Project SENDATE-SECURE-DCI

Abstract

Large Data Centers (DCs) are forming the most important control centers of the Internet nowadays. Within DCs, business as well as private data is stored, edited, forwarded, and processed. Although current DCs have a huge computing power, massive storage capacities, and an enormous performance based on centrally stored data, they are located far away from the customer, use the network only for transport, and are mostly run by non-European companies. This leads to low flexibility, long delays to customers, and security concerns.

New application scenarios of our digital society such as Industrial Internet, mobile connected objects, Internet of Things, health applications, and especially 5G lead to a huge number of end devices and an enormous increase of traffic volume. The high demands on security, location awareness, service guarantees, flexibility, and latency require a convergence of telecommunication networks and IT as well as distributed data centers, which are placed close to the customers. Innovative approaches such as Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) in combination with Software Defined Networking (SDN) are the basis for a secure, flexible, low latency, and locality-aware distributed data center approach to support the upcoming application scenarios.

Within the SENDATE Secure-DCI project, next-generation distributed data centers will be developed allowing a flexible and secure provisioning of compute, storage and networking resources to tenants and applications at scale. Targets of the project are:

• Development of a novel, packet-optical distributed data center fabric architecture
• Integration and extension of open-source based control and orchestration software for distributed compute, storage and networking resources
• Development of a new multi-layer data center switch as elementary fabric building block
• Development of new transmission schemes and optical interface technologies
• Development of an integral security concept