Overview
RESERVOIR ("Resources and Services Virtualization without Barriers"), is a European Union FP7-funded Cloud Computing research project that will enable massive-scale deployment and management of complex IT services both in a computing cloud, and across clouds under different administrative domains, IT platforms and geographies. Composed of thirteen leading industrial and academic partners, the project will provide 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.
Striving to develop new technologies beyond today's commercial Cloud Computing offerings, RESERVOIR will be researching such topics as:
- Federation of clouds across vendor boundaries to seamlessly allow expansion of existing capacity.
- Definition of open standards for Cloud Computing, to break the lock-in imposed by vendors today.
- Quality of Service (QoS) aware cloud computing backed by enforceable Service Level Agreements, including the necessary monitoring at all levels.
- Techniques for rapid deployment of an application without service provider intervention from a Service Manifest.
- Automatic life cycle management of services which may even span multiple virtualized resources.
IBM Haifa Research Lab's Role
As one of the initiators of the original RESERVOIR proposal, IBM HRL is playing a key position in the project, not only having the largest share of funded person-months, but also serving as the Project Coordinator and leading the architecture definition work. In addition, IBM is either or leading or participating in a number of technical work packages, including:
- Expanding upon underlying virtual machine technology, including generic low level management of virtualized resources.
- Developing virtualized networks, isolated for security.
- Relocation of virtual machines across physical hosts without shared storage and unrestricted by sub-network boundaries.
- The development of allocation algorithms for optimized placement of virtual machines.
- Provisioning of virtual machines, including image customization.
- Proposal of standards for Cloud Computing.
Demos
CeBIT 2009 Demo Held every Spring in Hannover, Germany, CeBIT is the world's largest IT and communication trade show. This year's event attracted over 4,500 companies from 69 countries, and more than 400,000 visitors. RESERVOIR was proudly featured in booths sponsored by IBM and SAP, in a demo migrating SAP applications between IBM Power6 servers located across clouds.
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