Testbed will help clouds and networks shake hands

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Stephen Lawson.

A network testbed being constructed just south of San Francisco will help carriers and vendors develop standards for better cloud services, the CloudEthernet Forum says. The group’s OpenCloud Project, announced on Monday, will combine commonly used networking and computing equipment with live traffic from service providers’ commercial networks. It’s the first place researchers will be able to test new technologies designed to make cloud services more reliable and easier to set up and manage.

As enterprises put cloud-based services to work in conjunction with their own assets, it’s become hard to set up fast, reliable connections among all the components being used, according to CloudEthernet Forum President James Walker. Cloud providers may try to deliver a certain level of performance, but they don’t own the networks that link them to their customers, said Walker, who is also an executive at carrier Tata Communications…

This can leave enterprises in the lurch, he said, giving the example of a company that pays to have a VM run on a public cloud service like Amazon Web Services…

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