Intel ® Technology Journal toward the Proactive Enterprise Planetlab and Its Applicability to the Proactive Enterprise Planetlab and Its Applicability to the Proactive Enterprise

Current Information Technology (IT) models for security, content distribution, network and systems management, and provisioning do not match the level of complexity and flexibility required by today’s enterprise. Private enterprises increasingly need to deal with internal security threats the same way as they deal with external security threats. Increasing mobility and globalization demand that applications be pervasive, i.e., working wherever an enterprise’s employees operate. At the same time, the cost of maintaining applications, including deploying them and provisioning the proper resources, must be minimized, and enterprises need to be able to manage and deploy new services without impacting the existing operational services. In this paper, we suggest that PlanetLab [1], currently a world-wide research platform, is a potential IT delivery vehicle that can solve many of the challenges facing IT organizations, and it has the potential to become a commercially viable platform for enterprise organizations.