SNIA Europe

Advancing storage & information technology

VISIONCloud

Virtualised Storage Services for the Future Internet - Towards a media-aware Data Access Layer.

Right now, there is one big reason, why Cloud Computing is talked about so much: It offers cost flexibility.

In the past, a company or user with high storage needs would have to buy servers or even built a data center. Today, there are already many options to simply move to cloud platforms and pay just for what is really used.

But, is that all the cloud has to offer? At this moment, companies from large sectors such Health, Telecommunication, Media and general business adminstration face a growing constraint in many day-to-day workflows where data needs to be accessed, worked with and stored.

Innovative platforms enabling new ways to work with storage

How about platforms, where patients, doctors and hospitals could securely exchange files and data, resulting in better services at lower costs? What about innovative ways to work on media projects with large HD video files and big data analysis? In short, there are many areas where we all would benefit from new and better functionalities in working with cloud-based storage.

New Services for the Future Internet

The goal of the EU-funded VISION Cloud project is to introduce a powerful ICT infrastructure for reliable and effective delivery of data-intensive storage services, facilitating the convergence of ICT, media and telecommunications.This infrastructure will support the setup and deployment of data and storage services on demand, at competitive costs, across disparate administrative domains, while providing QoS (Quality of Service) and security guarantees.

How is VISION Cloud unique?

The explosion of personal and organisational digital data has been recognised as one of the most significant characteristics of the decade. Generated data is growing faster than we can store it. In parallel our society has become critically dependent on services to extract valuable information from the data and drive decision making by individuals, businesses and government, across all aspects of life. In the emerging era of the Future Internet, the explosion of raw data and the dependence on data services is expected to be further amplified due to two important trends, namely the strong proliferation of data-intensive services and the digital convergence of telco, media and ICT.

The primary deliverables of VISION Cloud will be an architecture and a reference implementation of a cloud-based infrastructure, built on open standards and new technologies, to provide a scalable, flexible and dependable framework for optimised delivery of data-intensive storage services.

We will demonstrate how this VISION Cloud infrastructure -- where an object data model, computational storage, content-centric access, comprehensive data interoperability, and QoS and security guarantees play a central role -- supports new emerging telco/media services. In doing so, we aim to achieve significant and quantifiable improvements in service delivery productivity, quality, availability, reliability and cost.

Partners

IBM Haifa Research Lab (IL), SAP Research (DE), Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo (ES), Siemens AG (DE), Engineering Ingegneria Informatica Spa (IT), Institute of Communication and Computer Systems - National Technical University of Athens (GR), Deutsche Welle (DE), RAI-Radiotelevisione Italiana Spa (IT), Umeå University (SE), SNIA Europe (UK), Telenor (NO), France Telecom (FR), Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SE), University of Messina (IT), iTricity B.V. (NL)