Alan,
thank you for the sneak preview.

this author continues to be troubled by the lack of attention given to networking grid sites

Hereafter my own solace to that troubling thought. With Grids still trying to break through mainstream adoption and validation in the F500, I believe that the networking ecosystem (vendors, providers ...) is moving in several directions to fill the pipeline now in preparation for tomorrow's scaling of Grids. There are several stepping stones, which are not necessarily labeled as "Grid" steps (e.g., virtualization) and can serve several purposes. Some of these stepping stones call for prep activities within a number of SDOs (not just GGF), whereas others possibly call for internal re-structuring of operations (e.g., greater horizontal integration, greater L4-7 engagement, etc.).

Also, the Grid movement has originated in a HPC reality blessed with plentiful ad-hoc networks and ad-hoc operation of the same. While it has grown by leaps and bounds since then, we don't seem to have heard enough real-life use case stories to balance off that original view, especially when it comes to utilization of the network. Hence the continued quest for use cases with a documented strong network pull (within telco-cg, and the ghpn-rg prior to that).

There was no discussion of this at all at the Grid VIP Summit

I will be looking for the minutes to find out what does make it to these VIPs' short list of to-do's.

no follow-up from last October's OIF-GGF grid networking workshop

Since last October when I presented at the OIF, I have kept regular communication with the OIF (GHPN hat on). At the Telco-CG interim meeting at Supercomm, an OIF representative (Jonathan Sadler) responded to my invitation and gave a live account of the OIF Supercomm 05 demo, which breaks new grounds in multi-vendor dynamic provisioning while showing quite an impressive roster of participants. The GGF attendees resonated with the Grid potential. There is a plan to work on an action register that is of mutual appeal to OIF and GGF.

and no resolution of the rampant confusion at the GGF14 Telco Community Group meeting

"rampant confusion" reads to me as a fairly severe judgement of the 1st official meeting of a newly chartered group, when there is nothing written down in a draft document just yet, and purposely so.

The GGF and the Telco CG are a volunteer army. I hope that we continue to enlist your support and contributions. I appreciated your kicking off a discussion and bringing us back from summer vacations.

-franco

At 08:41 PM 7/27/2005, Alan Weissberger wrote:

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 October's 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.