IBM along with AT&T and ACS have developed a software-defined networking prototype (SDN) technology which can transfer large amounts of data over the cloud in case of disaster.
Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s CORONET programme, the new prototype drastically reduces time to set up a cloud-to-cloud high-speed network through a service provider from days into seconds.
The SDN prototype is a resource management system that will enable cloud service providers to access extra bandwidth in case of disasters.
AT&T Labs executive director of network evolution research, Robert Doverspike, said: "These shifts have driven the need to develop rapid and high rate bandwidth-on-demand in the Wide Area Network (WAN).
"By combining software defined networking (SDN) concepts with advanced, cost-efficient network routing in a realistic carrier network environment, we have successfully demonstrated how to address this need."
IBM provided the cloud platform and intelligent cloud data centre orchestration technologies to support the dynamic provisioning of cloud-cloud communications, while AT&T developed the networking architecture for the SDN, with ACS providing network management and optical layer routing of the cloud networking architecture.
During the demonstration, the setup time clocked less than 40 seconds, and the companies were able to get results within seconds by using reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM) equipment, which increases bandwidth.
IBM Research member Douglas Freimuth said: "This technology not only represents a new ability to scale big data workloads and cloud computing resources in a single environment but the elastic bandwidth model removes the inefficiency in consumption versus cost for cloud-to-cloud connectivity."
