July 2005 - telco-cg - lists.ogf.org

Excerpt of article to appear in next week's issue of gridtoday- relating to telco grid
by Alan Weissberger 28 Jul '05

28 Jul '05

All Telco CG members, Thought this might be of interest to the telco cg mail list, expecially since nothing besides the GGF14 minutes have been posted there so far. Best.. alan Weissberger The extract below is in the closing comments section of the article: On a different thread, this author continues to be troubled by the lack of attention given to networking grid sites -even within a single organization grid. There was no discussion of this at all at the Grid VIP Summit, no follow-up from last Octobers OIF-GGF grid networking workshop, and no resolution of the rampant confusion at the GGF14 Telco Community Group meeting (see meeting report at <http://news.taborcommunications.com/msgget.jsp?mid=418119&xsl=story.xsl>). While the US government funded TeraGrid project provides 10-30 G bit/sec interconnections between grid sites, nothing close to that is feasible in the commercial or enterprise grid world. Not only would such high speed connections be prohibitively expensive for the enterprise customer, but not even a fraction of that bandwidth is generally available for nationwide connections - at any price! The enterprise grid user must try to match the 1/10 G bit/sec Ethernet connections in his data center and campus network with what is available in the metro and wide area networks. Today, most commercial users interconnect grid sites using private lines- often by leasing DS3/E3 or dark fiber- at much lower rates than their campus LAN backbones. But there are limits to connectivity and scalability with this approach and the burden of managing the network is on the enterprise. What role will the telcos play in grid networking? The driving factor for a telco grid network service offering will be to effectively use the assets it already owns and to realize a reasonable return on investment. What type of network service (point to point, IP packet, Ethernet virtual private line or virtual private LAN, etc), at what speeds, and with what QoS/ SLAs would generate the highest take rate, revenue and ROI for the telco? What price should be charged for such a service? Is there an elasticity of demand in such an offering? Many other questions arise. When grids move from regional to national to global, how will they then be interconnected? Will it be a seamless evolution/ migration or disruptive? When a single organization grid is opened up to collaborators, partner companies, and customers (as John Hurley of Boeing suggested) how will network access be achieved? Where will the enterprise grid networking specifications and best practices recommendations be developed? What type of network topology and connectivity arrangement works best for the majority of industry grids? Will that network technology adequately scale to accommodate more sites, more users, or more servers at any one site? What about disaster recovery? Finally, who will be the primary grid network provider - the user (or community of users), the grid hardware vendor (IBM, HP, SUN), or the network facility vendor (BT)? Unless some answers emerge soon, grids are likely to be confined to a single campus network with 1/10Gig Ethernet links used for interconnection. This limits the size of the grid market, because it excludes interconnection of multiple, geographically dispersed grid sites. We are astonished that the telcos (with the exception of BT) are not more inquisitive and proactive in the emerging grid networking market and wonder if they are not missing out on a significant new source of revenue.

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RE: [telco-cg] minutes
by Inder Monga 12 Jul '05

12 Jul '05

Sorry for the delay. Attached are the cleaned up minutes (almost no names :)) Pramila, I can send you the word file if you want to upload it to the website. Thanks, Inder Telco CG Notes GGF14, June 29th, 2005 Franco kicks off the meeting Area Director Question: mailing list name (telco-cg(a)ggf.org) versus group name (Telecom Community Group). Consensus: Leave things the way they are Pramila presents details: - Agenda : no comments - Distribution list is up telco-cg(a)ggf.org <mailto:telco-cg@ggf.org> - See slides for details (should be on the website later) - Telco roles and network types grid presented o A survey of customer urgency o Both technical and business enablers o Capture use cases and develop roadmap Open Mike/Questions: Q: Clarification on managed grid service A: Managed compute and network resources like utility computing Q: Who participated in the past meeting? A: FT, BT, Deutshe Telecom, Telecom Italia Last GGF, lot of Asian telecom operators in Korea Not too many telcos from US in the last 2 questions: Why is it called CG rather than WG or RG? A: WG produce standards. RG focused on particular technical issues. CG: new category, promote the adoption, use, understanding Chairs: Chicken in egg issue between technical and business people. Technical cannot work where business people say there is money and vice versa business people look to technical people for feasibility Q. Is there any need for anything other than best effort IP for Grid Community? A. What is you basis for making that conclusion? Q. Based on GHPN working group doing research, not seen pull by the Grid Community yet. A. Efforts in NRENs to do both IP and optical. Valuable example. Other example is Enterprises that buy dark fiber and build private networks. They are interested in other experiences than best effort IP. Q. What you are saying is coming from the network research community. Outreach to the grid community needed to make the value-proposition clear. Q: Is that the difference between EGA and GGF. Paul Strong from Sun Micro who said it is all about service level objectives for grid service. It is for the Grid users to decide if that is true or not. A: EGA is saying we need service level objectives now Q. Today's picture we can get away from best effort IP. What about tomorrow? Comment: Focus of EGA is commercial enterprise. Commercial enterprise is not satisfied with best effort. Service level requirements are essential. GGF is looking further out. For grids to be adopted universally, service level requirements need to be there. Europe and UK are looking at opportunities for Grid Service Provisioning and will be valid in the commercial market if you have guarantees. Chairs Answer: June a person from Deutsche Telecom presented an example of entertainment. To create a scene with animated crowds - 10 terabytes of data and 10 million CPU cycles. Schedule is very important (release schedule) - see a huge spike in usage as deadline approaches. With 30TBof data cant hope for INTERNET or best effort IP. Infrastructure that we are trying to understand - is it real or not? Understand from the community. Q: What about interest from ISPs like Internet2, Geant etc? Answer 1: Grid NREN provider: Interest exists. Connection between NRENs and Grids. In Europe, NRENs established provider of grids - very close synergy between researchers and network providers. On other hand, no demand for service level agreements. Mostly research context and not in a commercial context. Answer 2: New research experiments like LOFAR etc. Routers are very expensive and want to route traffic around the routers. Makes sense to give them its own pipes. Huge interest for NRENs to go to dark fibers. One of the research topics at GLIF is to make these pipes dynamic or for a shorter time period than a longer time period/permanent. What grid users want is to execute a workflow in a set amount of time - their goal is to do science. These kind of workflows can translate into requirements to the network into quality expected from the network that cannot be satisfied by best effort network. High energy physics require high bandwidth connections to tier 1 and tier 2 sites. Question: Short holding time for calls like circuit switching. What is it? Answer: Starplane - sub second DWDM switching between computer clusters. Chairs: there is a gap between what NRENs are saying and the telcos. The NRENs do good work and write papers and vendors that are producing equipment for telcos have a different set of requirements. The gap needs to be closed and the CG should have network vendors, network providers, etc. Now we are seeing network participation. Comment: In the grid space a lot of research on collocation of cpus and storage/data. We want to add the network element into that picture..want to collocate lambda cpus and storage. Cost functions to determine where to place storage and CPU with network not being just a constant function. Chairs: the service offerings will depend on the business case. Comment: Demand for network capacities will evolve organically. LHC, NRENs is onesy - twosy cases with decade intervals. Then if you take those away then enabler to grid providers goes away. User of grid internally: it is upto the telco to decide whether to use grid internally or not using standard grid software. Provider of managed grid services with C should be the first area to look at. Chairs: your ideas resonate with the prior discussions. But we want to capture all the cases. Prioritizing will put us in lot of discussion and debate in arbitary context. We need to have this discussion with more data. Reach out to user community and ask about their requirements and pain points. Comment: excellent posture to take at this point. I feel like asking fundamental questions. What is the user for Provider of managed grid services roles? You have so many grids out there. Chairs: it will be from perspective of telco, telco users. Comment: There are people who are providing grid services, are you going to compete with them? Chairs: it is possible that a telco who is in direct competition in role 3 with another provider who is using telco services from a telco in role 1. We capture the role of intermediary but a telco can choose whether or not to play that role. User community can say we do not need a particular role...How do we break the user communities down, how do we reach out to them and get requirements Comment: Make a distinction between a Grid Service Provider and Network Service Provider? A Grid Service BU within a telco will use the network same way as IBM or HP..as a user getting a function. Chairs: there is some confusion here. We perhaps need to have a white paper that very clearly defines what we mean by this. What is meant by managed grid service and grid enabled service provider? Role 3 was a Grid Service Provider providing it as a managed service. BT has already announced that. Am on-demand service is a utility computing model. Managed grid service is where the assets are owned by the enterprise but not managed by the enterprise. Chairs: in interest of time lets talk about next steps. Chairs: Review the charter milestones and agree on it. See slides Bob Cohen to walk us through the next two items Discussion on sponsorship. Can SSA be involved in this? Comment: Huge amount of time. Managing them is very time consuming Bob: Proposal is quite clear but it will be still a lot of work. Fair amount of administration. Will some companies here participate in theproposal and put it together? 2 - 3 day workshop extensive program. Can be series of workshops NTT: Managed connectivity can be realized by managed connections. I prefer the second role...F. Dynamic path provisioning or path provisioning. Bob: Perhaps there should be several different questionnaires for use cases. Three different interview questionnaires to focus in on issues. NTT: Benefit to find out characteristic of each service types but we should get priority. We should discuss and prioritize the switch service type as first priority. Some kind of converged discussion, focus is necessary. -----Original Message----- From: owner-telco-cg(a)ggf.org [mailto:owner-telco-cg@ggf.org] On Behalf Of MULLAN Pramila RD-ILAB-SSF Sent: Friday, July 08, 2005 2:49 PM To: telco-cg(a)ggf.org Subject: [telco-cg] minutes Hi, we had two minute takers from the last telco-cg f2f at GGF 14. Could you please forward the meeting minutes to the group. Thanks Pramila Pramila Mullan France Telecom Research & Development San Francisco Director Web Services & Intermediation 801 Gateway Boulevard, Suite #500 South San Francisco, CA 94080 USA Tel: +1-650-875-1515 Fax: +1 650-875-1505 http://www.francetelecom.com/rd/ <http://www.francetelecom.com/rd/>

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minutes
by MULLAN Pramila RD-ILAB-SSF 08 Jul '05

08 Jul '05

Hi, we had two minute takers from the last telco-cg f2f at GGF 14. Could you please forward the meeting minutes to the group. Thanks Pramila Pramila Mullan France Telecom Research & Development San Francisco Director Web Services & Intermediation 801 Gateway Boulevard, Suite #500 South San Francisco, CA 94080 USA Tel: +1-650-875-1515 Fax: +1 650-875-1505 http://www.francetelecom.com/rd/ <http://www.francetelecom.com/rd/>

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