Introducing Virtual Private Overlay Network Services in Large Scale Grid Infrastructures

The computational Grid concept is gaining great popularity as the best way to deliver access to a wide range of distributed computing and data resources. But, as Grids move from an experimental phase to real production and their deployment in the Internet significantly increases, controlling the security of a Grid application becomes imperative. The most significant Grid security issue is that the different sites composing the Grid will generally be managed by different organizations each with their own security mechanisms and policies. This makes any communication security arrangement on the entities participating to the Grid generally more difficult than if they were on the same LAN. In this paper, we propose a novel network resource abstraction for delivering dynamic on-demand Virtual Private Overlay connection services, into large-scale Grid environments. Such facility provides to Grid applications an illusion of dedicated layer-2 LAN connections that are fully comparable to a private network in performance, reliability, security and Quality of Service, but also provide topology and control plane virtualization to ensure better isolation also at the protocol and address space level. It may represent a technological breakthrough that can transform the overall connection paradigm in modern Grids, by reducing infrastructure costs, with the elimination of private circuits and long-distance direct connections, and increasing network coverage and flexibility by leveraging the Internet usage. As a proof of concept, the proposed facility has been implemented in a Grid Information Service prototype which was successfully tested on a small dedicated testbed infrastructure.