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Bell Labs: Separation of datacentre and network limits Cloud adoption

Telco providers with their own network infrastructure have a role in to play in remedying certain limitations of Cloud computing

Certain limitations of cloud computing could be remedied by telcos that have their own network infrastructures, according to Bell Labs computer networks researcher, Moritz Steiner.

He was presenting at a public lecture hosted at the University of Technology (UTS), Sydney.

Bell Labs is the research and innovation company owned by communications vendor, Alcatel-Lucent.

At present, only certain applications can run easily on the Cloud, according to Steiner. These applications are generally transactional and have relaxed time constraints in terms of response rates.

“The set of applications that can use cloud today is rather limited,” Steiner said.

Some companies run business applications that cannot afford to experience any kind of latency, which is can caused by a number of factors, including distance between the hosting datacentre and customer.

While cloud providers such as Amazon.com are becoming increasingly prevalent, they cannot really provide a service level agreement (SLA) that can guarantee performance, Steiner said.

One of the reasons is because Cloud providers are not usually the network providers, which are essentially telcos.

“That is why a lot of enterprises don’t use cloud today, because they don’t get guarantee they can do business,” Steiner said. “So the network providers owning all the network infrastructure; if they also run computer resources they can offer a combined package and give guarantees about the complete offering including network connectivity and the datacentres.”

Telstra and Optus have been pushing towards offering cloud applications. In June, Telstra committed $800 million over the next five years to its Cloud computing business.

Optus is also investing more into its cloud services.

“You see, the network is very much at the heart of what the Cloud is because you have computer resources, datacentres and customers using this service on some kind of [network] infrastructure,” Steiner said. “So separating artificially the Cloud, datacentre and network is what is limiting us today.”

Bell Labs is currently working on solutions to make Cloud computing a good choice for enterprises.

Nominations for the 2012 ARN IT Industry Awards open on Tuesday, June 12.

More about: Alcatel-Lucent, Amazon, Amazon.com, Bell Labs, etwork, Lucent, Optus, Technology, Telstra, UTS
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