Enrique Castro-Leon

Service-Orientation in the Computing Infrastructure

This paper discusses service-orientation concepts applied to infrastructure orchestration and management. It discusses the concept of service-oriented infrastructure (SOI) and illustrates examples of end-to-end infrastructure services including services provisioned at the bare-metal hardware level. This paper demonstrates the potential to make platform as a service (PaaS) and its value to the IT infrastructure management

Power-Aware Management in Cloud Data Centers

Power efficiency is a major concern in operating cloud data centers. It affects operational costs and return on investment, with a profound impact on the environment. Current data center operating environments, such as management consoles and cloud control software, tend to optimize for performance and service level agreements and ignore power implications when evaluating workload scheduling choices. We believe that power should be elevated to the first-order consideration in data-center management and that operators should be provided with insights and controls necessary to achieve that purpose. In this paper we describe several foundational techniques for group-level power management that result in significant power savings in large data centers with run-time load allocation capability, such as clouds and virtualized data centers. We cover VM migration to save power, server pooling or platooning to balance power savings with startup times so as not to impair performance, and discuss power characteristics of servers that affect both the limits and the opportunities for power savings.

Smart cities and the Internet of Things

The smart city concept represents a compelling platform for IT-enabled service innovation. It offers a view of the city where service providers use information technologies to engage with citizens to create more effective urban organizations and systems that can improve the quality of life. The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) model is foundational to the development of smart cities. Integrated cloud-oriented architecture of networks, software, sensors, human interfaces, and data analytics are essential for value creation. IoT smart-connected products and the services they provision will become essential for the future development of smart cities. This paper will explore the smart city concept and propose a strategy development model for the implementation of IoT systems in a smart city context.

Building the Infrastructure for Cloud Security

For cloud users and providers alike, security is an everyday concern, yet there are very few books covering cloud security as a main subject. This book will help address this information gap from an Information Technology solution and usage-centric view of cloud infrastructure security. The book highlights the fundamental technology components necessary to build and enable trusted clouds. Here also is an explanation of the security and compliance challenges organizations face as they migrate mission-critical applications to the cloud, and how trusted clouds, that have their integrity rooted in hardware, can address these challenges.

Building Trust and Compliance in the Cloud for Services

Security is a key barrier to the broader adoption of cloud computing. The real and perceived risks of providing, accessing and controlling services in multitenant cloud environments can slow or preclude the migration to services by IT organizations. In a non-virtualized environment, the separation provided by physical infrastructure is assumed to provide a level of protection for applications and data. In the cloud, this traditional physical isolation between applications no longer exists. Cloud infrastructure is multi-tenant, with multiple applications utilizing a shared common physical infrastructure. This provides the benefit of much more efficient resource utilization. However, because the physical barriers between applications have been eliminated, it is important to establish compensating security controls to minimize the potential for malware to spread through the cloud. Newer types of malware threats, such as rootkit attacks, can be increasingly difficult to detect using traditional antivirus products. These threats use various methods of concealment to remain undetected as they infect key system components such as hypervisors and drivers. This increases the likelihood that the malware can operate in the background, spread through a cloud environment, and cause greater damage over time. This paper explores challenges in deploying and managing services in a cloud infrastructure from a security perspective, and as an example, discusses work that Intel is doing with partners and the software vendor ecosystem to enable a security enhanced platform and solutions with security anchored and rooted in hardware and firmware to increase visibility and control in the cloud.

Consumerization in the IT Service Ecosystem

Most of the available literature on IT consumerization focuses on current practices--from operational aspects of BYOD to its disruptive effects--but does little to illuminate the dynamics behind the trends emergence. Exploring the driving forces behind consumerization is essential if IT organizations are to both make sense of the current dynamics of transformation and disruption and formulate effective strategies in response. This article is one of the first attempts to explain these dynamics as part of a logical progression, from the Webs invention in 1989 to its evolution into machine-to-machine communication through Web services to SOAs role as an application discipline in virtualized cloud infrastructure context--all of which brings us to todays BYOD and BYOA.

Evolution of the Intel's e-business data center toward a service-oriented infrastructure

This paper brings a historic perspective of the Intel e-business data center growth from supporting a simple static Web site to a leading e-business implementation, one of the worlds largest and most complex installations of its type. It outlines the challenges facing IT and e-business operations today and calls out the needs for more advanced platform and service manageability technologies. To cope with these new challenges, the paper introduces the concept of service-oriented infrastructure (SOI), its architecture, key technical components, business benefits, and key steps to of the evolution toward SOI

Identity Management and Control for Clouds

In the last few chapters we covered the technologies, usage models, and capabilities that are required to enable trusted infrastructure in the cloud–one of the foundation pillars for trusted clouds. We looked at the concepts, solution architectures, and ISV components that establish and propagate platform trust, attestation, and boundary control, all of which are required to enable the trusted clouds. The other foundational pillar to enable them is identity management, and that is the focus on this chapter.

The Trusted Cloud: Addressing Security and Compliance

In Chapter 1 we reviewed the essential cloud concepts and took a first look at cloud security. We noted that the traditional notion of perimeter or endpoint protection left much to be desired in the traditional architecture with enterprise-owned assets. Such a notion is even less adequate today when we add the challenges that application developers, service providers, application architects, data center operators, and users face in the emerging cloud environment.

Architecting the Service Oriented Data Center

The adoption of SOA in business computing environments is growing due to the promise of significant cost reduction in the planning, deployment and operation of IT projects. However, the organic transformation from legacy enterprise applications to SOA applications only has been seen mostly in large enterprises datacenter where services are centralized. This paper discusses the effect of SOA, and specifically the effect of Outside-In SOA previously defined in the increasingly decentralized way in which data centers are deployed and managed. Patterns of adoption of SOA, in combination with emerging technologies lead us to believe that the traditional datacenter owned by a large organization, i.e., the traditional monolithic data center, will evolve into a more federated form, with horizontal specialization creating opportunities for smaller players and emerging economies. The decentralization of the physical datacenter will take place through federated services offered from distributed service providers. This new dynamic will affect large and small business alike.