Tim Culver

Every IT business needs to have an effective backup plan to protect against unforeseen events that can cripple the IT infrastructure modern businesses rely on. When it comes to IT infrastructure, data centers are a top priority. Data centers have become critical for the very functioning of a big business enterprise. Any interruptions in a data center operations can virtually bring down the business to its knees if there is no efficient backup strategy. One backup strategy is to have a backup data center. The backup datacenter must be located in a geographically distant location. For example, if a data center is at a disaster, all its information including virtual machines (VMs) should be live migrated to the backup data center. This massive VM migration to a distant location requires a reliable, high-speed, and on-demand connection. This type of connections can be provided by trustworthy and efficient SDN-enabled network. In this demo, an SDN-enabled two-layer network test-bed is implemented to demonstrate a data center automatic disaster recovery plan. The network test-bed consists of two layers, 1) An optical network layer which makes use of Open ROADMs and 2) a packet network layer which makes use of OpenFlow-enabled switches. The SDN Orchestrator (referred to as PROnet Orchestrator) is responsible for automatic on-demand flow service provisioning across the two layers and VM migration between two data centers.

Biography:

Timothy (Tim) Culver is an expert and thought leader in Software Defined Networking & Network Function Virtualization. He has been a lecturer with the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas for 12 years. He is co-recipient of a National Science Foundation grant for the development of an SDN Security Curriculum.  Timothy is also a co-author of a publication to IEEE on an SDN solution on WDM using OpenROADM and co-author of “Software Defined Networks: A Comprehensive Approach” ISBN#9780128045794.  Timothy has his MS in engineering from Southern Methodist University and has done post-graduate Ph.D. research in Cloud Computing at Baylor and Walden Universities and SDN at UTD. He has 5 patents and was a Research Associate, Open Networking Foundation from 2016 to 2018.