Telecom Firms Grappling With the Grid

CHICAGO -- Security, performance and lack of effective business models are the major challenges standing between telecom providers and the provision of lucrative grid-based services to their customers, according to sources at the Global Grid Forum's meeting here at Supercomm.

With prices for services such as VOIP becoming increasingly commoditized, telecom vendors are now looking to offer utility-computing-style services in an effort to open up additional revenue streams. However, this involves the development of complex grids that can run customers' diverse applications on the vendor's own server and storage infrastructure.

The problem for many telecom firms is how to adapt to support the fluctuations in demand required of grid-based computing. For example, a retail firm may need extremely high CPU and storage utilization around the Christmas period, or a film company may need to run an extremely resource-hungry application during the last few months of production.

Andrew Davey, senior manager at Sprint Corp. (NYSE: FON) admitted that finding a sufficiently scaleable business model to support all these diverse applications is easier said than done.

He says, "It's a challenge you need an infrastructure that enables the grid applications to be deployed quickly and ripped back down if the customers don't want them."According to Davey, Sprint has already "redone" its internal storage infrastructure to support grid-based services, mapping the hardware to new service-level agreements (SLAs) and data. However, overhauling all this internal hardware is complicated and expensive, and Davey estimates it is likely to take another year before the company will have its commercial grid offering in place.

But time is tight, and woe betide the telecom firms that are last to this market. Analyst Robert Cohen of the Economic Strategy Institute warned that if service providers don't get their grid offerings in place over the next few years, their futures could be threatened.

"There's a great deal of pressure on them to define what their vision for the future is. If they don't deliver commercial grid services, they could disappear within a decade," he says.

At the moment, the telecom firms are watching each other closely to see who will be the first to deliver these types of services on a wide scale, though at least one of their key technology suppliers admits that there remain technical challenges to be overcome.

Franco Travostino, director of advanced technology at Nortel Networks Corp. (NYSE/Toronto: NT), cites security and system dependability as big issues for the telecom firms.Travostino feels that the level of "robustness" offered on servers from the major hardware vendors is not matched by the software and middleware used to support grid applications. He says, "The application software and the middleware need to grow. It will take a couple of release cycles more for the software to become robust and scaleable."

The networking vendor is currently working on some grid-specific products of its own, though Travostino refused to reveal the details of these. He did, however, point to Holland's SURFnet network as providing a possible pointer for the telecom firms.

SURFnet (in which Nortel is heavily involved) is a grid connecting research organizations and teaching hospitals that will be capable of 10-Gbit/s data traffic, according to Travostino. He says, "This will be a good technology preview of what we can expect in the next two to three years."

It seems that, as the telecom firms plan their next big grid step, it may be the traditional high-performance computing and scientific projects that offer guiding light – particularly when it comes to security. An issue for many companies will be how to deploy effective policies across their grid infrastructures that are capable of handling both internal and external security threats.

Steve Crumb, executive director of the Global Grid Forum, cites the example of the work being undertaken by the TeraGrid project, which aims to build the world's largest grid for scientific research. Organizations such as the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) are already threshing out these issues, according to Crumb.He says, "These [organizations] are having to deal with sharing security policies in a way that could be extended or refined for the commercial environment."

— James Rogers, Site Editor, Next-gen Data Center Forum