Efficient, Scalable and Survivable Design for next generation Virtualized Data Center for Cloud Services

随着大大小小的组织开始利用云计算的优势，云计算正在成为主流范例。云计算之所以成功，是因为它准确地满足了 IT 的需求：能够以经济高效的方式随时增加和缩减计算资源，而无需进行基础设施设计和设置的痛苦。使计算需求适应市场波动的能力只是云计算必须提供的众多好处之一，这就是这种新范式迅速崛起的原因。根据 Gartner 报告，2013 年全球云服务预计将增长至 1310 亿美元。随着这一巨大增长，底层基础设施的性能对其成功和可持续性至关重要。目前，云计算严重依赖数据中心来满足其日常业务需求。事实上，正是通过数据中心的虚拟化，“计算作为实用工具”的概念出现了。然而，数据中心虚拟化仍处于起步阶段。最近，NSERC 创建了虚拟基础设施上的智能应用战略网络 (SAVI)，其目标是解决构建在灵活且可演进的基础设施上的未来应用平台的设计问题。 SAVI 的目标之一是通过积极参与研究项目来加强 IT（信息技术）产业基础，从而帮助推进加拿大的数字经济战略。该举措强调了云网络和网络虚拟化研究的重要性及其对加拿大工业的影响。然而，通过这一举措，可以确定与数据中心虚拟化相关的大量开放研究问题和挑战，包括但不限于优化的拓扑和协议、嵌入设计方法和在线算法、资源供应和分配、数据中心能源效率、容错问题和级联相关故障的容错设计、提高灾难性灾难条件下的服务可用性等。 因此，本提案将尝试详细阐述和解决与高效虚拟化数据中心和云服务数据中心基础设施的设计和运营相关的关键研究挑战和问题。特别是，我计划研究数据中心网络中的可扩展流量管理和流量工程方法的问题，并提出（离线）问题的数学公式以及支持服务质量（QoS）配置的在线方法/算法。我还计划通过新颖的协调设计方法研究可生存的虚拟网络嵌入问题，以便为网络运营商实现更高的收入，同时为云服务提供有保证的服务连续性。考虑到这个问题的复杂性，我们计划使用大规模优化方法来解决离线设计问题，并使用新颖的算法来获得在线解决方案。现在，网络运营商面临的主要问题之一是利润最大化。这意味着要充分利用网络投资和容量，以容纳更多服务。网络编码是一个框架，允许网络运营商最大化其网络中的流量，而无需对基础设施进行任何升级。为了获得最大的好处，必须设计网络编码感知的嵌入解决方案。然而，这是之前的工作中尚未解决的另一个具有挑战性的问题。该提案计划通过新颖的嵌入解决方案以及离线和在线方法来研究这个问题来表征增益。

Cloud Computing is becoming the mainstream paradigm, as organizations, both large and small, begin to harness benefits. Cloud computing gained its success for giving IT exactly what it needed: The ability to grow and shrink computing resources, on the go, in a cost-effective manner, without the anguish of infrastructure design and setup. The ability to adapt computing demands to market fluctuations is just one of the many benefits that cloud computing has to offer, this is why this new paradigm is rising rapidly. According to a Gartner report, cloud services are expected to grow to 131 billion dollars worldwide in 2013. With this massive growth, the performance of the underlying infrastructure is crucial to its success and sustainability. Currently, cloud computing heavily depends on data centers for its daily business needs. In fact, it is through the virtualization of data centers that the concept of “computing as a utility” emerged. However, data center virtualization is still in its infancy. Recently, NSERC has created a Strategic Network for Smart Applications on Virtual Infrastructure (SAVI) whose objective is to address the design of future applications platform built on a flexible and evolvable infrastructure. Among SAVI’s objectives is helping advance Canada's Digital Economy Strategy by strengthening the IT (Information Technology) industrial base through active participation in the research program. This initiative underscores the importance of research on cloud networks and network virtualization and the impacts they will have on Canadian industries. With this initiative, however, a plethora of open research issues and challenges related to data center virtualization can be identified, including but not limited to, optimized topologies and protocols, embedding design methods and online algorithms, resource provisioning and allocation, data center energy efficiency, fault tolerance issues and fault tolerant design for cascaded correlated failures, improving service availability under catastrophic disaster conditions, etc. Therefore, this proposal will attempt to elaborate and address key research challenges and problems related to the design and operation of efficient virtualized data centers and data center infrastructure for cloud services. In particular, I plan to investigate the problem of scalable traffic management and traffic engineering methods in data center networks and present both mathematical formulation for the (offline) problem as well as online methods/algorithms to enable quality of service (QoS) provisioning. I also plan to study the problem of survivable virtual network embedding through novel coordinated design methodologies to achieve higher revenues for network operators while providing guaranteed service continuity for cloud services. Given the complexity of this problem, we plan to use large scale optimization methods for addressing the offline design problem and novel algorithms for obtaining online solutions. Now, one of the major issues for network operators is to maximize their profits; this implies squeezing the most benefits of their network investments and capacity to be able to accommodate more services. Network coding is a framework that allows network operators to maximize the traffic flows in their network without requiring any upgrade to the infrastructure. To get the most benefits, network coding aware embedding solutions must be devised. This is however another challenging problem that has not been addressed in prior work. This proposal plans to investigate this problem through novel embedding solutions as well as offline and online methods to characterize the gains.