RESERVOIR

Background

Cloud computing allows data centres to operate more like the Internet by enabling computing across a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources, delivering on-demand services over the Web, reducing software complexity and costs, expediting time-to-market, improving reliability and enhancing accessibility of consumers to government and business services. Thus, cloud computing represents a true materialisation of Service-Oriented Computing (SOC)’s visionary promise.

In RESERVOIR, we are developing breakthrough systems and service technologies that will serve as the infrastructure for cloud computing. However, conditional to the wide-scale penetration of SOC to the economic landscape, the ICT industry needs to solve several well-recognised technical challenges. One such key challenge is the development of a scalable and effective service-oriented infrastructure. This is the challenge addressed by RESERVOIR.

The vision of RESERVOIR is to enable the delivery of services on an on-demand basis, at competitive costs, and without requiring a large capital investment in infrastructure.

The Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) Equation

To accomplish the vision, our work will extend, combine and integrate three technologies: Virtualisation, Grid computing and Business Service Management (BSM). We believe this approach can deliver ubiquitous utility computing by harnessing the complementary strengths of these technologies. Virtualisation technology has been shown to be useful in overcoming some barriers to commercial adoption of Grid technology. On the other hand, RESERVOIR will add
virtualisation-awareness to the Grids, by using low-level monitoring information for metering and billing.

To benefit fully from the dynamic nature of the RESERVOIR computing cloud, the project will develop a uniform policy-driven management layer that will automatically allocate resources to services and monitor execution and utilisation to ensure compliance to Service Level Agreements (SLA) by adjusting resource allocation level and location. The new capabilities of the infrastructure will enable us to explore new allocation policies, optimising over a range of parameters that is wider than what is commonly done today, e.g. the reduction of power consumption.

Main Achievements

The main results of the project will be an architecture for a flexible, secure and scalable service-oriented infrastructure together with a reference implementation. This implementation will be based on open standards and new technologies for the provision of on-demand services. The proposed infrastructure will be tested using several scenarios of complex services which are impossible to achieve with existing infrastructures. These scenarios will illustrate the significant and measurable improvements in productivity, quality, availability, reliability and cost of service delivery.

Benefits

CETIC involvement in RESERVOIR will develop skills in service-oriented infrastructure and make them available to businesses and administrations in the Region. As dissemination and exploitation activity leader, CETIC is responsible for training businesses and governments to use a service-oriented infrastructure.
CETIC is also in charge of analysing threats, defining a security architecture, and implementing security solutions for the RESERVOIR infrastructure.

Partners

 Telefonica Investigacion y Desarrollo
 University College London
 Umea University
 Thales Services SAS
 Sun Microsystems CmbH
 ElsagDatamat S.p.A
 Universita della Svizzera italiana
 The European Chapter of the Open Grid Forum OGF EEIF