Layer 7 to Demonstrate Cloud Network Elasticity at TMForum Management World in Dublin

I’ll be at the TMForum Management World show this May 23-26, 2011 in Dublin, Ireland to participate in the catalyst demonstrating cloud network elasticity, which is sponsored by Deutsche Telekom and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. For those of you not yet familiar with TMForum, it is (from their web site) “the world’s leading industry association focused on enabling best-in-class IT for service providers in the communications, media, defense and cloud service markets.” We’ve been involved with the TMForum for a couple of years, and this show in Dublin is going to showcase some major breakthroughs in practical cloud computing.

TMForum offers catalysts as solution proof-of-concepts. A catalyst involves a number of vendors which partner together to demonstrate an end-to-end solution to a real problem faced by telco providers or the defense industry. This year, we’re working closely with Infonova, Zimory, and Ciena to showcase a cloud-in-a-box environment that features elastic scaling of compute resources and network bandwidth on-demand, all of which is fully integrated with an automated billing system.We think this solution will be a significant game-changer in the cloud infrastructure marketplace, and Layer 7′s CloudControl product is a part of this solution. CloudControl plays a crucial role in managing the RESTful APIs that tie together each vendor’s components.

What excites me about this catalyst is that it assembles best-of-breed vendors from the telco sector to create a truly practical elastic cloud. Zimoury contributes the management layer that transforms simple virtualized environments into clouds. We couple this with Ciena’s on-demand network bandwidth solutions, allowing users to acquire guaranteed communications capacity when they need it. Too often clouds elasticity starts and stops with CPU. Ciena’s technology ensures that the network resource factors into the elastic value proposition.

The front end is driven by Zimory’s BSS system, ensuring that all user actions are managed under a provider-grade billing framework. And finally, Layer 7′s CloudControl operates as the glue in the middle to add security and auditing, integrate disparate APIs, and provide application-layer visibility into all of the communications between different infrastructure components.

Layer 7's CloudControl acts as API glue between cloud infrastructure components.

I hope you can join me at TMForum Management World this month. We will be giving live demonstrations of the elastic cloud under real world scenarios given to us by Deutsche Telekom and Commonwealth Bank. This promises to be a very interesting show.