Cloud Network: Ethernet in action

With the rise of the cloud services market, more and more enterprise users are moving from the traditional IT environment to the mixed environment that contains the cloud. However, a large number of cloud service providers also bring new problems to the connectivity of cloud networks. How to build an open cloud environment has become a major issue at the Netevents Asia-Pacific summit recently. Why do we need an open cloud environment the use of cloud services in the Asia-Pacific region is accelerating, according to a survey by IDC. "In 2013, only 39% of Asia-Pacific institutions did not use cloud services, and by 2014 the ratio would fall to 2%," Adam Dodds, an IT service research manager from IDC, gave the attendees his latest findings. As enterprise users migrate to the cloud, enterprise data center workloads are growing fast and moving from traditional data centers to the cloud. "In 2012, 61% of the workload was in the traditional data center, and by 2017, that proportion would drop to 37%," said James Walker, president of Cloud Ethernet Forum (CEF), which said: "2014 will be a turning year for clouds over traditional data centers." "As more and more data migrate into the cloud, connectivity is becoming important again." Early cloud users are content with the best connectivity through public Internet connectivity, and when critical workloads are transferred to the cloud, users are most concerned about security and quality of service issues, and the strong need for performance management and monitoring and security policy implementation. On these issues, the industry is facing a very small challenge. There are now more than 400 cloud service providers in the United States, and there is a lack of consistency in service interfaces, APIs, and automated deployments. At present Tata Communications, Verizon and BT and other operators are addressing the problem of connectivity with multiple cloud service providers. Because more and more customers are now proposing that they can connect their data centers and cloud service providers directly through a single connection, as if they were part of their data center environment. "This is hard to implement at the IP layer, but it's much easier on Ethernet." "The Cloud Ethernet forum wants to do some standardization work in this area," says James Walker. "There is not yet a cloud solution to meet all of the requirements of the user, as a business user needs to use a number of providers of cloud services." Adam Dodds's findings also show that 60% of Asia-Pacific institutions use 2 or more than 2 cloud services. Users then need to consolidate these services. There is now a question of cio[: Why is the overall cost not falling after the use of cloud services? Where does the extra cost come from? The answer is the increasing cost of consolidation. James Walker explains: "Migrate from the existing environment to the virtualized environment, and continue to maintain communication with the legacy systems, support internal individual users, and implement security policies to ensure overall security." This is a big investment, especially when you're writing dozens of different softwareinterface. "And CEF is building a set of standards that will enable the cloud, the network, the data center and the enterprise environment to achieve unicom, can help users quickly integrate new services into their environment." By creating an open cloud environment, you can help implement the dynamic End-to-end automated deployment that users need. CEF accelerated standard-setting process CEF only a year since its inception, but standard development work has been fully launched. The first white paper was released 5 months after CEF was founded, and 6 solution use cases are being written. The first use case is to migrate a virtual machine from one data center to another. "You might say it's not difficult. But if two data centers are owned by different companies, and the network used by the third company is the same, the problem will become difficult, and three companies need to work together to do the seemingly simple job. James Walker said. The challenge now facing CEF is how to quickly set standards to meet the needs of the cloud industry. Now that some of the standard is usually two or three years, James Walker wants to be able to propose a series of standards in 6-8 months, so he decided to adopt an iterative approach. CEF recently announced an open cloud project, built labs in Silicon Valley, set up a real-world environment with a reference framework, segmented development standards and tested them. This experimental environment can not only verify whether the theory is really feasible in the actual environment, but also allow CEF members to test their equipment and services. According to James Walker, CEF has grown in size over the past year, and 7 companies have said they want to join the CEF since the announcement of the open cloud. CEF also announced an open day event on July 28 at a Silicon Valley data center to showcase an open cloud program for executives from the data center and cloud computing sector.