Thanks to a donation from Oxeva we could recently set up an extension of the computing and networking facility of the ROC team. We got new data-center-grade servers, among which two powerful high reliable Dell industrial chassis, and switches and routers.
Oxeva is a cloud computing company based in Paris, France. Oxeva main activity is to provide managed hosting solutions in the cloud, for sites and applications with high traffic and requiring high availability. Oxeva also offers innovative hosting solutions for companies with Big Data challenges.
As part of a significant upgrade to its infrastructure, Oxeva decommissioned datacenter-grade computing and network equipment and offered them to our research and teaching team at Cnam, just before the 2020 covid-19 lockdown. Thanks Oxeva!!
Thanks to Oxeva donation we could so deploy a full rack of computing and networking equipment to use for ROC experimental research activities. The current ROC facility totals 106 physical CPUs, 512 cores, 3 TB RAM and 100 TB storage. We are currently using the platform in order to emulate large networks using latest technologies, in the frame of many national, international and internal research projects. For instance we are running :
- three OpenStack islands to emulate geo-distributed data-center architectures for edge computing applications.
- Standalone and partially interconnected 5G and beyond 5G testbeds, making use of open-source platforms, namely O-RAN (Open Radio Access Network), ONAP (Open Network Automation Platform), OMEC (Open Mobile Edge Computing) and CORD (Central Office Rearchitectured as a Datacenter). We are for example today experimenting network automation protocols for running Network Function Virtualization (NFV) infrastructure use-cases such as 4G core, 5G core, vPON.
- A large-scale SDN (Software Defined Networking) network leveraging on ONOS (Open Network Operating Systems) and the LISP-Lab platform for testing routing optimization algorithms.
- The core of the LISP-LAB experimental platform, created thanks to ANR funding 10 years ago.
Besides research activity, the platform revealed these days to be fundamental to support remote teaching activities. We could so deploy resources to students to run experimental labs (Travaux Pratiques) and projects on BGP, MPLS, SDN and NFV technologies: more than 100 virtual machines of 8 GB RAM are these days used remotely by students of the teaching units RSX217, RSX218 and NEVA.
Thanks Oxeva! And looking forward to further collaborations 🙂
