The project, promoted by the European Commission, is committed to the 'hybrid cloud' with an investment of 10.5 million euros over three years

The objective is to optimise the life cycle of the services offered by a cloud, covering everything from the development of the services to their deployment and operation, and to create a full toolkit which will be available to companies and organisations

MADRID, Dec. 14 — Atos, an international IT services company, leads the consortium of academic and industrial partners responsible for carrying out the OPTIMIS project, one of the key elements in the European Commission strategy to ensure that Europe leads the deployment of cloud computing. Optimising Infrastructure Services (OPTIMIS) will represent an investment of 10.5 million euros, of which 7 million shall be provided by the European Union, and will last until May 2013.

The objective of the project is the optimisation of the life cycle of the services offered by a cloud, both at service provider and infrastructure provider level, taking into account all of the phases, from the building to the deployment and operation of the service. OPTIMIS will produce a toolkit that covers the entire service life cycle and numerous deployment scenarios, with confidence, reliability, risk, cost, ecological efficiency and legal aspects as the principal optimisation factors.

OPTIMIS is driven by the idea that hybrid clouds shall be the model of the future, since they will enable private clouds to interact in an integrated manner with a varied ecosystem of public clouds under numerous models using Brokers and Aggregators. The objective of OPTIMIS is that companies and organisations can, automatically and transparently, externalise services and applications to hybrid cloud providers offering guarantees and reliability. As such, OPTIMIS plans to give support and facilitate the appearance of an ecosystem of providers and end customers that will benefit from an optimised operation of services and infrastructures.

The consortium has already started the development of an ‘Software Infrastructure as a Service (SIaaS)' which enables organisations to automatically distribute the most appropriate execution channels for a service, be it on locally installed resources or on the public or private cloud, depending on price, security requirements, eco-efficiency, risk, cost and confidence, amongst other criteria. The OPTIMIS software will support hybrid cloud models, as well as the creation of a market in which the cloud providers and their services shall be secure and reliable for consumers.

There is a plan to use the OPTIMIS specifications and tools to develop a few models or real cases that will demonstrate the possibilities of new generation cloud architectures:

• The Cloud Programming Model case will show how the OPTIMIS framework can be used for the migration aspects of legacy applications and the development of new applications on the cloud.
  
  
• The Cloud Brokerage case will demonstrate the possibilities of cloud intermediation and of aggregation between several providers.
  
  
• The Cloudbursting case will show how organisations can scale their infrastructures in an automated fashion in certain circumstances, by using third party resources.

Atos (Spain) is the project coordinator, and also participating in the consortium are the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (Spain), BT Group (United Kingdom),Flexiant (United Kingdom), Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (Germany), ICCS-NTUA (Greece), SAP (Germany), The 451 Group (United Kingdom), Umea University (Sweden), University of Stuttgart and Leibniz University of Hannover (Germany), City University of London and Leeds University (United Kingdom) and Arsys (Spain).

For more information, visit www.optimis-project.eu/.

About Atos

Atos is an international information technology services company with annual 2010 pro forma revenues of EUR 8.6 billion and 74,000 employees in 42 countries. Serving a global client base, it delivers hi-tech transactional services, consulting and technology services, systems integration and managed services. With its deep technology expertise and industry knowledge, it works with clients across the following market sectors: Manufacturing, Retail, Services; Public, Health & Transport; Financial Services; Telecoms, Media & Technology; Energy & Utilities.

Atos is focused on business technology that powers progress and helps organizations to create their firm of the future. It is the Worldwide Information Technology Partner for the Olympic Games and is quoted on the Paris Eurolist Market. Atos operates under the brands Atos, Atos Consulting and Technology Services, Atos Worldline and Atos Worldgrid. For more information, visit atos.net.

-----

Source: Atos