges, hybrid and autoscaling management, and other intermediaries,” said Joe Weinman, Senior Vice President, Cloud Services and Strategy, Telx Group and Chairman, IEEE Intercloud Testbed Executive Committee. “The Intercloud represents the next logical wave in computing, enabling complex hybrid applications, cost and performance optimization, enhanced reliability, customer flexibility and lock-in avoidance. It is an honor to be part of such an important initiative and work with such a distinguished group of members.”
David Bernstein, IEEE P2302 Working Group Founding Chair, Originator of the IEEE Intercloud Testbed Project and the Project’s Chief Architect, said, “This project will enable a significant step in the evolution and maturation of cloud computing. Just as the ARPANET project made the Internet real, this IEEE Intercloud Testbed project will make the Intercloud real and provide a springboard for the Intercloud to become a commercial reality.”
The technical architecture for cloud interoperability used by IEEE P2302 and the Intercloud is a next-generation Network-to-Network Interface (NNI) “federation” architecture that is analogous to the federation approach used to create the international direct-distance dialing telephone system and the Internet.
The federated architecture will make it possible for Intercloud-enabled clouds operated by disparate service providers or enterprises to seamlessly interconnect and interoperate via peering, roaming, and exchange (broker) techniques. Existing cloud interoperability solutions that employ a simpler, first-generation User-to-Network Interface (UNI) “Multicloud” approach do not have federation capabilities and as a result the underlying clouds still function as walled gardens.
IEEE offers an open and neutral environment for Intercloud research and development. The IEEE Intercloud Testbed was created by the IEEE Cloud Computing Initiative and is operated as an activity of the IEEE Standards Association Industry Connections program. The IEEE Intercloud Testbed project is a companion to—and runs in parallel with—the IEEE P2302 working group. As such, the IEEE Intercloud Testbed’s efforts will also be used to help inform, refine and validate the development of the IEEE P2302 draft standard.
Member company representatives elected to the IEEE Intercloud Testbed executive committee include Joe Weinman (chair), Telx Group; Henry Chan (vice chair), The Hong Kong Polytechnic University; and Professor Kun Yang (secretary), University of Essex. They join three members appointed from the IEEE Cloud Computing Initiative: Mark Davis, Dell Corporation; Michael Lightner, University of Colorado, Boulder; and Jon Rokne, University of Calgary. Steve Diamond, chair of the IEEE Cloud Computing Initiative, serves as anex officio member of the committee.
