Title: Networking the Cloud: Enabling Enterprise Computing and Storage

Abstract:
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.