FLEXIANT. Utility Computing on Demand

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1 FLEXIANT Utility Computing on Demand

2 Flexiant Flexiant is a software and services company, one of the world's first public/private Cloud providers. We provide cloud infrastructure software and services for hosting providers, data centre owners and telecommunications operators. Flexiant is privately held and based in Livingston, Scotland. FlexiScale is an on demand computing platform that enables you to fully utilise your computing infrastructure by rapidly adapting your usage requirements as needed with instant results. Our flagship product, Extility, was launched in March 2010, and is the culmination of many years of development of a hosting centric cloud and utility computing platform. Uniquely amongst its peers, we have a heritage in the hosting industry stretching back to 1997.

3 History Originally developed by hosting provider XCalibre Communications Limited, the Extility platform was designed specifically with the needs of the web-hosting industry in mind as the basis for XCalibre's public cloud offering, FlexiScale. In 2009, following the sale of XCalibre's web hosting business, the Extility technology and the team behind it transferred to a new entity, Flexiant Limited, entirely focused on further development of the Extility platform and making it available to other operators. FlexiScale, is Europe s first cloud platform and was launched in This showcase of our Extility technology illustrates how it enables end users to purchase computing services on a flexible, scalable, automated computing and hosting infrastructure. Customers can flex their requirements up and down on demand and only pay for the service that they actually use.

4 Overview of our UI

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6 Cloud Interoperability Plethora of commercial developments in cloud computing', including service oriented architectures (PaaS, SaaS, IaaS) and virtualisation, widely promoted as means of resource efficiency. Gains with cost savings, increased interoperability, increased efficiency and flexibility in the way information is stored, managed and used. Achieved through shared network-delivered services, both public and private, in which each user sees only the service. Implementation infrastructure is managed elsewhere and is transparent to the consumer.

7 Real World Solutions The Flexiant Cloud already provides real world solutions. A well know top league football team: on demand resources are utilised when they experience high load/traffic scenarios and then revert back to physical hardware only when the load/traffic drops away. A well known e-gaming website: provide a pre-made scalable programming sandbox environment for third parties to develop applications for their offerings.

8 Project Involvement Flexiant is involved in three FP7 European funded projects where academia and industry collaborate to help move European industry beyond the state of the art. A TSB project with a practical end result. These projects act as a stimulus for collaboration in areas where normally the various industry sectors work autonomously and often without academic intervention.

9 OPTIMIS FP7 Project High-level objective to enable a highly open, scalable, virtualised Cloud Service Ecosystem that improves the delivery of adaptable, self-service, secure, elastic, auditable and sustainable (ecological and economical) IT services. Overall aim is allow organisations to automatically and seamlessly, externalise services and applications into trustworthy and auditable cloud providers whilst managing sensitive/legislative restricted data for the consumer in a transparent manner. Ecosystem will give rise to a strengthened European ICT industry able to meet key societal and economical needs.

10 OPTIMIS Overview

11 OPTIMIS Use Case #1 Cloud Bursting The dynamic deployment by a software/management layer application that runs on an internal Cloud provider infrastructure resources to a public/private cloud to address a spike in demand, that is outside the capacity of that provider. FlexiScale will be presented to an internal organisation (Atos Origin) as an external provider which can be utilised as a metered service. The combination of utility style on a public cloud gives end users scalability options while on a payas-you-go self-service platform.

12 OPTIMIS Use Case #2 Cloud Brokerage Enterprise use of multiple cloud providers: an organisation makes use of services provided by various cloud providers to fulfill an internal process. Cloud provider to broker multiple providers to provide a SLA-based tiered pricing model: an enterprise approaches a cloud broker with a given set of functional and SLA-based requirements and the cloud broker then picks up the best match. Cloud aggregation ecosystem: treat both IT and business functions as a series of interconnected cloud services.

13 4CaaSt FP7 Project Advanced PaaS which supports elastic and optimised hosting of internet-scale and multi-tier applications. Collaboration and organisation required to embed all necessary features, easing programming of rich applications, enabling the creation of business ecosystem where apps from different providers can be tailored to end users, mashed up and traded together. Avoids software fragmentation and reuses software components.

14 CumuloNimbo FP7 Project Next generation PaaS for cloud providers which demand consistency, availability, and simpler programming abstractions, such as transactional consistency. Current PaaS systems sacrifice data consistency for scalability, thus increasing complexity of building applications on top of such platforms. High scalability, 100+ service-nodes, providing scalability without sacrificing consistency, major breakthrough that will enable European stakeholders using service platforms to gain competitive advantage.

15 Enhanced Cloud Core Security TSB Project Technology Strategy Board (TSB) collaborative project. Cloud computing has been recognised as an important new paradigm to support small and medium size businesses and general IT applications. Despite its advantages and rapid growth, cloud computing brings several security privacy and trust issues that need to be tackled. Through this collaborative project, we will provide some revolutionary solutions to these issues. Collaboration with a UK Datacentre and cutting edge security services company who provide security solutions to the financial sector. We will work together to change the perception of Cloud/virtualisation based security vulnerabilities.

16 Usability Gap - 1 Open standards/cross platform integration should be promoted and adopted but only where apt. Libcloud - open-source project to make it easier for businesses and developers to build apps that work with IaaS providors such as Flexiant. 4CaaSt will further this concept. vcloud - Flexiscale Cloud is hypervisor agnostic, vsphere is being slotted into our modular Public and Private Clouds and used with other cooperating hypervisors. StratusLab(FP7) - distributed computing for the European Grid. Reservoir(FP7) - Enable massive scale deployment and management of complex IT services across different administrative domains, IT platforms and geographies. BonFIRE(FP7) - A multi-site cloud facility to support apps, services and systems research targeting the Internet of Services community within the Future Internet.

17 Usability Gap - 2 OpenNebula: Similar to Extility and also used by the 4CaaSt project. Projects commonly will use more than one Cloud infrastructure software stack as developed components must demonstrate adaptability/versatility. There are also inherent dangers to the over adoption of standards as this can then be restrictive to the technological advancement of the paradigm. Open Grid Forum (OGF) RESTful web services: WS-Agreement Specification defines a language to describe an SLA and defines a protocol to create SLAs based on so-called templates. The service levels define acceptable QoS thresholds agreed upon by both parties. The OPTIMIS project will adopt this standard. Consideration to Open Source Alliances, OW2 Consortium, Morfeo, OCCi.

18 Technology Gap To boost the adoption of Cloud Technologies the technology gap has to be addressed. Industry and academia must focus on innovation that addresses real world problems that are a hindrance to the adoption of the platform. The needs of end users should be more prominent with an emphasis on use cases that lead to practical solutions. Cloud initiatives going beyond the state of the art require funding.

19 Cultural Gap Education of users to make them aware of the advantages in their adoption of current technologies. Real life requirements of users for apt use case scenarios during development. Provision of testbeds/sandbox implementations with a rapid turnaround capability.