CS/EE Networking Seminar: Disaster Recovery Design in Cloud Cyberinfrastructures

Speaker: Nasir Ghani, Professor of Electrical Engineering, University of South Florida and Research Liaison for Cyber Florida

Date: Monday, October 22, 2018

Time: 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.

Location: Computer Science Building, Room 488 (4th floor entrance in MUDD building)

Abstract: Cloud-based applications are being hosted across datacenter sites with abundant storage and computing resources. These paradigms are seeing strong traction today and provide many saliencies, such as high cost efficiency and rapid scalability. However as demands continue to increase, many applications are being deployed across multiple datacenters to achieve improved responsiveness. Namely, service providers are using network virtualization techniques to build customized distributed storage/computing overlays for their clients, e.g., such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Furthermore, network function virtualization (NFV) techniques are also being used to replace hardware-based networking devices. However, as these paradigms gain traction, service survivability and continuity are coming to the fore. Of particular concern are large stressor events which can cause multiple correlated datacenter and network outages, e.g., natural disasters, malicious weapons of mass destruction (WMD) attacks, cascading power outages, etc. Clearly, localized intra-site server recovery schemes will not suffice here, and instead more capable globalized strategies are needed. This talk will focus on this challenging problem area and present a range of disaster recovery solutions for virtualized cloud cyberinfrastructures. Foremost, pre-fault protection strategies will be presented to mitigate the impact of potential disaster occurrences. However, since it is very difficult and costly to pre-protect against all randomized faults, further post-fault restoration strategies will also be covered. These solutions include rapid re-mapping schemes as well as more time-staged progressive infrastructure repair/recovery methodologies. The talk will conclude with discussions on future research directions.

Biography: Nasir Ghani is a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of South Florida and Research Liaison for Cyber Florida, a state-funded center focusing on cybersecurity research, education, and outreach. Earlier he was Associate Chair of the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department at the University of New Mexico (2007-2013). He also spent 8 years in industry working at several large corporations (Nokia, IBM, and Motorola) and startups. Currently he is involved in a range of research activities in cyberinfrastructure network design, cybersecurity, disaster recovery, cloud computing, and IoT/cyber-physical systems. He has published over 230 papers and has generated several standards drafts and patents. His research has been supported by various agencies, and he also received the NSF CAREER Award in 2005. He chaired the IEEE Technical Committee on High Speed Networking (TCHSN) from 2007-2010 and has served as an associate and/or guest editor for the IEEE/OSA Journal of Optical Communications and Networking, IEEE Systems, IEEE Communications Letters, IEEE Communications Magazine, and IEEE Network. He has also chaired many symposia and workshops for flagship IEEE communications and networking conferences, including IEEE GLOBECOM, IEEE ICC, IEEE Infocom, and IEEE ICCCN. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo in 1997.

Host: Professor Gil Zussman