Telecom Italia GRID activities for 6th FP Program Maurizio Cecchi 3/4 October 2002

2 Descrizione Open issues What evolution of the Grid paradigm is required to enable its application to commercial services for storage, disaster recovery and distributed, community- and enterprise- wide data architectures? –security issues –capillarity of infrastructure What is the best “path to market” for Grid-enabled services? –service target identification –business case demonstration How can not-for-profit applications (e.g., scientific research) and commercial services co-exist? –service levels How can the emerging architectures of intelligent optical networks (GMPLS/ASON) be applied to further enhance the capabilities of Grids? –flexible bandwidth for variable traffic patterns –signalling between network control plane and cluster operating systems

3 Descrizione Information is rapidly becoming the most critical asset for modern enterprises, whose organisation model is changing: Base technology innovation –Faster, smaller, denser memory and computing chips –Ever-higher transport capacity Telecom Operator’s Networks and Data Centres based on large computational resources Critical digital assets of modern enterprises Systems centric PC centric Network centric Information centric huge amounts of digital data to process, storage and protect

4 Descrizione Scenario Web model firmly established Emerging combination of client-server and Peer-to-peer models for online organizations and communities Need to match data production and consumption requirements with adequate distributed networking structures (fast, scalable, secure, QoS-enabled, content-aware) Emerging model of a Computing Grid that: aims to orchestrate geographically distributed resources for data processing and storage allows dynamic allocation of resources to computational and storage tasks is intrinsically resilient to faults and self-healing Communication model innovation

5 Descrizione The exploitation of GRID technologies for telecomunication services While up to now it has been thought mainly for scientific applications, the model could be effectively exploited by telecom operators and service providers in order to develop advanced services for the end market : Knowledge management and distributed search engines Highly efficient storage and business continuity services for enterprises Advanced inter-networking solutions

6 Descrizione How Telecom operators could collaborate in the EU R&D Programs For GRID “Infrastructure” IPs Contribution to EGEE initiative by mean of a specific activity focused on: –Promotion of GRID in the ICT world, and specifically in the tlc arena –Test of Optical components (with Pirelli Lab) on GRID/GEANT network –Providing R&D skills for specific telecommunication tasks of GRID (next slide) For Research on GRID Launch of specific indipendent projects: –On “Semantic GRID”, starting from the successfull GRACE initiative in the 5th EU R&D Program In both cases, collaboration with Telecom Italia Lab’s initiative in OpticalNetworking: –Telecom Italia Lab is the Coordinator of a large 6th FP initiative, named ICAHN, with the participation of the most important actors (Siemens, Cisco, Alcatel, etc.) on Optical Networking  Objective - IP on optical networks

7 Descrizione (the most important for Telecom Italia Group)Integrated Optical IP control (the most important for Telecom Italia Group) Always-on naming and addressing Innovative routing –Smooth IPv4-to-IPv6 transition –Content-aware routing policies Generalized, interoperable inter-domain QoS Service access through next-generation Authentication (AAA) –Content awareness –Multi-level, dynamic VPNs for instant communities Content-aware networking: –Distribution, Routing, Discovery, quality –Inter-community and inter-domain Content Peering Disaster Recovery (the closest application to the tlc market) A target for Grid research

8 Descrizione The evolution of storage and business continuity services (1/2) local network storage servers mirrored data stand-by servers local network enterprise primary siteenterprise backup site dedicated network services Today dedicate network and IT resources affordable only by large enterprises limited reliability and efficiency Emerging on-demand storage and continuity services shared wideband optical network (WDM, IP/GbE,...) IT resources managed by service provider and shared among customers, but still concentrated optical MAN/WAN storage resources stand-by servers (1:N) storage network storage service provider enterprises

9 Descrizione The evolution of storage and business continuity services (2/2) Tomorrow the Grid as an alternative to private and concentrated IT resources –enterprises store their information in a secure distributed infrastructure –data copies are generated according to required levels of resilience (SLAs) –processing power is available anytime, with intrinsic disaster resilience –resource usage is charged on a per-use basis distributed computing and storage resources business customers wideband geographic network cluster operating system grid middleware storage on-demand business continuity multi-site data mirroring