Flexiant s FP7 Involvement Supports Academic Partners and Research Institutions to Develop the Next Wave of Cloud Technology Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) bundles all research-related EU initiatives together under a common roof playing a crucial role in reaching the goals of growth, competitiveness and employment
Situation FP7 is the short name for the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development. This is the EU s main instrument for funding research in Europe. FP7 is designed to respond to Europe s employment needs, global competitiveness and quality of life. Flexiant is supporting six FP7 projects including: PaaSage A four year project to develop an open and integrated platform to support model based lifecycle management of Cloud applications. The project is worth 8.4 million to the members of this consortium, of which 6.3 million is funded by the European Union To ensure success, PaaSage requires significant platform resources to provide a high level of performance coupled with expertise in supporting a commercial platform. Flexiant is supporting the PaaSage initiative by supplying the test platform in the cloud that enables the project to assess use cases and demonstrate these with the agility, freedom and flexibility to scale, deploy and configure resources triggered by indicators from the Flexiant platform. Our support for this project facilitates the necessary testing environment essential to an open and integrated platform that supports both design and deployment of cloud applications. CELAR This three year project seeks to address the rapid increase of applications running on cloud infrastructures and the associated storage, compute and networking resources required as a result. CELAR will provide the European software industry with a modular, complete open-source system for automatic, elastic programming at the platform level. It will be bundled in a single software package for one-click installation of any application alongside its automated resource provisioning over a cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This project is worth 3.5 million to the members of this consortium. As part of the consortium, Flexiant will enable cloud and application performance metrics through a scalable monitoring system for the research team. Furthermore, Flexiant will contribute to application testing and integration on the platform, application resource management and analysis of user requirements to ensure the infrastructure can enable automated testing, bug reports and feature requests. Lastly, Flexiant will also contribute to integration of prototypes and subsequent prototype testing followed by use case application testing.
CumuloNimbo The CumuloNimbo three year project seeks to obtain a highly scalable transactional platform as a service (PaaS). One of the innovations will be attaining scalability without compromising on consistency. The project is worth 4.7 million to the consortium members. With the Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator solution established at the University Politecnica Madrid, Flexiant is providing the platform required to utilise local storage in compute nodes to prove the core project innovation of scaling big data with integrity guarantees. Flexiant provides both public and private platforms for validity testing to be carried out by various parts of the CumuloNimbo stack OPTIMIS This project presents the fundamentals for a toolkit for scalable and dependable service platforms and architectures that enable flexible and dynamic provisioning of cloud services, known as cloud bursting. Flexiant s involvement in this project includes leading a core cloud bursting use case where the toolkit developed by the project is tested to understand the boundaries and limitations of the current cloud environment. The goal is to use external resources in a managed, cost effective, quality conscious manner to create an aggregated set of geographically and independently owned resources. Flexiant also provides extensive historical data and run-time data. Both sets of data help the consortium validate developed tools in the areas of risk, trust, eco and cost while also integrating monitoring tools to allow a decision engine to make dynamic real-time decisions for enhanced quality of service. 4CaaSt The two year project offers an application marketplace for service providers to use to focus on their core business (both the software and the service monetization), leaving the underlying complexity of infrastructure and platforms out of their concerns. This marketplace s main purpose is to build an innovative framework for creating, marketing, deploying and managing applications on the cloud, both over platform products and platform as a service. Flexiant s involvement in the 4CaaSt project includes contributing to a work package on resource deployment and management in areas such as run time deployment and cloud scaling where compute and storage requirements of an application will automatically requisition this from our platform. In addition, Flexiant contributes to the use case experimentation to prove the project s developments. MODAClouds The main goal of MODAClouds is to provide methods, a decision support system, an open source IDE and run-time environment for the high-level design, early prototyping, semi-automatic code generation, and automatic deployment of applications on multi-clouds with guaranteed QoS.
Flexiant Involvement Working as part of each consortium, which includes enterprise and academic partners and research institutions, Flexiant is able to support research and development with Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator, a mature and proven cloud-orchestration software solution. Flexiant offers five main solutions for each FP7 project including: 1. Provides the cloud platform for each project team to build and test open source tools as well as test use case scenarios. 2. Provides each project with the necessary use case data for testing that is not manufactured. Instead, it presents real-life use cases with the appropriate data. The open-source tools take application context data and translate it to resource requirements. This involves Flexiant exposing cost, resource availability and geographical location data via API. 3. Provision of real data sets from cloud provider activity. For example, providing the relevant data to fulfil the modelling architecture plans. In addition, Flexiant provides the metadata database and social network system for the output costs performance and other data required by apps. 4. Offers a mature comprehensive API(s) necessary for project developments. 5. Our extensive cloud expertise having introduced the first cloud platform to Europe. Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator is a mature, reliable and feature-rich software solution for cloud management. The software was developed to launch the first public cloud service platform in Europe, in 2007 and was first made commercially available to the market in 2010. Since then, it has been named as the most innovative and trendsetting cloud management solution by Info-Tech Research Group. Stable, reliable, proven and feature-rich, Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator is simple to understand, simple to deploy and simple to use.
Flexiant Benefits Flexiant offers each FP7 project the following benefits: Big Data Scaling Projects requiring additional research benefit from Flexiant s ability to easily provision cloud resources quickly and reliably. Mobile Data Management Flexiant s platform can become part of a larger mobile ecosystem where the advantages of a virtualised cloud can be offered seamlessly to services dealing with the capture and management of mobile data. Multi-Cloud Scenarios Flexiant support scenarios outside of local resource boundaries and can deploy different services at the most appropriate location. PaaS Solutions Flexiant offers projects the ability to adapt its software to be used in a platform as a service scenario where developers and service providers can provision various applications to build an overall service on top of our software. Flexiant is able to support and benefit each FP7 project by deploying clouds on existing hardware to partners including many universities. Doing this allows these universities to run experimentation and use case scenarios which also create the ability to experiment across multiple cloud topologies. In addition, Flexiant offers the capabilities for higher level applications and decision making tools by ensuring the necessary information is available by making certain resource parameters accessible. Lastly, because of Flexiant s extensive expertise in the cloud industry, the team provides general guidance on all cloud related issues. Benefit to Flexiant Flexiant is contributing for the benefit of each of these projects, but also receives significant benefits from collaborating with these partners. The FP7 projects enable Flexiant to build strong relationships with organisations across Europe helping to promote the benefits of Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator. As a result, academic partners and research institutions, will directly utilise the features available from our cloud orchestration software when developing or evaluating projects. By partnering with industry and academic leaders, we are jointly pushing the boundaries and benefiting from combined expertise. Flexiant is able to use the knowledge gained from these projects in further development of Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator. Involvement with FP7 is contributing to Flexiant s leading industry position.
Future Flexiant is also collaborating in 10 proposals under three European Commission FP7 calls. Flexiant seeks to support these projects by providing the cloud provisioning technology to support research, development and testing. About Flexiant Flexiant is a leading international provider of cloud orchestration software for on-demand, fully automated provisioning of cloud services. Flexiant s software gives cloud service providers business agility, freedom and flexibility to scale, deploy and configure cloud services, simply and cost-effectively. Vendor agnostic and supporting multiple hypervisors, Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator is a software suite that is service provider ready, enabling cloud service provisioning through to granular metering, billing and reseller management. Used by over one hundred organisations worldwide, from small hosters to large Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Enterprises, Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator is simple to understand, simple to deploy and simple to use. Flexiant customers include NetGroup, FP7 Consortium, ITEX, TransEnt, Fast2host and Boston Group. Visit www.flexiant.com.
Partners and Research Institutions involved with Flexiant for FP7 Projects PaaSage be.wan Science & Technology Facilities Council Cetic SysFera Automotive Simulation Center High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) of the University of Stuttgart ERCIM - the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics EVRY Lufthansa Systems GWDG SINTEF Inria CELAR OPTIMIS Coventry University Enterprises Ltd (CUE) Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) Signosis Sprl (SIGNOSIS) Deutsches Zentrum Fuer Luft-Und Raumfahrt Ev (DLR) Forum of European National Highway Research Laboratories (FEHRL) Laboratorio Nacional de Engenharia Civil (LNEC) Road and Bridge Research Institute (IBDiM) University College Dublin (UCD) Sapienza Università di Roma- Centre for Transport and Logistics (CTL) Transport & Mobility Leuven (TML) CE Delft European Commission Joint Research Centre (EC- JRC) SIXSQ SARL (SIXSQ) Institute of Cancer Research Royal Cancer Hospital (ICR) PlayGen Ltd Greek Research and Technology Networks S.A. Technische Universitaet Wien (TUV) / Vienna University of Technology University of Cyprus Athena Research and innovation Center in Information Communication and Knowledge Technologies CumuloNimbo Universidad Politécnica de Madrid SAP AG Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas Yahoo Research McGill University Universidade do Minho MODAClouds 4CaaSt TELEFONICA INVESTIGACION Y DESARROLLO SA SAP AG FRANCE TELECOM SA TELECOM ITALIA S.p.A ERICSSON GMBH NOKIA SIEMENS NETWORKS TELEKOMMUNIKACIOS KERESKEDELMI ES SZOLGALTATO KFT UNIVERSIDAD POLITECNICA DE MADRID UNIVERSITAET STUTTGART STICHTING KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT BRABANT UNIVERSITEIT VAN TILBURG UNIVERSITAT ST GALLEN Bull SAS 2ND QUADRANT LIMITED UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik Berlin INSTITUTE OF COMMUNICATION AND COMPUTER SYSTEMS BONITASOFT STIFTELSEN SINTEF IMPERIAL COLLEGE OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND MEDICINE SOFTEAM ATOS SPAIN S.A. CA TECHNOLOGIES DEVELOPMENT SPAIN S.A. SIEMENS SRL BOC INFORMATION SYSTEMS GMBH Flexiant INSTITUTUL Limited, Geddes E-AUSTRIA House, TIMISOARA Kirkton North, Livingston, EH54 6GU, UK Tel 0870 POLITECNICO 050 0080 or DI +44 MILANO 1506 606 000 www.flexiant.com