Sky Systems Seminar: Israel Cidon (VMWare) – Pathway, CloudCast and DRAGON – Multicloud Network Building Blocks from VMware Research

Speaker: Israel Cidon
Location: Soda 510
Date: September 22, 2023
Time: 11am-12pm PST

Title:

Pathway, CloudCast and DRAGON – Multicloud Network Building Blocks from VMware Research

Abstract: The talk will present and demo three complementary concepts and implementations, developed by our team at the VMware CTO office, for the virtualization and “cloudification” of Wide Area Networks.

Project Pathway aims to disrupt the WAN market by enabling corporations and service providers to dynamically deploy, in minutes, software based, dedicated agile and cost-effective worldwide WAN infrastructures leveraging available public clouds, colos and on-prem resources. Pathway can automatically and securely network the entire footprint of enterprise operation including IoT, remote users, branches, datacenters, clouds’ VPC/VNET etc.

CloudCast is a multi-cloud measurement system, composed of active software traffic agents maintained across all regions of all major public clouds. They measure any to any path performance as well as reaching global services from these locations and report back to a visualization platform.

DRAGON is a WAN optimization system, built on RUST,  that improves the performance and introduce major traffic reduction for modern WAN applications. It improves legacy WANopt solutions by 10-50X in core speed and helps to cut cloud egress fees for distributed hybrid cloud applications.

Bio:
Israel Cidon is the new Director of the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech in New York City and an affiliated researcher at VMware research. Prior to his current role, he held the position of Vice President Researcher at VMware and served as the co-director of the VMware research group (VRG). Before joining VMware, he was a chaired professor and dean at the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department at Technion.

Israel was also a research member and manager at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center at NY and Sun Microsystems Labs at Mountain View. Additionally, he was a cofounder of several startup companies, including Actona Technologies, a pioneer of WAN optimization that later became Cisco WAAS, and Sookasa, a SaaS security platform integrated with Barracuda Networks’ email protection solutions.

Israel’s research interests involved mobile wireless networks, high-speed packet switched networks, overlay networks, distributed systems and on chip networks (NoC). He co-authored many peer-reviewed papers and holds 65 US patents. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and received twice the IBM outstanding innovation award.