Virtual business networks with cloud computing and virtual machines

Abstract

To be competitive and to react faster to the market demands, Enterprises need new information processing techniques, able to analyse the increasing amount of produced data, and innovative solutions in order to manage the computational resources with better flexibility, scalability, efficiency and smaller costs. The traditional monolithic high performance computing paradigm is not suitable to achieve these requisites. The emerging Cloud Computing represents a valuable answer to these requirements. In fact, in this model the business buy computing time from commercial providers, allowing to dramatically decrease the investments in own data centers. Nevertheless, this paradigm often imposes constraints related to underlying infrastructure, forcing Enterprises to rethink their application architectures. Inspired by Amazon's EC2 model, we propose a system which allows Enterprises to extend their business networks within any Cloud infrastructure, creating custom virtual environments able to run the applications without any change, but responding always to the business companies typical requirements: Quality of Service, High-Availability and Security. © 2009 IEEE.