There is no shortage of industry alliances targeting the convergence of connectivity and the cloud, especially at the edge of the network. But the latest, the Open Grid Alliance, has announced its objective as no less than supporting a re-architected Internet.
“Like the power grid, from which it gathers its metaphorical inspiration, the Open Grid will be a software-defined system that stretches across the globe to support multi-cloud services via fungible resources that are employed, when and where they are needed, on demand, and with guarantees and service-level agreements,” states the group’s launch manifesto. Within that, 5G will have a critical role to play.
This ambitious goal is being chased by a group of edge infrastructure and software-based network companies, led by Dell and its virtualization subsidiary VMware (soon to be spun off). Other members include Vapor IO, DriveNets, MobiledgeX and PacketFabric – all, in different ways, innovators in building the new cloud-based network, and many of them already partners from other groupings.
The group wants to define and provide the foundations that will accelerate the progress of making the Internet into a converged, shared platform for highly distributed computing, data and analytics at the edge.
The idea is to develop a software-defined network that provides a layer of abstraction, and so supports the dynamic allocation of connectivity and computing across multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, near-premise and on-premise services. The Alliance plans to draw upon developments and expertise from vendors in every part of the virtualized network stack including hardware, SDN, virtualization and containers, automation and applications.
However, it will not write specs or standards, but says it will focus on guidelines and key principles, and development of reference architectures. The first announcement is promised within a month and will focus on convergence between wireless and wireline networks.
“In today’s technology landscape, all the action is happening at the edge. The list of interactive applications that distributed edge computing will enable keeps getting longer,” Kaniz Mahdi, VP of advanced technology at VMware, told SDxCentral. “And yet, when we look closely at many of them, we reach an unavoidable conclusion: There is no single location for the edge. It’s nowhere. But, everywhere.”
What is needed to address this situation is a “fungible edge”, believes VMware – one that “stitches together the right level of compute resources, in the right place, at the right time, driven by application intent”.
The next generation Internet, then, would be built from the edge in, rather than distributing old norms and architecture to the edge as an afterthought. In that architecture, low latency connectivity such as 5G will be a critical enabler, potentially giving its deployers and operators an enhanced role in the cloud and Internet value chain.
“As exciting as emerging edge technologies from hyperscale cloud providers and telecommunications service providers might be, the truth of the matter is that it’s near impossible for one technology provider to deliver this vision,” Mahdi continued in the interview. “The edge is just too distributed, too dynamic, and too heterogeneous for a singular service provider to tackle it all.”
With virtualization of data centers and networks underway, the group aims to define rules that allow these virtualized systems to supply the appropriate amount of compute resource for each task or application, operating as a “compute grid”. (Those whose memories stretch back to the 1990s may hear strong echoes of a then-hot topic, much discussed by IBM and others, of ‘utility computing’.)
With this grid in place, each application could take the resources it needed – compute, memory, connectivity – on an on-demand basis. This would be enabled and fully automated by a layer of intelligence applied on top of the virtualized, open grid system. But such a vision would only be realized with cooperation between cloud, wireless, networking and data industries – and whether a new body like Open Grid Alliance, run by a clearly interested party in Dell/VMware, can provide the necessary unifying force is questionable.
For the grid to function effectively, there will need to be traffic interconnection and hand-off, for wireless and wireline, in huge numbers of locations close to users. Cole Crawford, CEO of Vapor IO – which provides edge infrastructure with a particular focus on cell sites and 5G – said traffic still travels hundreds of miles, on average, even in countries like the USA with considerable investment in edge cloud infrastructure.
“If we’re ever going to see optimized, low latency network hand-off” for use cases like autonomous robotics, “at some point the physics come into play, and that’s why this is so important…the need for Internet in more places is here and now,” he said.
Vapor IO was an early player driving the future trend for the increasingly distributed and cloud-based 5G RAN to converge with the edge cloud. These might both be deployed by an operator, or via a partnership between a cloud provider, telco and an infrastructure company (Vapor IO’s edge platforms have sometimes been deployed in partnership with towercos in the USA such as Crown Castle).
Last year, Vapor IO and Digital Realty announced a partnership with Hivelocity that shows the kind of concrete developments that might bring the Open Grid vision down to deployable earth. Hivelocity provides a bare metal edge cloud, and the three are working on a core-to-edge bare metal platform, starting in Atlanta. The platform enables developers to deploy edge-to-core workloads using a multi-tiered platform that also incorporates Digital Realty’s PlatformDigital and Vapor IO’s Kinetic Edge platform.
This extends a partnership that Vapor IO and Digital Realty first formed in late 2019. This highlighted the need for flexibility in the best telco edge locations – although Vapor IO initially made its name as a close partner of Crown Castle (which owns a stake), placing its micro-data centers at tower sites, it has backtracked a bit on that strategy. Vapor CEO Cole Crawford has said towerco sites do not always align well with all the edge services required and that it is “not relevant to talk about sitting at the bottom of one tower”, but instead to focus on “tower-aggregated and connected, not tower-located” scenarios.
This brought it to a partnership with non-telco player Digital Realty, which provides colocation services, and an agreement for the latter to implement Vapors’s Kinetic Edge Exchange (KEX) software-defined interconnection technology in all its US colocation facilities. KEX is a natural extension of Kinetic Edge, which combines multiple, micro-data centers to create virtual ones. Adding KEX connectivity makes all the geographically distributed data centers in a given metro area appear as a single location.
KEX uses Vapor IO’s Kinetic Edge software-defined networking (SDN) fabric to enable and coordinate traffic exchange between the Digital Realty center and Vapor IO’s Kinetic Edge deployments. This allows operators, developers, content providers and other Kinetic Edge users to cross-connect, reducing the cost to peer and exchange data, while closer to the last mile wireless and wireline networks. Endpoint workloads are processed at the Kinetic Edge sites, then passed to the Digital Realty data center for upstream workflow processing, data analysis and storage. The virtual cross-connects are controlled in software, so that they are automatically adjusted as traffic patterns change, in order to support predictable QoE and low latency.
Hivelocity, which is already a customer of Digital Realty, is extending its bare metal cloud to Vapor IO’s Kinetic Edge locations. Its COO Steve Eschweiler said: “By using our existing control plane in Digital Realty’s facilities to orchestrate machines in Vapor IO’s data centers at the infrastructure edge, leveraging the integrated Digital Realty Service Exchange and Kinetic Edge Exchange networks for connectivity, we were able to quickly and cost-effectively extend our bare metal cloud to the infrastructure edge, where last mile telco networks are aggregated.”
“We designed this joint solution to combine the data center and networking infrastructure needed to enable cloud-to-core-to-edge applications,” said Crawford. “Hivelocity’s ability to simply and effectively extend its bare metal cloud to the edge in Atlanta is a perfect example of how we’re making it easier for joint customers to deliver low-latency edge services that tie back to their regional and core workloads.”