Use SLA to measure effectiveness of cloud service providers, says Ciena
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Use SLA to measure effectiveness of cloud service providers, says Ciena
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To measure the effectiveness of their provider in a cloud environment, businesses can rely on the service level agreement (SLA), which measures both the cost and performance, according to an executive from Ciena.
Stephen B. Alexander, senior vice president, for products and technology and chief technology officer of Ciena, told Networks Asia that the effectiveness of a cloud environment for a business boils down to cost and performance, where performance in this sense means bandwidth elasticity, zero packet error modes, and deterministic latency management, even in restoration mode after a network failure, and security. Alexander noted that all of these characteristics can be found in high-capacity, dedicated point-to-point optical networks, but the cost of dedicated networks is so high as to inhibit growth of cloud services.
“Since the economics of cloud services really comes from sharing of pooled resources, the effectiveness of the provider will really be about how well the provider can offer what performs like a dedicated private network, but with the cost advantages of shared/pooled resource networks,” says Alexander.
Asked if traditional networks and those currently offered by Asian telcos are ready for cloud computing and increased demand that UC will bring, Alexander pointed out that
traditional networks have been carrying cloud traffic for years without directly associating this with “the cloud.”
Alexander explains that a fiberoptic service between two data centers that runs virtualization software on either side (like VMware), is involved in cloud computing. The difference going forward will increasingly be about how well the WAN takes on the characteristics of bandwidth elasticity, performance programmability (like error rate management and latency management), and application awareness to the cloud services applications. “These new capabilities will require added intelligence and programmability of the network, such as the use of control planes and unified management. Ciena has made this transition path smooth so that Asian telcos can migrate toward increasingly responsive cloud platforms,” says Alexander.
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