Oct. 26 – VISION Cloud will showcase their data storage solutions and services at the Powering the Cloud Conference in Frankfurt, October 30th.

Society is becoming more and more reliant on on-demand services that can support decision making processes based on the ever growing production of digital data. With such demand for data in all walks of life, VISION Cloud, an EC-funded project, is developing a powerful and reliable cloud storage infrastructure. The aim is to facilitate the convergence of IT, media and telecommunications. The infrastructure enables service providers to rapidly deliver rich data-intensive services to their customers. Service consumers benefit from data mobility, higher service availability, quality and dependability across a variety of sectors.

VISION Cloud is showcasing its work in four distinct sectors – the media, telecommunications, enterprise and healthcare at a workshop within the Powering the Cloud conference, from 9:30 to 10:50, 30 October in the Spektrum room.

“The workshop at Powering the Cloud will be an opportunity for stakeholders to find out more about the added-value of our technologies addressing today's challenges in the storage cloud landscape with respect to computational storage, data mobility, compliance, etc. Initial adopters from four main industrial domains (i.e. Media Content Production, Telecommunications Services Delivery, eHealthcare Systems, and Enterprise Business Intelligence) will demonstrate how representative technologies can amplify the value of their provided services”, says Dimosthenis Kyriazis, from the Greek Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) and workshop chair. The VISION Cloud architecture has been designed using the SNIA Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI), which enables interoperability between cloud providers. Implementation has been facilitated by the involvement of SNIA in the Consortium, helping to drive forward cloud federation as a key project objective.

VISION Cloud for Telecommunications

Enhancing the core business of telecommunications companies is central to the Telecommunications use case. VISION Cloud has demonstrated that its storage architecture can enhance the core business of many telecommunications companies through practical, real-world examples with a call centre service provided by one telco being taken to other companies. The scenario will be analysed at the workshop by Jerome Bidet, Orange Labs and includes the subscription to the call centre service by an insurance company and the treatment of a claim by an insurance company advisor, via call centre facilities.

There are clear advantages for end-users on both ends of the phone: the insurance call centre agents and the customer. “Firstly, call centre agents can access objects and metadata related to the content. They can also access services including audio-recording, transcoding, key word extraction, automatic translation. Customers on the other hand, benefit from a much more efficient and richer service from their insurance company and in turn are more likely to stay with their insurance company” says Jerome. He continues, “The innovation lies in the use of a content-centric approach, computational storage mechanisms and account management services. This is mainly illustrated through automatic creation of objects and metadata related to a content stored in VISION Cloud infrastructure and by the use of dynamically ingested storlets enabling to run compute operations as close as possible to the content.” The work carried out on this area is led by Orange Labs, with important contributions from Telenor and Telefonica.

VISION Cloud for the Media

Work between the Italian national broadcaster RAI and German broadcaster Deutsche Welle will help transform the ways in which media companies might use IT systems, storage and data. As more and more open data and data types become available, Data-journalism is becoming a new buzzword. This sea-change brings with it the need for new types of data set storage services that interconnect data and facilitate the work of data-journalists to ingest, filter, sort and visualize information that can be turned into stories for public consumption. In other words, services that turn data into stories. In his presentation Alberto Messina, RAI, will illustrate “the challenges and requirements for storage clouds from the perspective of a media producer and broadcaster”. Furthermore, Alberto will examine experimentations carried out to implement a media production workflow using a storage cloud, taking into account digital video production, reformatting and coding, and universal data resources for visualization and data-driven journalism.

VISION Cloud for Healthcare

With concerns over the trustworthiness of cloud computing, a key goal of VISION Cloud is to ensure a secure data storage service for the secure and efficient exchange of sensitive healthcare data. With Siemens leading research in this area, Albert Eckert, Siemens will present the Healthcare use case which has seen an in-depth evaluation of new technologies for secure cloud computing/storage, data models, mobility, as well as examining the business value of providing personalized healthcare systems that can handle and compute on large data and provide secure cloud interoperability on a cloud data based ecosystem.

The Healthcare use case examines the transfer and storage of personal health records which includes the storage and retrieval of complex data based on logical data modelling, managing representations of real-world entities such as measurements, CT scans, medical terms, genetic information and DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) image file. An interoperable system that also provides mobile access and analytical services will bring considerable benefits to doctors and patients alike.

Vision Cloud for Enterprise

With businesses becoming more and more reliant on real-time data analytics to shape business strategies and as a basis for well-informed decision making processes, VISION Cloud has been assessing improvements to these processes so they can become more agile and adaptable to user needs. Aidan Shribman, SAP, will present work carried out through VISION Cloud to provide more flexible data storage services in the cloud which can reduce costs and improve user experience and support enterprises around the world. He comments “For enterprises developing SaaS cloud offerings - the cloud storage IaaS traditional role is as a simple archive system. While this paradigm is plausible, it may require extra burden in developing supporting storage related logic in the SaaS layer. My talk will show how SAP Instant BI PoC makes use of capabilities of a next-generation cloud storage IaaS. Specifically leveraging advanced capabilities such as: on-boarding federation among storage providers; integrated tenant and user management; computational storage for handling data normalization; fine-grained control over level's of data replication.”

The VISION Cloud workshop takes place at 9:30 – 10:50, 30 October in the Spektrum room at the Powering the Cloud conference, Frankfurt, Germany.

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Source: VISION Cloud