Virtual Infrastructures as a Service enabling Converged Optical Networks and Data Centres

Cloud computing service emerged as an essential component of the Enterprise IT infrastructure. Migration towards a full range and large-scale convergence of Cloud and network services has become the current trend for addressing requirements of the Cloud environment. Our approach takes the infrastructure as a service paradigm to build converged virtual infrastructures, which allow offering tailored performance and enable multi-tenancy over a common physical infrastructure. Thanks to virtualization, new exploitation activities of the physical infrastructures may arise for both transport network and Data Centres services. This approach makes network and Data Centres' resources dedicated to Cloud Computing to converge on the same flexible and scalable level. The work presented here is based on the automation of the virtual infrastructure provisioning service. On top of the virtual infrastructures, a coordinated operation and control of the different resources is performed with the objective of automatically tailoring connectivity services to the Cloud service dynamics. Furthermore, in order to support elasticity of the Cloud services through the optical network, dynamic re-planning features have been provided to the virtual infrastructure service, which allows scaling up or down existing virtual infrastructures to optimize resource utilization and dynamically adapt to users' demands. Thus, the dynamic re-planning of the service becomes key component for the coordination of Cloud and optical network resource in an optimal way in terms of resource utilization. The presented work is complemented with a use case of the virtual infrastructure service being adopted in a distributed Enterprise Information System, that scales up and down as a function of the application requests. © 2014 Elsevier B.V.