Reservoir

Latest news on RESERVOIR

• RESERVOIR Leading the Future of Cloud Computing
  
  Brussels, February 22, 2010 – The European Commission (EC) recently highlighted, in an Expert Group’s Report on the Future of Cloud Computing, the need for coordinated open source deployments between Research and Industry. This is to promote the use of flexible commercial Cloud-based services infrastructure offerings. The RESERVOIR (Resources and Services Virtualization without Barriers) European Framework Programme (FP7) project, now in its third year, has taken a significant organic growth in this perspective through the development of open architecture and interfaces and open source software. These are available as downloadable specifications and tools encompassed under “the RESERVOIR Framework” which presents a blueprint to help businesses build on-demand infrastructure services, at competitive costs, across disparate administrative domains, while assuring quality of service.
  
  Press release for download
  
  
• Visit the new, dynamic RESERVOIR website at www.reservoir-fp7.eu
  
  The main features cover accessing components of the RESERVOIR Framework, learning about how RESERVOIR open source software and specifications may be used to build a federated Cloud infrastructure. Other add-ons include: blogs from high-level experts, focused publications, featured articles and videos on RESERVOIR, offering the user a selection of RESERVOIR opportunities.

What is RESERVOIR about?

RESERVOIR - Resources and Services Virtualization without Barriers is an ambitious European Union FP7 funded project aiming at increasing the competitiveness of the EU economy by introducing a powerful ICT infrastructure, using Cloud Computing technologies, for the reliable and effective delivery of services as utilities.

This infrastructure supports the setup and deployment of services on demand, at competitive costs, across disparate administrative domains, while assuring quality of service.

RESERVOIR is a consortium of 13 European companies and universities who collaborate on developing an advanced infrastructure for Cloud Computing, based on deep integration of virtualization and Grid technologies.

RESERVOIR enables massive scale deployment and management of complex IT services across different administrative domains, IT platforms and geographies. The project provides a foundation for a service-based online economy, where - using virtualization technologies - resources and services are transparently provisioned and managed on an on-demand basis at competitive costs with high quality of service.

RESERVOIR is laying a foundation for a service-based European online economy, where services - which have become critical to our business environment - are transparently, scalably and flexibly provisioned and managed for the benefit of businesses and citizens.

The current work of RESERVOIR consists in setting up an architecture and a reference implementation of a service-oriented infrastructure (SOI) which "built on open standards and new technologies" is providing a dependable framework for delivering services as utilities. RESERVOIR can demonstrate how this infrastructure supports the deployment of complex service scenarios that are not otherwise supported by today's technology. Doing this, RESERVOIR clearly aims to achieve quantified and significant improvements in service delivery productivity, quality, availability and cost.

From a scientific standpoint, The RESERVOIR work will contribute to the state-of-the-art by:

• Significantly advancing virtualisation and Grid technologies and deeply integrating them, thereby creating a basis for the next generation SOI, where services and their associated resources are effectively delivered "without boundaries" of geography and configuration.

• Developing service management technology capable of exploiting the strengths and addressing the challenges presented by the RESERVOIR infrastructure, e.g. monitoring service execution and resource utilization, and triggering service relocation and resource reallocation decisions as needed to assure compliance with Service Level Agreements across disparate domains.

RESERVOIR technologies are built on open source and open standards, avoiding vendor lock-in and ensuring a level playing field for all. From a business perspective, the technological advances underpinned by RESERVOIR enable SMEs to join forces in terms of data centres and networks and build a substantial cloud.

To this end, RESERVOIR unites key European players who, in addition to cumulative expertise in Grid computing and virtualisation, bring in a tradition of support for open standards and open specifications. Therefore, the prime deliverable of the project is an architecture and a reference implementation for a service-oriented infrastructure, which will be built on open standards and new technologies to provide a scalable, flexible and dependable framework for delivering services as utilities. The participation in and contribution to standards organizations is therefore a major target for this EU research project.

Related links on RESERVOIR within IT-Tude.com:

• Cloud Computing – Enterprise Perspectives by Maik Lindner, SAP Research, certified contributor

• OpenNebula - Open Source Tool for Advanced Cloud Computing by Ignacio M. Llorente (Prof), Universidad Complutense Madrid, certified contributor

• Cloudscape II, 22-23 February 2010, Brussels, Belgium

• Driving Forward the Adoption of Standards for Cloud Computing OGF’s Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) Working Group by Thijs Metsch, Sun Microsystems, OCCI co-chair & certified contributor