Virtual Consumption, Sustainability & Human Well-Being

There is widespread consensus that present patterns of consumption could lead to the permanent impossibility of maintaining those patterns and, perhaps, the existence of the human race. While many patterns of consumption qualify as ‘sustainable’ there is one in particular that deserves greater attention: virtual consumption. We argue that virtual consumption — the experience of authentic consumptive experiences replicated by alternative means — has the potential to reduce the deleterious consequences of real consumption by redirecting some consumptive behavior from shifting material states to shifting information states

Designing a VM-level vertical scalability service in current cloud platforms: A new hope for wearable computers

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Public clouds are becoming ripe for enterprise adoption. Many companies, including large enterprises, are increasingly relying on public clouds as a substitute for, or a supplement to, their own computing infrastructures. On the other hand, cloud storage service has attracted over 625 million users. However, apart from the storage service, other cloud services, such as the computing service, have not yet attracted the end users’ interest for economic and technical reasons. Cloud service providers offers horizontal scalability to make their services scalable and economical for enterprises while it is still not economical for the individual users to use their computing services due to the lack of vertical scalability. Moreover, current virtualization technologies and operating systems, specifically the guest operating systems installed on virtual machines, do not support the concept of vertical scalability. In addition, network remote access protocols are meant to administer remote machines but they are unable to run the non-administrative tasks such as playing heavy games and watching high quality videos remotely in a way that makes the users feel as if they are sitting locally on their personal machines. On the other hand, the industry is yet unable to make efficient wearable computers a reality due to the limited size of the wearable devices, where it is infeasible to place efficient processors and big enough hard disks. This paper aims to highlight the need for the vertical scalability service and design the appropriate cloud, virtualization layer, and operating system services to incorporate vertical scalability in current cloud platforms in a way that will make it economically and technically efficient for the end users to use cloud virtual machines as if they are using their personal laptops. Through these services, the cloud takes wearable computing to the next stage and makes wearable computers a reality

D-STREAMON: from middlebox to distributed NFV framework for network monitoring

Many reasons make NFV an attractive paradigm for IT security: lowers costs, agile operations and better isolation as well as fast security updates, improved incident responses and better level of automation. On the other side, the network threats tend to be increasingly complex and distributed, implying huge traffic scale to be monitored and increasingly strict mitigation delay requirements. Considering the current trend of the net- working and the requirements to counteract to the evolution of cyber-threats, it is expected that also network monitoring will move towards NFV based solutions. In this paper, we present D- StreaMon an NFV-capable distributed framework for network monitoring realized to face the above described challenges. It relies on the StreaMon platform, a solution for network monitoring originally designed for traditional middleboxes. An evolution path which migrates StreaMon from middleboxes to Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) has been realized.Comment: Short paper at IEEE LANMAN 2017. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1608.0137

Hyper Converged Infrastructures: Beyond virtualization

Hyper Convergence has brought virtualization and IT strategies to a new level. Datacenters are undergoing a deep paradigm shift from a hardware-centric to an application-centric approach which leverages on software defined architectures, while IT is more and more being delivered as services rather than assets or products. Throughout different evolving phases since the initial attempts to convergence, the concept has been refined down to a level where,ultimately, a whole datacenter could be fully managed from a centralized single point, abstracting the whole hardware layer and exposing it to the administrators as a transparent pool of resources. This paper analyzes the evolution of infrastructures and tries to dig into the reality and convenience of Hyper Convergence

Virtualizing Monitoring and Control Systems: First Operational Experience and Future Applications

Virtualization is a technology that allows emulating a complete computer platform. The potential use ranges from consolidating hardware to running several different operating systems in parallel on one computer to preserving the operability of heritage software. GSOC has been investigating the possibilities of virtualization for some time. Aside from the usual approach of virtualizing the central servers out of administrational, consolidational reasons, the possibilities and advantages of control room client virtualization was explored. While moving mainstream in other businesses, the space community is cautious to apply this technique to the mission critical monitoring and control systems. This paper illustrates three virtualization steps that are underway at GSOC and presents the experiences gained