Name change reflects dynamic growth

THE OPENCLOUD PROJECT (OCP), announced last May has already generated considerable momentum, and become the key focus for our ongoing cloud standards development drive. It was this that inspired the name change. When we launched the CEF, one of the key aims was for automated, secure, end-to-end, vendor agnostic cloud service enablement. Since then, given the strong response to the OCP, ‘Open-ness’ has taken pole position. Meanwhile ‘Cloud’ takes its rightful place at the very heart of our banner, and the final ‘Connect’ reflects a double meaning: representing both literal connectivity and the bonds of shared purpose that bring such an apparently diverse membership into one cohesive whole. We are more than a forum, we are a movement. Hence: OpenCloud Connect (OCC).

The original name was influenced by the close ties with the MEF, and a greater initial focus on the transport layer: We still share significant common goals with the MEF, but as the work of the forum encompasses a broad range of Cloud technologies the board and members over the past couple of months have agreed to forge ahead under the new OCC banner. We’ve also formed a new OpenCloud Committee responsible for the work of the OpenCloud Project and the OpenCloud Lab, hosted by Iometrix based in Silicon Valley, California.

The Committee’s first action was to call for members to participate in the OCP by contributing equipment or services to the project. The first public presentation by the Committee was at Interop, Las Vegas April this year. The showcase provided a full update of results to date, members collaborated to present the first large scale demonstration of service delivery across multiple providers, networks and equipment providers. This radical solution by the OCC to the challenge of developing standards fast enough to keep pace with cloud growth, meant that we became the first ever Standards Development Organisation to integrate an iterative testing initiative at the heart of its standards development process from day one.

More than ten major enterprises co-operated to create a live test bed, enabling fast, innovative development of cloud services tailored to business-critical applications. With live circuits interconnecting multiple data centers to the OpenCloud lab in Silicon Valley, this was the first public deployment of the OCC Reference Architecture in action. Of particular interest was the presentation of the cloud services use cases under test in the OpenCloud lab, which illustrated the first on-going testing cycle.

The “Secure and Managed Cloud Service” use case – presented by OCC members: Hubble, Comcast, Wedge and Spirent – proved especially reassuring: Hubble is a publically hosted HTML5 cloud service providing financial reporting, analytics, and planning capabilities against an enterprise privately hosted database accelerator that mirrors customer business data.

Comcast is providing the link to the OpenCloud lab (representing the enterprise data center), while Spirent simulated a mix of legitimate enterprise traffic and malicious traffic trying to compromise the public cloud service. Wedge’s role was in securing the connection by preventing data leakage, providing elastic compute/security capability and active prevention of threat injections. This use case highlighted the performance/security advantages over public Internet, whilst helping to determine best practices
for IaaS/NaaS standard commercial
services.

Other use cases included “Dynamic End-to-End Provisioning and Activation of Connectivity” between and inside datacenters and “Real-Time Communication as a Service” or CaaS, demonstrating mobility of virtual machines in a multi-tenant environment. Liam Kiely, VP Fabrics & Infrastructure at Avaya – the company heading the CaaS case – emphasized the long-term importance of these use cases: “We are thrilled to contribute to the first wave of the Open Cloud Connect Reference Architectures. We are confident that customers implementing the Open Cloud Connect independently verified solutions, will experience greater levels of innovative service delivery for years to come.”