An Infrastructure Virtualisation SOA for VNO-based Business Models

Today's networking and storage providers can typically offer a limited range of services to their customers because of their reliance on a small, preferred range of infrastructure technologies. The providers do this in order to deliver effective, well-understood services for their customers and minimise the risk associated with developing solutions from a variety of different technologies. They each deliver a particular solution for their customers. However, from the customers' point of view, the provisioning of innovative, customised services that go beyond the services of a single infrastructure provider is very attractive. This paper presents a service-oriented architecture based on a well-established business model - the virtual network operator (VNO) - that allows the providers to meet their customers' complex requirements. Our proposed architecture uses virtualisation techniques to abstract the infrastructure services in such a way that new customised, value added services can be composed using existing infrastructure and/or VNO services, and then offered to customers. We illustrate our approach through two case studies of infrastructure services: storage and networking, and present the Web Services technologies we have developed for infrastructure virtualisation.