RESERVOIR

RESERVOIR (REsources and SERvices Virtualisation withOut barrIeRs) is a research project partly funded by the European Commission as an Integrated Project under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) sponsorship program. Started on February 1, 2008, the project will run 36 months, until January 31, 2011.
According to the project factsheet, their goal is "to increase the competitiveness of the European Union economy by introducing a powerful Information and Communication Technologies infrastructure for the reliable and effective delivery of services utilities. This infrastructure will support the setup and deployment of services on demand, at competitive costs, across disparate administrative domains, while assuring quality of service."
The findings of the project are available on the project's website.
Overview
RESERVOIR will provide a foundation for a service-based online economy, where - using virtualisation technologies - resources and services are transparently provided and managed on an on-demand basis at competitive costs with high quality of service.
The project consortium is coordinated by IBM Haifa Research Lab, and includes a good balance of industry and academia.
Cloud computing allows data centres to operate more like the Internet by enabling computing across a distributed, globally accessible fabric of resources, delivering on-demand services over the Web, reducing software complexity and costs, expediting time-to-market, improving reliability and enhancing accessibility of consumers to government and business services. Thus, Cloud computing represents a true materialisation of Service Oriented Computing (SOC)’s visionary promise.
RESERVOIR is developing systems and service technologies that will serve as the infrastructure for Cloud computing.
The vision of RESERVOIR is to enable the delivery of services on an on-demand basis, at competitive costs, and without requiring a large capital investment in infrastructure.
SOC carries the visionary promise of reducing software complexity and costs, expediting time-to-market, improving reliability and enhancing accessibility of consumers to government and business services. However, conditional to the wide-scale penetration of SOC to the economic landscape, the ICT industry needs to solve several well-recognised technical challenges. One such key challenge is the development of a scalable and effective service-oriented infrastructure. This is the challenge addressed by RESERVOIR.
To accomplish the vision, the RESERVOIR work will extend, combine and integrate three technologies: Virtualization, Grid computing and Business Service Management (BSM). This approach can deliver ubiquitous utility computing by harnessing the complementary strengths of these technologies. Virtualisation technology has been shown to be useful in overcoming some barriers to commercial adoption of Grid technology. On the other hand, RESERVOIR will add virtualisation-awareness to the Grids, by using low-level monitoring information for metering and billing.
To benefit fully from the dynamic nature of the RESERVOIR computing cloud, the project will develop a uniform policy-driven management layer that will automatically allocate resources to services and monitor execution and utilisation to ensure compliance to Service Level Agreements (SLA) by adjusting resource allocation level and location. The new capabilities of the infrastructure will enable us to explore new allocation policies, optimising over a range of parameters that is wider than what is commonly done today, e.g. the reduction of power consumption.
Outcome of the project
The main results of the project will be an architecture for flexible, secure and scalable service-oriented infrastructure together with a reference implementation, . This implementation will be based on open standards and new technologies for the provision of on-demand services. The proposed infrastructure will be tested using several scenarios of complex services which are impossible to achieve with existing infrastructures. These scenarios will illustrate the significant and measurable improvements in productivity, quality, availability, reliability and cost of service delivery. The OpenNebula cloud management toolkit, the LATTICE could monitoring framework and toolkit, the CLAUDIA service management toolkit and Extensions to Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) are the main technology outcomes. The RESERVOIR Framework, available through the project's website, contains links to all the other Open Source components created by the project.
RESERVOIR's Impacts on State of the Art in Cloud Computing
RESERVOIR's technical innovations have put RESERVOIR technology on the roadmap for future research; it has been sited in a expert group committee commissioned by the European Commission on the future of cloud computing in Europe , in The Top 150 Players in Cloud Computing , as well as listed by a number of sources as one of the top Open Source resources for Cloud Computing .

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