Five Innovations

The VISION Cloud Project Focus

VISION Cloud (started in October 2010) is still at an early stage. As a means to make the project understandable, we have identified five areas where innovation is needed.

Storage in the cloud, how could it be better, easier and more secure? This question is currently driving and shaping the actual research work in VISION Cloud.

At this early stage we have defined five key areas of innovation, below is a brief list with more detail. It is important to state that these should at best not be the only innovations at the end of the project. Instead, these are the basic starting points to add features and functionalities to storage in the cloud.

Overview:  Five key areas for innovation

1. Raising the Abstraction Level of Storage:  Encapsulating storage into objects with user-defined and system-defined attributes (a.k.a. "metadata")
2. Data Mobility and Federation without Boundaries:  The goal here is to substantially extend the limited data migration capabilities available in contemporary infrastructures to migrate and federate data across geographically distributed administrative domains, ensuring comprehensive and transparent data interoperability and overcoming the problem of data lock-in.
3. Computational Storage: Providing an architected solution for bringing computing to storage. Enabling secure execution of computational tasks near their data, applicable both to user-driven computational tasks as well as autonomous data derivation and transformation.
4. Content Centric Storage: Facilitating access to data by content and its relationships rather than details of the underlying storage containers, further supported by mechanisms to define domain-specific storage optimisations, and altogether leading to highly simplified and efficient storage access.
5. Advanced Capabilities for Cloud-Based Storage:  Combining the base concepts for cloud computing with additional capabilities of storage virtualization, advancing the state of the art by creating a platform where data-intensive services can be provided securely, at the desired level of service, and at competitive costs.

As stated above, these - partially very technical goals - are just the base where the project starts. In simplified terms the goal is to enable users to simply do more with the stored data in the cloud - find it, move it, work with it, access large repositories and save the data in highly secure way.

From innovations to use cases

The actual results of this work will be applied and tested in four use cases - more about this practical side of the project here.