 |
|
DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
|
Special Features:
TELECOM FOCUS SESSION AT GGF10 IN
BERLIN
By Uwe Harms
At GGF10 in Berlin we found more than 600 participants during March 10 to
12.
Around the conference and the several working groups, there could be found a
lot of additional events. In the telco session, more than 80 participants
discussed the topic of Grid and service providing. There have been different
approaches concerning the research and scientific networks contrary to the
requests of that community to the commercial telcos, where they should deliver
new software and billing systems.
The meeting of this session started early at 8 p.m. Thus, it was impossible
to
reach Berlin at that time. Therefore, I participated in the second part of
that session.
In the early morning, the Grid Market Awareness Committee discussed the
awareness of the Grid technology in respect to telecommunications. Scientific
Grids are affecting research and scientific networks. These Grids put
unscheduled load on the networks, as the researchers and their Grid
application requires. On the other hand, the scientific networks, like the
German DFN (German Research Network) get money from their users and the
ministry to improve the bandwidth.
In the second part the group discussed "How vendors of network equipment
and
applications that may be provided over networks are preparing for greater Grid
traffic on networks." Here, vendors like Cisco, Juniper, Spanish Network,
Alcatel, Foundry, Nortel and T-Systems presented their different views.
Foundry sees managability for the Grid enablers as an important issue,
especially across multiple geographic and different vendors. Then it is
possible to use a technically "unlimited" Grid, but it needs performance. For
Nortel, the network solutions track a complex ensemble of power laws.
Technology enjoys a one size fits all, but their are different IPs, adapters,
Ethernet, etc. They want to support hybrid packages/Lambda Service as a
defining design principle: packets for many to many, Lambdas for few to few.
As a reference serves OMNInet as a Metrotestbed, which sets Lambda. Therefore,
the Grid bill has more than one item: the bits-finesse, granularity of
control-virtual access to control knots-resource bundling network- standing
all alone that makes a lot of information The result is that for all a Grid
tool chain is necessary plus commercial available products.
Lees de Laat presented the Lambda Grid Software. He expects an available
network at an average of 99.995 percent. On the users side, he sees the
business management layer, the service management and the element management
layer, on the providers side the network element. High topics are to create
the best route, to offer manageable elements and a policy based database.
The Poznan Supercomputer and Networking Center described their requirements
in
the Telco environment. New software may be required to support the Grid
applications, being used over layer 1 For example the new generation network
like dark fibre, optical network requires it. Additionally, new standards are
needed for the quality of services, APIs concerning the Grid and telco
networks, bandwidth/Lambdas on demand and a new business model for telcos -- a
task forces for that.
M. R. Hayley from IBM underpinned the need to support new telco services,
offerings in the Grid environment. Early Grid services succeed, but assumed
plentiful network resources. The telcos might be able to responsively allocate
bandwidth. But they lack easy monitoring and provisioning capability. IBM sees
telcos are shorting attitudes about Grid: science demos to business pilot. IBM
plans Grid Telco Billing Pilot, what new software requires.
The telcos are business value driven, when investing in a Grid
infrastructure.
Here the question of ROI and Tools are to be discussed. There is a need of a
powerful integration of monitoring and provisioning at network layer. All OGSA
and GGF had to be better integrated in standards. Telcos are international
masters of billing for services.
From the discussions there are two contrary view points. The science and
research Grid scene wants the telcos to invest in software and services. But
this community has no money for funding and buying the telcos services. If the
enterprises use Grids and buy the services, this will give an other picture of
Grid and telcos.
|