Cloud Services Gateway

Overview

The Compiled Networks Cloud Services Gateway (CSG) enables Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers to drastically expand their current market penetration, of less than 4% of a $377B market, by offering a comparable alternative to the physical data center. Data centers today provide control of server, storage, and network resources; while IaaS offerings only allow for control of server and storage. The CSG enables a IaaS vendor to offer virtualized network control and meet the network requirements of most applications and user policy that physical data centers currently provide.

Market Definition

Infrastructure as a Services (IaaS) is a Cloud Computing market that focuses on providing data center like services to enterprise customers through Just-In-Time administration tools and utility billing models. IaaS has been quite successful as a service because it is quick and easy to use, and it has a low cost of failure. If an IT project does not succeed, the lost time and expense is often orders of magnitude lower than if the project utilized traditional data center services. IaaS offerings today allow customers to create server and storage resources, but they do not let the customer administer the network that supports these virtual resources. For the customer building public web stack based applications, the lack of network control is not a limitation. However, most of the applications and services that run in the data center have implicit requirements on the network.

Problem

There are many applications that run in the data center that imply network requirements in variable ways. Some legacy applications may not use IPv4 as their transport medium, implying a layer 2 broadcast requirement. Other applications may have a IPv4 broadcast requirement as part of their function; for instance live migration. Many applications are internally developed and may not have used the best of coding practices; they might have embedded IPv4 addresses within their code, which forces administrators to preserve specific addresses across upgrades and updates to the underlying hardware. Some applications have ʻhelperʼ appliances that can provide security, address normalization, and load balancing across clusters of recipient servers. These ʻhelperʼ appliances force a layer 2 relationship with the target cluster of servers.

In some cases the applications themselves are not the sole dictator of network requirements. Policy decisions on use of the applications can also greatly influence network requirements. Certain users, uses, and applications can be grouped into generic policy groups with their own set of network isolation and connectivity rules. A small grouping of high risk applications might even dictate that their network provide some form of privacy, beyond isolation, for its served applications. These policies are the product of internal as well as external security requirements.

Market Opportunity

These implicit requirements force a data center administrator to expect a high level of network control in order to meet their customers demands. Current IaaS offerings do not allow an enterprise customer to have the same level of flexibility and control of their ʻvirtualʼ data center as they now have with their private data center. IDC estimates that $377B was spent on the data center market in 2008 and will grow to $452B in 2012.

IDC also estimates the market size for Cloud Services to be $16B in 2008 growing to $42B in 2012. Cloud Services in this report includes both IaaS as well as hosting and Software as a Service (SaaS). This trend indicates that IaaS providers are capturing less than 4% of the data center market and at best growing this share to something below 8% by 2012.

Solution

The Compiled Networks Cloud Services Gateway (CSG) is an enterprise cloud gateway that provides Secure Domain Extension between the IaaS provider network and enterprise customers. The CSG allows a IaaS vendor to offer a virtual data center that provides control of all data center resources: server, storage, and network. The CSG extends the secure private enterprise data center into the cloud on demand. By transparently linking the enterprise to the cloud and preserving layer 2, the CSG supports migration of existing applications.