Orchestrating end-to-end network and IT resources according to application level service level agreements

For the end-user, the complexities of the underlying network and IT infrastructure should be invisible: the end-user simply wants their application to work. This demands adequate network, compute, and storage resources to provide an acceptable session performance. However, behind the application may be a complex myriad of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) components from the desktop through to the data centre, each of which contributes to the overall performance experienced by the end-user, from PC to Local Area Network (LAN), to access network, to Wide Area Network (WAN), to data centre, servers, and application functionality. Whilst there have been recent advances in both data centre virtualisation and WAN optimisation technology, most virtualisation systems have focussed on the data centre and the data centre LAN. In this paper, we show how the addition of Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) technologies can enable us to deliver a total orchestration of ICT resources across both WAN and data centre, to meet the needs of user applications and to enable application-level Service Level Agreements (SLAs). In addition, we explain a prototype BT has developed that manipulates multi-site WAN resources, server resources, and storage resources together according to application needs.