Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

Conclusions

List of Tables

Executive Summary

This document summarises the dissemination, collaboration and standardization activities in the final year of the StratusLab project, and provides an analysis of the success of these activities.

The project has been well represented at events internationally, with conference booths, invited talks, presentations, panel discussions, posters and tutorials. In particular Stratuslab has participated in EGI events, other events in the e-Infrastructures area and cloud-focused conferences and meetings. Additionally events outside of the e-Infrastructures domain have been targeted.

The website was redesigned to incorporate social media integration, videos, a simpler site structure and improved look and feel. Announcement mailing lists and a user forum have also been used to communicate with users and attempt to create an active user community.

Press-releases and articles have helped to spread awareness of the project and disseminate results. Project results are also disseminated through demonstrations and tutorials with six training events being organised this year. A paper describing an economic analysis of running a private cloud was accepted for the CloudCP Workshop of the EuroSys 2012 conference.

Major dissemination efforts are centered around software releases with a release dissemination plan being created for each. Release announcements have been widely picked up by on-line technical media outlets.

Dissemination activities have been successful with most metrics met and the majority of tasks in the Roadmap for year two achieved. Some weaknesses remain, with traffic to the website not as high as hoped, and the use of the user forum quite low.

The collaboration activity has also progressed well, with several MoUs in place and many more informal collaborations. Collaboration with commercial partners have been particularly fruitful, and project partners have successfully developed commercial products in collaboration with other companies.

In the area of standarization, the project has implemented the OGF OCCI standard, the TCloud Specification and the OVF standard. Discussions on new standards for the cloud area have continued, albeit with few concrete outcomes.

The project has completed the ERINA+ Socio-Economic Impact Self-Assessment. Despite some problems with the tool, the initial results are favourable and Stratus-Lab compares well to other projects.

Introduction

Purpose

The purpose of this report is to review the dissemination, collaboration and standardization activities of the second year of the project. It should be read in conjunction with D3.1 Initial Plan for Dissemination, Collaboration and Standardization Activities [START_REF] O'callaghan | Initial plan for dissemination, collaboration and standardization activities[END_REF] and D3.2 Report on Dissemination, Collaboration and Standardization Activities [START_REF] O'callaghan | Report on dissemination, collaboration and standardization activities[END_REF].

Organization

This document contains two main chapters, Dissemination and Collaboration and Standardization. Each of these chapters first describes the Aims and Objectives of the activity, before going on to describe the activities undertaken during the project. They go on to include an analysis of the activities, highlighting successful activities and any issues or problems encountered. Finally some conclusions are presented in the Conclusions chapter.

Dissemination

Aims and Objectives

From the beginning of the StratusLab project, dissemination has had a high priority with the goal of ensuring visibility of the project and its results across Europe and internationally.

The dissemination effort in StratusLab has several broad aims, outlined originally in D3.1 [START_REF] O'callaghan | Initial plan for dissemination, collaboration and standardization activities[END_REF], as follows:

• To raise project awareness • To inform users and the public about the project results

• To interact with user communities in order to educate them about the project's benefits (in conjunction with WP2)

Target audiences

The StratusLab consortium aims to make the project results known to multiple target audiences including -but not limited to -industry, commercial clients, technology journalists, researchers, students and other technical professionals. The technical target audience for StratusLab has been split into two broad categories: end-users and systems administrators. The end-users consist of the domain scientists who will use StratusLab in their work; while the system administrators belong to the resource centres which will install the StratusLab distribution, in particular those coming from a background in grid computing (e.g. from National Grid Initiatives and the European Grid Infrastructure).

Dissemination methods

The StratusLab project makes use of a range of methods to meet the dissemination aims and objectives. These include:

• Interaction with related communities to raise awareness • In print and online • Publishing, demonstrating and disseminating project results

• Events and talks

• Publicity related to software releases The project incorporates to the largest extent possible the communication best practices collected by the European Commission and acknowledges the funding from the European Commission through the FP7 programme via the appropriate use of the FP7 logo, EU flag, EC/e-Infrastructures, and the like in all dissemination activities and materials. Scientific publications of the project explicitly acknowledge the European Commission's financial support through the StratusLab project.

Activity review

This section presents a review of the dissemination activity in the second year of the project in line with the published "Initial Plan for Dissemination, Collaboration and Standardization Activities" (D3.1) [START_REF] O'callaghan | Initial plan for dissemination, collaboration and standardization activities[END_REF]. The quarterly reports have documented the project's progress including a more detailed account of its dissemination activities.

Events

StratusLab has been represented at many events internationally. This has included conference booths, invited talks, presentations, panel discussions and posters.

The project has maintained a very visible presence at events of the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) this year, with project booths, posters, promotional materials as well as dissemination of project results through participation in the cloud computing tracks of these conferences. Project participants also chaired several sessions.

The project has also continued to target other e-Infrastructures events as well as NGI meetings and workshops.

Other important targets for the project are cloud-focused conferences and events and StratusLab members gave keynote speeches, technical presentations and workshops at events such as the CloudScape IV, Cloud Day 2011 and CloudCamp Valencia 2011, as well as larger conferences dedicated to cloud and virtualisation such as SVM11 and ISC Cloud 2011.

Events outside the e-Infrastructures field included FOSDEM, Brussels, Belgium in February 2012, the International Conference on Parallel Computing, Ghent, Belgium, in September 2011 and the International Conference on High Performance Computing & Simulation, Istambul, Turkey, July 2011.

Events and talks for the second year of the project are listed in the relevant Quarterly Reports, and a full list is also maintained on the project website1 .

Online

Deliverable D3.2 described the dissemination activities online during the first year of the project. Since then these activities have been expanded. A major redesign of the project website2 was completed in July 2011 and went live to coincide with the release of version 1.0. The site provides general information about the project, along with news and status updates, an archive of public documents and deliverables, links to presentations and other dissemination material, etc.

The redesign included integration with social media such as a Twitter feed allowing Twitter microblogging content to appear on the main page. The StratusLab Twitter feed now has 116 followers.

Project videos have also been created describing the project and software, as well as showing how to use the StratusLab Distribution. These are available on YouTube and are also prominently linked from the StratusLab website. An RSS feed of project news is available 3 .

Figure 3.1 shows the number of visits to the website in the second year of the projct.

The project partners maintain several weblogs such as the DSA Research blog [START_REF]DSA Research Blog[END_REF], the Morfeo Cloud Technologies blog [START_REF]Morfeo Cloud Technologies Blog[END_REF], and also publish posts in GridGurus [START_REF] Gridgurus | [END_REF] and OGF Thought Leadership Series [4] and these have been used as dissemination tools for the project.

In order to spread awareness of the site website the address ("stratuslab.eu") is included prominently in other project dissemination activities and on dissemination materials, such as t-shirts.

From the beginning of the project an announcements mailing list was created. This list has 73 members and is used to keep subscribers up-to-date with news from the StratusLab project such as new releases.

In Q6 an additional User Announcement mailing list was created to keep in touch with users of the StratusLab reference infrastructure. The list has 47 members, all of whom are users of the reference infrastructure.

A User Forum was also created to provide a discussion area for StratusLab users in the hopes of fostering a community support network. To date the forum

Press

The project has attempted to get coverage through traditional and on-line press by making news releases for major events, and by working with technical journalists to develop articles.

The project released a number of press releases over the period which were widely picked up by online and print media, such as the announcement of the DS-Cloud Ready Pack in March 2012, the European initiatives strengthen cooperation on cloud computing in iSGTW in November 2001, and the EGI story The Grid on a Cloud in July 2011. A number of French language stories were also published in online technical outlets for that market.

A full list of references to StratusLab in the press is maintained on the project website 5 .

Publishing, Demonstrating and Disseminating Results

StratusLab has been publicised at a variety of events throughout the second year of the project.

With the release of the first major production-ready release of the StratusLab Distribution in July 2011, training took on a more important focus within the project. User training was conducted by WP2, but also serves a dissemination purpose in demonstrating the results of the project and the features of the software. Table 3.1 shows the StratusLab training events this year. As described in Section 3.2.1, presentations and keynote speeches were also given at a range of high-profile conferences in the e-Infrastructures field and beyond.

Interesting project results such as the Marketplace, Persistent Storage, and the development processes of the project were also disseminated via talks, presentations and posters.

The project also submitted a paper to the CloudCP 2012: 2nd International Workshop on Cloud Computing Platforms workshop of the EuroSys 2012 conference describing an economic analysis of running a private cloud versus using Amazon EC2, based on work done by GRNET.

Software Releases

Public releases of the StratusLab distribution provide an opportunity not only to renew contact with existing users, but to further publicise the StratusLab project via release announcements, press-releases, emails and other means.

In July 2011 the first major version of the StratusLab distribution version 1.0 was released. This was followed up by several minor releases throughout the year (versions 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4). The project is now preparing to release version 2.0 4 https://groups.google.com/a/stratuslab.eu/group/user-forum/topics 5 http://www.stratuslab.eu/doku.php/press For each scheduled release an internal dissemination plan is created, with details of the proposed activities to publicise the availability of the new version. The feature set in a particular release informs this plan, for example, the venues chosen to publicise the release may differ depending on whether the new functionality is aimed particularly at users or at administrators.

Typically the release dissemination plan includes a notification to the user communities via the StratusLab Announcements mailing list, news items posted on the StratusLab website, notification in the StratusLab RSS and Twitter feeds and posts on partner blogs. Depending on the significance of the release and the features included, a press-release may also be prepared. Where suitable, release announces are also sent via other mailing lists and fora in which the project members are involved.

Press releases were produced for version 1.0 and also for some of the interim releases containing particularly interesting features and functionality. These were widely picked up by the technical media. A list of references to StratusLab in the press can be found on the project website6 .

Dissemination tasks and metrics

Table 3.2 shows the dissemination tasks that were planned for the second year of the project, as outlined in deliverable D3.2 [START_REF] O'callaghan | Report on dissemination, collaboration and standardization activities[END_REF]. The majority of these have been completed with some still ongoing. In addition to these planned items, Stratus-Lab was present at many more events, a details of which are given in the relevant Quarterly Reports and maintained on the project website 7 .

Table 3.3 lists the project's dissemination metrics that will be used to understand the impact of the dissemination activities.

In the next section we provide analysis of each dissemination activity.

Analysis

At the end of the project visibility of the project outputs is high, particularly among the DCI projects, but also among projects from other areas and commercial entities. StratusLab has been extremely well represented at a variety of events, as noted in section 3.2.1. All of the events identified in the roadmap of events for year two were attended, along with attendance at a large number of additional events which were identified during the year. Participation in these events generated a lot of interest. Christophe Blanchet of partner CNRS/IBCP won the runner-up prize in the poster competition for his poster "Virtualization of Bioinformatics Applications on Cloud Infrastructures" at the EGI Technical Forum in September 2011. Some specific events in which the project intended to participate, were not attended. For example, it was intended in year one to demonstrate the StratusLab distribution and seek feedback at trade shows such as VMWorld [START_REF]VMWorld[END_REF], the Virtualization Conference and Expo [START_REF]Virtualization Conference and Expo[END_REF] and similar commercial events.

Initial plans to participate in industry trade shows were not followed up on, with engagement with commercial partners achieved in other ways during the second year of the project. This included mainly one-on-one meetings between project partners and various companies, and a number of new commercial products have been developed. Examples include the DS-Cloud Ready Pack product developed by partner SixSq in collaboration with Swiss IT Solutions Provider Darest which was announced at the IBM "Le Printemps de la Technologie 2012" conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the TCD presentation entitled at a meeting with Intel Academic Research Programme representatives in Dublin in January 2012.

The project has been relatively well covered in the press, in particular iSGTW and other e-ScienceTalk outlets. The release announcements were widely covered within the technical press, and also given some coverage in the mainstream press. The project had hoped to have more coverage in the mainstream press but was unable to achieve this.

The website forms the main public interface of the project. Website visits are, however, at a relatively low level (see Figure 3.1). Regarding search engine ranking, the project is visible under its own name and description (i.e. searching for It was hoped that the User Forum which was created in Q6 would form an active community hub and help create a user support community. Usage of the forum has, however, been quite low despite attempts to increase the visibility by including the link in all announcements and posting it to the existing user announcement lists.

The project has almost reached its target for the number of users on the announcement mailing list, however, this figure fails to take into account the members of the user-announcement list for users of the StratusLab reference infrastructure. The total number of unique members of both lists comes to 115, thus exceeding the projected target for year two.

Results

Project results, including the availability and features of the StratusLab distribution, as well as the Marketplace, and some of the processes of the project have been disseminated, mainly by presentations and keynote speeches at conferences. Demonstrations and Tutorials have also been conducted and these have been very well received.

The project submitted a paper entitled "Public vs Private Cloud Usage Costs: The StratusLab Case" analysing the StratusLab's Datacenter cost and comparing it against running in Amazon's EC2 which was accepted to the CloudCP 2012: 2nd International Workshop on Cloud Computing Platforms workshop of the EuroSys 2012 conference.

The initial project surveys described in Review of the Use of Cloud and Virtualization Technologies in Grid Infrastructures (D2.1) [START_REF] Loomis | Review of the use of cloud and virtualization technologies in grid infrastructures[END_REF] identified a possible weakness in dissemination aimed at commercial entities. This has been addressed by several of the project partners who have been very active in meeting with potential commercial partners and a number of new commercial products have been produced. The StratusLab consortium considers the exploitation, and in particular commercial exploitation, of the StratusLab Distribution to be a major success of the project. These activities are described in the Exploitation and Sustainability Final Plan (D3.5) [START_REF] Cassidy | Exploitation and sustainability final plan[END_REF].

Releases

Major dissemination efforts have centred around each software release. The targeting of press-releases and other dissemination materials to the specific user communities based on the feature set of the release appears to be an effective approach to release dissemination.

Other issues

Dissemination to the general public

Dissemination to the general public is also important, to raise awareness of the project and for educational purposes. In targeting the general public it is necessary to focus on the economic and societal benefits of the project, its impact on science and research, and how this can be of benefit to the broader community. This is quite a different approach to that taken for dissemination to technical or scientific audiences. Thus far StratusLab has not focussed on dissemination to the general public.

A general StratusLab video has been produced which is aimed largely at technical users and describes the benefits of the StratusLab Distribution. A shorter more user-focussed version of this is in production and this would be aimed more at the non-technical public.

Collaboration & Standardization

Aims and Objectives

A large number of projects, companies, and standards bodies currently focus on cloud and virtualization technologies because of their promise and growing adoption. StratusLab has actively engaged with those entities to ensure that the project's results are well represented, that we are aware of others' advances, and that we drive standardization in a direction consistent with our vision.

StratusLab has established collaborations with several other EU projects, particularly those in the Distributed Computing Infrastructures area, and is continuing to work with these projects to identify common interests, and to avoid duplication of effort.

The project aims to use existing standards where appropriate and also to actively engage with relevant standardization bodies in order to influence developing standards.

Activity review

The project has both formal and informal collaborations with several other projects and most of these have seen significant progress during the second year. Several external projects are now using and evaluating StratusLab components, and some have indicated willingness to contribute to their development after the project life time. StratusLab has worked with several projects to develop Virtual Appliances containing their software, for example the EGI UMD-1 appliances, the IGE Globus appliances, etc. These are now available via the StratusLab Marketplace.

Memoranda of Understanding

During the second year of the project Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) were signed with four additional projects, adding to the two MoU signed in the first year with EGI and EDGI.

• CYFRONET • VENUS-C • IGE • ERINA+
The MoU with these organisations are available on the project website1 , while progress in line with these MoU is described in the Quarterly Reports for the second year of the project.

Informal Collaborations

Informal collaborations have also continued with several projects including

• EMI • Contrail • SIENA • Mantychore
In particular the project has had a strong collaboration with EMI and SIENA during the second year of the project. EMI has been working with StratusLab to provide feedback on the StratusLab distribution and produce Torque virtual Images. StratusLab has been present at SIENA events and has provided input to their documents.

Again, more detail is provided on these informal collaborations in the Quarterly Reports, and a full list of collaborating projects is maintained on the project website2 .

Commercial Collaborations

Project partners have been successful in developing and bringing to market a number of products based on the StratusLab Distribution in collaboration with their commercial partners. More detail on such activities is given in D3.5 Exploitation and Sustainability Final Plan [START_REF] Cassidy | Exploitation and sustainability final plan[END_REF] which is due concurrently with this deliverable, and in the Quarterly reports.

Standards and Policy Bodies

StratusLab has continued to engage with standards bodies to drive standardization in a direction consistent with our vision.

Use of existing standards

During the second year of the project support was added for the OpenNebula OCCI API based on the OGF OCCI specifications.

Under its MoU with EGI, StratusLab has contributed to the EGI prioritised list of standards by identifying the standards which the project implements or intends to implement.

StratusLab has also continued to engage with bodies such as SIENA and through them with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) about cloud standards. For example, StratusLab gave a presentation in September 2011 to the SIENA Workshop at the EGI Technical Forum describing the project's use of Standards and Interoperability. Similarly, the project provided input to SIENA on how the projects solutions map to the NIST use-cases.

The OVF standard is also supported by the Claudia Service Manager as a service definition language for deploying services on a StratusLab cloud via Claudia.

Extension of standards

StratusLab uses the TCloud API of Claudia for service and VM management, based on the VMware VCloud API. This has been sent to the DMTF for standardization.

Preliminary discussions also took place with other organisations around the area of both existing and new standards. For example talks with SARA HPC identified possible areas of future standardisation in the area of network management, while discussions with Contrail included a plan to push for standards for authorisation and accounting.

ERINA+ Impact Self-Assessment

As part of the project's MoU with the ERINA+ project, StratusLab has undertaken to use the ERINA+ Socio-Economic Impact Self-Assessment of e-infrastructure Projects tool to perform an analysis of the impact of the project. The ERINA+ selfassessment methodology provides a way to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of a project, based on information provided about the project's collaborations, the cost-benefit of various project scenarios, the impact and reach of the project's outputs, etc.

ERINA+ have provided a web-based tool to collect this information and analyse it by comparing it to other projects which have completed the assessment.

It should be noted that the results may be somewhat subjective, not all of the activities of a given project will necessarily fit neatly into the categories provided by ERINA+, and it is not always possible to compare like with like across projects.

StratusLab has collected data about a subset of its activities and has input these into the ERINA+ web tool. The initial analysis, which compares Stratus-Lab with five other projects who have also performed the self-assessment, is quite favourable.

The ERINA+ analysis calculates the project's "Efficiency" in terms of their economic net present value (ENPV) (the difference between the discounted total social benefits and costs) and a B/C ratio, i.e. the ratio between discounted economic benefits and costs. These have the potential to be very useful measures, however, they require estimating the benefits of certain project activities in terms of time saved or reduced cost for users. This is not appropriate for all of Stratus-Lab's activities. Nonetheless, the project has attempted to estimate such figures where possible. Technical issues with the ERINA+ tool are currently preventing the calculation of these figures, but we hope that these can be resolved soon. The analysis also calculates the project's "Effectiveness", in terms of competitiveness, innovativeness and cohesion. The project scores "Good" for each of these factors, and the results in this area are similar to the project average for the other projects who have completed the analysis. A graph of the calculated project effectiveness is given in Figure 4.1.

Analysis

As the project draws to a close the formal collaborations that are in place will naturally also end. The project's continued existence as an open-source initiative does, however, afford an opportunity to continue many of these collaborations.

In some cases collaborating projects have indicated that they are willing to contribute to the continued development and maintenance of components of the StratusLab Distribution. In particular several projects will take over the maintenance of their own virtual appliances, and EGI may take on a role in developing the Marketplace.

StratusLab has directed some effort in the second year towards becoming more standards compliant and now supports both OCCI and TCloud. They have also helped to drive the formation of new standards such as TCloud, and have been active in standards related groups to help identify the best of the existing cloud standards, as well as gaps which exist and could be targeted for future standardisation. These standardisation activities are likely also to continue after the project life time through the efforts of project partners such as TID and UCM.

The ERINA+ Socio-Economic Impact Self-Assessment of e-infrastructure Projects shows that the StratusLab project has performed well in terms of the project effectiveness, although problems with the tool have made it impossible to assess the project's efficiency.

Conclusions

This document analyses the dissemination, collaboration and standardization activities undertaken by the StratusLab project in year two. Visibility of the project is high, with many presentations and keynote speeches given by project members. A particular effort has been made to inform related communities such as the DCI projects about the project and its results.

A strong online presence has been created with the project website complemented by microblogging, use of an announce mailing list, a discussion forum and integration of Social Networking tools.

Dissemination activities have centered around the software releases with a release dissemination plan created for each release.

A greater focus on Training this year has resulted in over 150 people being trained in the use of the StratusLab Distribution.

The document also gives an outline of collaboration with related projects. MoUs have been signed with EGI, EDGI, CYFRONET, VENUS-C, IGE and ERINA+, and a number of informal collaborations were also pursued. Some of these collaborations have resulted in agreements for collaborating partners to take on a role in sustaining outputs of the project after the project life time.

Commercial collaborations have also been very successful and have resulted in a number of new commercial products coming to market.

Standardization efforts increased this year, and the OGF OCCI standard was implemented in addition to the TCloud Specification adopted in the first year. The project has continued to drive standards forward in some areas.

At the end of the project the StratusLab project, and the StratusLab Distribution, is very well known not only in the e-Infrastructures and DCI ecosystem, but also among commercial entities and projects outside the DCI area. Several collaborations have produced useful results, and will continue to do so beyond the project life time as collaborating projects take on a role in sustainability of the StratusLab project's outputs.

3 Dissemination 3 . 1

 331 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Organization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Aims and Objectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.1 Target audiences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.2 Dissemination methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Activity review. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.1 Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.2 Online . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.3 Press. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.4 Publishing, Demonstrating and Disseminating Results . . 3.2.5 Software Releases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.6 Dissemination tasks and metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.1 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.2 Releases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.3 Other issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Collaboration & Standardization 4.1 Aims and Objectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Activity review. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.1 Memoranda of Understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.2 Informal Collaborations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.3 Commercial Collaborations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.4 Standards and Policy Bodies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.5 ERINA+ Impact Self-Assessment . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3. 1

 1 Training events in Year two . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Roadmap of Dissemination Activities for Year 2 . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Dissemination Metrics and Targets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Figure 3 . 1 :

 31 Figure 3.1: Website visits for Year 2

Figure 4 . 1 :

 41 Figure 4.1: Project Effectiveness (source ERINA+ Self-Assessment tool)

Table 3 . 1 :

 31 Training events in Year two

	Event	Location	Date
	StratusLab Training at	Munich, Germany	29 March 2012
	the EGI Community
	Forum
	StratusLab Tutorial	Orsay, France	17-18 November 2011
	StratusLab Tutorial at	Hanoi, Vietnam	1-3 November 2011
	the ACGRID3 school
	StratusLab Tutorial	Lyon, France	22 September 2011
	(Description, Slides,
	and Posters) at the
	EGI Technical Forum
	StratusLab training	Budapest, Hungary	15 July 2011
	day Joint European
	DCI Summer School
	Building Clouds with	Hyères-Les-Palmiers, France 27 June 2011
	OpenNebula 2.2 and
	StratusLab Contrail
	Summer School
	before the end of the project.

Table 3 . 2 :

 32 Roadmap of Dissemination Activities for Year 2

	Activity	Date	Description

Table 3 . 3 :

 33 Dissemination Metrics and Targets Notes: 1 Metric has been adapted from "Number of people on StratusLab discussion list". See section 3.2.2 for a discussion of this metric; 2 Visits between 1 June 2010 -31 May 2011; 3 Visits between 1 June 2011 -31 May 2012.

	Year 1	Year 2

'StratusLab' or 'combining grid and cloud') but still not highly visible for more generic terms such as 'open source cloud'.

http://stratuslab.eu/doku.php/presentations

http://www.stratuslab.eu

http://www.stratuslab.eu/feed.php?ns=news

http://www.stratuslab.eu/doku.php/press

http://stratuslab.eu/doku.php/presentations

http://www.stratuslab.eu/doku.php/deliverables

http://www.stratuslab.eu/doku.php/collaborations


Kathryn Cassidy

Marc-Elian Bégin

David O'

Callaghan Tcd

Christophe Blanchet

Vangelis Floros

Ignacio M Llorente

Charles Loomis

Henar Muñoz

Enhancing Grid Infrastructures with Virtualization and Cloud Technologies Exploitation and Sustainability Final Plan

This document describes StratusLab's plans for exploitation and sustainability beyond the project lifetime. The plans cover commercial exploitation, primarily through commercial integration and support; and non-commercial exploitation, through use in national and international research e-infrastructures: for operating grid resources on private clouds, and for running research-oriented community clouds. In addition, we plan exploitation through partner projects such as EGI and through training and future research. Plans are in place to ensure the sustainability of the critical infrastructures used by the project partners, users and collaborating projects. Similarly, the software outputs of the project have been identified and a plan for the future development of each has been created. These plans include the formation of an open-source StratusLab community, identifying key partners to continue development of specific components, identifying funding options (public, private and community contributions) for continued development and engaging with collaborating projects to ensure that they will contribute to the maintenance and development of the components that they use.

Conclusions

Executive Summary

This document describes the plans to exploit the project results and to ensure their sustainability beyond the project lifetime.

The plans cover both commercial and non-commercial exploitation. Commercial exploitation will take the form of integration and support: several specific examples related to project partners are described, including SixSq and SlipStream, and the Telefónica I+D Global Cloud Initiative.

Non-commercial exploitation will include use of StratusLab within national and international research e-Infrastructures: private clouds for service deployment -particularly for grid services -as well as public clouds for research communities. For systems administrators, StratusLab will provide a convenient approach for testbed deployment.

OpenNebula, as well as providing a core component of the StratusLab software, offers a key point of exploitation, as StratusLab-originated innovations are provided to its user community.

Collaborating projects, particularly from the Distributed Computing Infrastructure sphere, will provide another channel of exploitation.

Finally, StratusLab project results will be exploited to provide opportunities for future cloud research, and for training and e-Learning.

With respect to sustainability, the project has concrete plans in place for sustainability after the project lifetime, including continuation of critical infrastructure, continued development of software components as well as future research. Some future funding, from both public and private sources, has been secured to continue development and research of specific components of the StratusLab Distribution. The overall plan for sustainability, however, involves the creation of an open-source consortium under which development and maintenance will be ensured by the strong involvement of the existing project partners, along with fostering an open-source community among users.

Introduction

Cloud computing is revolutionising the way we procure and consume computing, storage and networking resources, as well as the way these resources are managed at the infrastructure level. StratusLab offers an open source cloud distribution, targeted particularly at the e-science community.

Purpose

This document updates the Deliverable D3.3 "Exploitation and Sustainability First Plan" [START_REF] Begin | Exploitation and sustainability first plan[END_REF] and outlines the final exploitation and sustainability plan for the Stratus-Lab project. This document describes the plans to exploit the project results and to ensure the sustainability of the products beyond the project lifetime.

Organization

This document contains chapters on Exploitation and Sustainability and finishes with Conclusions. The Exploitation and Sustainability chapters draw on plans provided by each partner and the Conclusions include a summary of exploitation and sustainability strategies that cut across the project as a whole.

Exploitation

This section describes the current exploitation of the StratusLab project's outputs, in line with the initial plans laid out in D3.3. It also includes a number of exploitation activities that are expected to continue beyond the project lifetime, including those by project partners as well as external entities.

The project hopes that its work will be rewarded by a wide adoption by grid sites and infrastructure providers around Europe and beyond our frontiers. This exploitation should also generate feedback and requests for further improvements. Further, as the distribution is deployed and used, a larger set of virtual machines and datasets will be produced and maintained using StratusLab software.

The project has engaged with user communities and other FP7 projects in order to ensure that the software and other outputs of the project are utilised. Over the lifetime of the project 47 users have requested accounts on the StratusLab reference infrastructure in order to try out the cloud distribution and many more have downloaded the software themselves. The project Deliverable "Final Review of Dissemination, Collaboration and Standardization Activities" (D3.4) [START_REF] O'callaghan | Final review of dissemination, collaboration and standardization activities[END_REF] gives more detail on the project's outreach and collaboration activities as well as some of the statistics on usage of the StratusLab reference infrastructure and software. Several communities are currently using or evaluating the StratusLab Distribution or components thereof. Similarly, through efforts of the project partners, a number of new commercial products based on the StratusLab Distribution have been developed.

Exploitation of the project results falls into four broad categories; commercial exploitation, exploitation by e-Infrastructures and user communities, use of the StratusLab distribution and other outcomes of the project such as expertise and know-how in future research projects, and use in training infrastructures.

Commercial exploitation

Commercial exploitation of project results comes in several forms, including integration with commercial products and commercial support work.

DS-Cloud Ready Pack

Partner SixSq has developed a commercial cloud solution in collaboration with Swiss IT Solutions provider Darest. The product, announced in March 2012, is a turnkey Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud solution, based on the StratusLab Distribution along with SixSq's SlipStream.

The product targets small and medium enterprises looking for a private cloud solution, and includes managed services such as a public StratusLab Marketplace and SlipStream services, providing users with virtual images and appliances, as well as construction and deployment recipes.

The DS-Cloud Ready Pack will be distributed by Darest.

StratusLab Certification on IBM PureSystems

SixSq has also tested and certified the StratusLab software on IBM PureSystems hardware. IBM PureSystems is at the higher end of the cloud market and this initiative ensures that StratusLab is an option for larger cloud deployments.

Helix Nebula Consultancy

SixSq is building consultancy based on the StratusLab distribution. For example, in the context of the Helix Nebula collaboration, SixSq and Atos (one of the Helix Nebula cloud suppliers) are working together building a commercial public cloud proof of concept. This proof of concept is being evaluated by CERN, EMBL and ESA.

ESOC-ESA

SixSq has developed a proof-of-concept to show rapid deployment of groundcontrol systems for the European Space Agency's European Space Operations Centre (ESOC). This was done as a demonstration running on an infrastructure belonging to Terma, the company who produce the software used by ESOC. The proof-of-concept showed that the deployment time could be reduced from approximately 1 week to less than 10 minutes. SixSq are now working with Terma and ESOC to deploy a similar configuration within ESOC for their production groundcontrol systems. The three are looking for sources of funding to continue this work.

SlipStream

SixSq's flagship SlipStream product is an automated engine for creating multimachine runtime environments, using cloud computing as a back-end. While initially deployed using the Amazon EC2 cloud service as the cloud back-end, SixSq have integrated support for StratusLab clouds. This has opened up SlipStream for potential use by a significant number of companies who are unable to use Amazon EC2 cloud due to reasons ranging from legal to cultural. The commercial activities mentioned above use Slipstream running on StratusLab, and SixSq are confident that they will be able to attract many more customers by leveraging the combination of these two products.

Telef ónica I+D Global Cloud Initiative

As described in D3.3 Telefónica I+D (TID) works on research and development activities and provides new and innovative products and solutions which can be commercialized by Telefónica's operators (LATAM, Spain, O2 Europe, etc.).

In the context of the 2009-2012 Strategic Plan, Telefónica I+D has established the Cloud Computing Area where an IaaS Cloud Product Line is under development. The TID main objective is to provide advanced capabilities for Cloud products to be part of their roadmaps. Telefónica cloud products worth particular mention include the Virtual Data Center, a public Cloud for big companies [START_REF]Telefónica virtual data centre[END_REF] or the private Cloud developed for a Spanish regional government [START_REF]Castilla-la mancha's private cloud[END_REF].

Within the StratusLab project, TID has been working on the service manager Claudia, as a added-value component on top of any Cloud platform, providing management of multi-tier applications and scalability according to the service KPIs. TID has been developing the KPI monitoring systems as a framework to collect KPIs from services to be used for scalability. Both Claudia and monitoring systems represent added-value prototypes for integration into TID Cloud initiatives, demonstrating new advanced functionalities going beyond current Cloud platforms such as Amazon EC2, OpenStack or Flexiscale. These components represent the seed of medium-term work on the public or private Cloud platforms, and are the proof of concept of advanced use cases.

Advanced service management and scalability prototype

Partner Telefónica I+D has developed the prototype multi-tier e-Business application as a proof of concept demonstrating multi-tier service management, KPIdriven scalability, load balancing, monitoring, secure networking and cloud federation. This proof of concept demonstrates the advanced Cloud capabilities that a Cloud platform can provide. Currently, Cloud providers only offer VM deployment, but with StratusLab's advanced capabilities as demonstrated by this multitier application use case, it is possible to show how an organisation can provision of e-business applications (mainly composed by front-end, business-logic and database), automatically scale them based on service KPIs (not hardware KPIs as most providers allow), ensure security in the network and offer federation among sites.

The prototype might also be used by other StratusLab partners to show the advantages of using these advanced features that StratusLab provides.

UCM and C12G Labs consultancy

As a University research group, UCM's aim is to perform applied research and to transfer the results to the industry and the scientific community. So, although their primary aim is not to commercially exploit the results, UCM offers valueadded services around OpenNebula through the University Office of Technology Transfer.

UCM and their spin-off company C12G Labs provide support for OpenNebula, a core component of StratusLab. They are already seeing support requests from StratusLab users via the OpenNebula support channels. Thus the StratusLab community is now supported by UCM alongside other communities using OpenNebula without the StratusLab distribution. UCM and C12G Labs are committed to pro-viding ongoing support for these users, in line with their existing support policies. This includes supporting those StratusLab extensions to OpenNebula which have subsequently been merged back into the OpenNebula product.

Exploitation in e-Infrastructures and user communities

User communities -and in particular the community of research e-infrastructuresoffer important opportunities for the exploitation of the StratusLab project results.

Computing sites

Individual computing sites, initially those related to the project partners, are already seeing benefits from exploiting the StratusLab software locally.

CNRS

The CNRS laboratories involved in StratusLab are already exploiting the Stratus-Lab software to provide services to system administrators, engineers, and scientists. Both LAL and IBCP plan to further their use of the StratusLab cloud technologies in the near future and are participating in planning at the national level to provide cloud services via existing and new generic computing infrastructures.

As described in D3.3 LAL has deployed both private and public StratusLab clouds. The private cloud infrastructure is used by developers and system administrators within LAL, while the public cloud infrastructure is available to external users who register for access to the service. Both of these services are in active use and will continue to be maintained beyond the project lifetime.

IBCP was already using virtualization heavily for the provision of local services and of grid services within EGI before the beginning of the StratusLab project. An initial goal of IBCP within the StratusLab project was to be able to quickly deploy grid-sites using StratusLab which were customised for the bioinformatics community. As the project progressed, however, it has become apparent that services can be more easily provided to the bioinformatics user community by using cloud directly. Thus, IBCP has created a number of bioinformatics appliances containing applications and databases for their users, and they run a StratusLab cloud which allows members of the French bioinformatics community to deploy these virtual appliances and perform their analysis directly on the cloud rather than using the grid. The StratusLab cloud provides services for this community which are not available elsewhere (e.g. via the grid) and so IBCP are committed to maintaining a StratusLab site for the foreseeable future.

Users of the infrastructure also require access to a Marketplace instance, and IBCP may install a federated Marketplace at a later stage in order to ensure that this service continues to be available to their users after the end of the StratusLab project.

IBCP continues to promote their StratusLab cloud infrastructure within the French Bioinformatics Institute and beyond.

Both laboratories have already benefited from their existing StratusLab deployments through the better use of existing hardware and improved (easier, faster, and more flexible) provisioning of resources to administrators and users. These improvements have positively impacted both general laboratory services and scientific analyses.

TCD

As described in Deliverable D3.3, TCD already makes use of StratusLab as a testbed platform. This is used for testing new releases of software, new grid and other services, and to perform initial installation of hardware before it is integrated into production at TCD or at other Grid-Ireland sites. TCD plans to convert some grid resources to run on a StratusLab cloud in the future, this may be as part of EGI with production grid services within the Grid-Ireland infrastructure running on top of StratusLab.

As a grid resource provider and Computer Science research group, TCD has begun to use StratusLab in a number of research contexts, for example, StratusLab has been investigated as a platform for providing virtualized access to GP-GPU grid worker nodes. This work was presented at the EGI Community Forum 2012 and may be taken up in time by other site operators as a solution to the problem of providing access to GPU resources.

TCD is likely to continue to use StratusLab as their cloud distribution of choice for such research initiatives and projects.

National infrastructures

France

There is a growing realization in CNRS and in France that cloud services provide a more flexible and dynamic computing infrastructure than is currently available with existing infrastructures. Taking more advantage of these technologies would allow the infrastructure to appeal to a wider scientific community and thus allow consolidation and better use of computing and human resources. Consequently, France-Grilles, the French partner of EGI and RENABI GRISBI, the French distributed bioinformatics infrastructure, both are investigating use of StratusLab and providing cloud-like services to their user communities. These investigations also include studies of possible national funding models while taking advantage of the administrative and support services which already exist within France-Grilles and RENABI GRISBI.

The support of a Quattor-based installation for StratusLab also makes it easier for the majority of sites in France-Grilles, who use Quattor, to adopt the Stratus-Lab cloud distribution. Wider use makes it easier to justify the necessary human resources to maintain and to evolve the CNRS components of the distribution after the end of StratusLab.

Greece

GRNET plans to continue developing a Greek cloud infrastructure, however, this will be based on the Okeanos IaaS platform. GRNET will continue to run their existing StratusLab-based Grid site, as well as exploiting the know-how and expertise produced by the StratusLab project in the context of the Okeanos project, which may reuse parts of the StratusLab Distribution.

Ireland

TCD anticipates that the cloud approach offered by StratusLab may be attractive to potential resource providers and users for whom grid computing did not appear suitable.

As a grid operations centre with responsibility for maintaining Grid-Ireland, the Irish national grid infrastructure, TCD is already an intensive user of virtualization technology for testing and deployment. At a high level, TCD will exploit StratusLab to provide a simpler private cloud approach for server deployment.

TCD runs a set of Xen hosts for national services, but VMs are statically allocated. TCD plans to use of StratusLab to simplify the deployment of these services. TCD currently deploys grid gateways to Grid-Ireland sites around Ireland. Each gateway hosts a number of Xen virtual machines for various grid services. TCD will evaluate the use of StratusLab to deploy these systems in future.

Research Exploitation & Collaborating Projects

The StratusLab partners are involved in several other EU and nationally-funded projects which will continue to exploit the outputs of the project. In addition, the project has pursued collaborations with other projects, and disseminated the project results widely to ensure that the outputs of the project will be exploited by many other research projects going forward.

The OpenNebula Community

As a core component of the StratusLab distribution, UCM is extending the Open-Nebula open-source toolkit to address the requirements of the Grid computing community that have been identified in the project. These extensions are incorporated into the main OpenNebula distribution an so they are available for all users of the toolkit and not only for the users of the StratusLab distribution.

OpenNebula serves as an excellent vehicle to transfer the technology and the innovation created in the project because it is used as a cloud management tool in thousands of deployments around the world and across different industries, such as hosting, telecoms, HPC, and eGovernment. Moreover OpenNebula is being used in many EU-funded projects as a tool for innovation and interoperability. This technology transfer is a valuable mechanism by which industry can accelerate its innovation activities and gain competitive advantage through cloud computing.

Collaborating Projects

The existing StratusLab infrastructures also enable exploitation and collaboration with other regional and European projects.

The European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) has expressed a clear interest in using virtualization technology. TCD, GRNET and CNRS participate in EGI and are likely to take part in the EGI transition to virtualized grid resources, based on StratusLab technology. As mentioned above, GRNET and CNRS have for some time run and evaluated StratusLab as a virtual platform for EGI grid sites with positive results. These experiences are documented in the project's Technical Note Installing and operating a production grid site in the StratusLab cloud: Experience and issues [10].

Within the context of the FP7 Mantychore project, TCD expects to deploy StratusLab-based computing resources to a number of Grid-Ireland sites as part of a use-case for next-generation dynamic networking.This will form the basis for research in network-level federation of cloud resources, resource migration, load distribution, and comparison with 'static' non-cloud grid resources.

StratusLab partners TID and UCM are involved in the 4CaaSt project which aims to create an advanced PaaS Cloud platform supporting optimized and elastic hosting of Internet-scale multi-tier applications. The project will use Claudia and the Stratuslab monitoring systems as a key component of its Cloud platform, as well as OpenNebula and the StratusLab OpenNebula enhancements.

Another project where TID is evolving the Claudia service manager is FI-Ware PPP-Core. There new requirements are coming which will allow them to evolve the component with new functionalities.

The Initiative for Globus in Europe (IGE) project has created a number of Globus virtual appliances which are available via the StratusLab Marketplace. These allow users to quickly deploy Globus infrastructures running over a Stra-tusLab cloud.

The VENUS-C project uses OpenNebula and thus benefits from the outcomes of the StratusLab project, and the StratusLab enhancements to OpenNebula. This project is continuing research in the cloud area including work to support the DMTF OVF standard.

The BonFIRE consortium brings together world leading industrial and academic organisations in cloud computing to deliver a robust, reliable and sustainable facility for large scale experimentally-driven cloud research. The majority of their sites are running OpenNebula and thus benefiting from the StratusLab OpenNebula enhancements.

Training and e-Learning

TCD has a strong interest in e-Learning technology. StratusLab provides the ability not only to simplify management of a standing training infrastructure, but also to quickly deploy isolated infrastructures or to scale up existing ones to cope with the anticipated load of scheduled training events. StratusLab also will appear as a subject of e-Learning material.

Summary

The StratusLab Distribution has been integrated into several commercial products, and forms the basis for a number of new products. Some of these have already been officially launched while others in development, but with significant potential.

The software is also being used by many user communities and other projects within the e-Infrastructures area to provide infrastructures for their users. In addition collaborating projects are using the StratusLab Distribution and the other outputs of the project as part of their research.

Finally, exploitation areas such as testbeds and training infrastructures are being explored by the project partners.

The exploitation outcomes of the StratusLab project are summarised in Table 3.1.

Sustainability

This section describes the plans that the project has put in place to ensure that the sustainability of the StratusLab Distribution, and other outputs of the project, after the project lifetime.

In order to ensure that the exploitation described in the sections above can continue, a sustainability plan which allows for the continued development, maintenance, innovation and support of the software is crucial.

Approaches to sustainability

The StratusLab project has developed a sustainability plan which focusses on the creating an open-source community to develop the StratusLab Distribution. Existing project partners will initially form the core of this community, but it is hoped that external parties will gradually become more involved. Several project partners are involved in EU or Nationally funded research projects which will continue to use and develop components of the StratusLab Distribution. Similarly, project partners who run existing infrastructures which now make use of StratusLab will continue to be involved, with several partners have committed to making unfunded contributions to the components in on which they rely.

Continuation of the StratusLab collaboration

The founding members (CNRS, SixSq, GRNET and UCM) of the StratusLab project have previously collaborated in the context of the StratusLab initiative. This informal collaboration framework was created in November 2008 to evaluate the maturity of existing cloud and virtualization technologies and services to enhance production grid infrastructures, and to promote the benefits of virtualization and cloud for the grid community. All of the current project partners, including these founding members as well as TCD and TID, are committed to continuing this collaboration in some form after the end of the StratusLab project.

The scope of such a collaboration will be narrower than the current FP7 project, but the StratusLab distribution will be maintained as an open-source consortium.

StratusLab is involved in the ScienceSoft [START_REF][END_REF] initiative coordinated by EMI [START_REF]European Middleware Initiative[END_REF] which aims to assist scientific communities in finding software for scientific research. The initiative will host a repository of software, but this is unlikely to be in place by the end of the StratusLab project. Thus, while the StratusLab software may eventually be hosted there along with software from other grid and cloud computing projects, ScienceSoft does not provide an immediate solution to the problem of sustaining the outputs of the StratusLab project.

The project has thus begun to migration the StratusLab distribution code to GitHub [3], which offers free public repositories and associated tools used by over one million people worldwide to manage collaborative development projects.

The majority of current project members will continue to be involved to some extent and other contributors may be added in the future. A Contributor Licence Agreement will be drawn up to clarify the rights of contributors to the distribution, to ensure that IPR issues are adequately handled, and that the the project direction and roadmap is clear.

Continuation of critical infrastructure

Various organizations including the project partners, NGIs, collaborating projects and others have an incentive to maintain the software on which their critical infrastructure is (or will be) built.

A complete list of components and outputs of the StratusLab project is given below, along with the proposed sustainability plan, and the partners or external entities who have committed to continued development or service provision.

Documentation and Website

Project deliverables are now available in the Hyper Article en Ligne (HAL) [START_REF] Hal | [END_REF] open access repository and OpenAIRE [START_REF]OpenAIRE Repository[END_REF] repository, making them available to a wider audience and ensuring that they are archived for posterity even if the StratusLab website should no longer be available.

LAL will continue to run the project website on a best-effort basis for some time after the project lifetime, however it is planned to archive the current content and migrate it to GitHub pages.

A new website will be created to serve as an ongoing hub for activities around the development of the open-source StratusLab distribution. There will be a change of focus on the website away from the project and towards the software.

All partners will continue to to update documentation, but insofar as possible, this will no longer be hosted centrally on the website, but bundled with the software components.

Marketplace Service EGI is currently evaluating the use of the StratusLab Marketplace as part of its Federated Clouds Task Force. EGI has thus installed its own version of the Marketplace which is available to the EGI community. TCD is also committed to running an instance of the Marketplace service for the foreseeable future, and going forward, they may be involved in provision of the EGI Marketplace service in their role as the Irish NGI (Grid-Ireland). Other partners including CNRS will continue to use the Marketplace and have indicated a willingness to host it should TCD be unable to continue to provide the service.

Appliance Repository The Marketplace and persistent disk service mean that the appliance repository as implemented at the beginning of the project is now largely obsolete. Before the end of the project any appliances remaining in the appliance repository will be migrated so that this service will not be required.

VM Images LAL will continue to maintain base images for the various operating systems supported at present. It is expected that user communities will take over the maintenance of the majority of virtual appliances, for example, EGI would maintain the UMD Grid images, IGE will maintain the Globus images while IBCP will continue to maintain the bioinformatics images for its user communities.

Build and Test Tooling There is limited interest among project partners in continuing to maintain the entire build and test infrastructure, however a minimal version of this may be migrated to the cloud so that it can continue to be used to build and test the open source StratusLab distribution beyond the project lifetime. Alternatively, other tools such as the Travis CI [START_REF] Travis | [END_REF] distributed build system, which integrates with GitHub, could be used.

SlipStream Deployment Models These will be available but not actively maintained.

Reference cloud services GRNET will continue to provide their public cloud service running StratusLab. LAL will also continue to run a cloud service for the foreseeable future. This service will be available to the general public subject to demand. IBCP will also continue to run a StratusLab cloud service, but this will be mainly for French bioinformaticians.

Grid Site

The StratusLab distribution will be available to any EGI site wishing to deploy a grid site on top of a StratusLab cloud. GRNET will also continue to run a grid site on StratusLab, the administration of which will be taken over by the Greek NGI.

Software

The StratusLab distribution, the software produced by the StratusLab project, is the main output of the project. It is important to ensure that this software can continue to be developed and maintained with regular releases after the end of the project. As described in Section 4.1.1 the StratusLab code will be migrated to GitHub and will continue to be developed as part of an open-source project.

Marketplace Most of the project partners intend to continue using the Stratus-Lab Marketplace and therefore will continue to contribute to its development. EGI are also investigating the use of the Marketplace and they appear to be willing to contribute to maintenance.

Persistent Storage SixSq have a number of commercial applications which use the StratusLab persistent storage and so will continue to maintain and develop this service. Other partners are also using this service and will continue to maintain it.

Network Manager

The network management functionality is implemented as part of OpenNebula and will continue to be maintained by UCM. In addition, there is the possibility of further development in collaboration with the Mantychore project which is interested in using the StratusLab distribution as an enabling technology for its community controlled virtual network services.

Authentication proxy LAL is committed to maintaining the authentication proxy with the possibility of further development to integrate it with tools such as the persistent storage or OpenNebula's SunStone interfaces.

Service manager (Claudia) TID will continue to develop this component and it will be used in the context of the 4CaaSt project in which TID is a participant.

OpenNebula This is a pre-existing product developed by partner UCM; they will continue to develop and sustain it after the project lifetime.

Stratuslab OpenNebula customisations Some of the customisations for Open-Nebula developed as part of the StratusLab project will be migrated into the Open-Nebula repository and maintained by UCM going forward. An activity to identify which customisations will become part of OpenNebula is under way. Other components will be maintained by various project partners who are making use of them as part of the open-source StratusLab distribution, and these may also become part of the OpenNebula Ecosystem [START_REF]OpenNebula Ecosystem[END_REF] which is a community portal for third party developers creating tools and extensions that complement the functionality provided by OpenNebula.

Registration application LAL intends to continue to maintain the registration application, with possible further development to make it more generic.

Web Monitor Dashboard It has been agreed not to further develop the Web Monitor Dashboard as OpenNebula SunStone now works with StratusLab deployments and provides much of the same functionality. The code will be frozen and made available in a GitHub repository, but will not be further developed or maintained.

Quattor installation CNRS is using the Quattor installation and will continue to update the Quattor profiles. In the longer term, it is intended to migrate these to the Quattor Working Group so that they are available to the rest of the Quattor community.

Manual installation

The manual installation tools are used by SixSq as part of their commercial offerings based on StratusLab, and thus these will be maintained by SixSq going forward.

Command Line clients SixSq has committed to be the lead developer going forward on the command line interface component of the StratusLab distribution. Other partners will contribute to particular parts of the client tools, for example, GRNET intend to continue to develop the client tools related to automatic provisioning of clusters in the cloud, while TCD will continue to develop the Marketplace client tools.

Monitoring The Claudia KPI monitoring will be used by the 4CaaSt project and development and maintenance will continue as part of that project.

Public Funding

Public funding has been secured to continue the development of some components, for example, the Claudia Service Manager and Monitoring Systems which are to become part of the 4CaaSt FP7 project of which TID is a member. Similarly, the EGI project is evaluating use of the Marketplace and TCD is hopeful that they can continue development of the Marketplace as part of their EGI activities.

GRNET has secured national funds to develop a comprehensive cloud solution for academic users, and while this will not be based on the StratusLab distribution, some components as well as know-how and expertise produced by the StratusLab project are likely to be reused.

Private funding

Project partners SixSq have been very successful in attracting private funding for integration of the StratusLab Distribution into new and existing business lines, giving them a revenue stream which allows them to commit to future development of several of the StratusLab components.

SixSq predicts that its business pipeline from SlipStream service and product will come in significant proportion from deploying private services inside customers' infrastructure. Since SlipStream targets StratusLab as its preferred private cloud solution, in turn, SixSq will be investing some of this revenue in the maintenance and evolution of the StratusLab solution.

As mentioned above, UCM offers value-added services around OpenNebula through the University Office of Technology Transfer. This funding is used to maintain and evolve the OpenNebula project and other StratusLab components which are now being integrated into the standard OpenNebula distribution.

Finally, partner Telefónica I+D is providing funding in the Global Cloud Initiative for developing the ideas about the multi-tier service management and scalability demonstrated by the Claudia framework.

Community contributions

It is envisaged that 'large users' may engage with the StratusLab development community and invest effort into the distribution.

Several partners have also pledged to contribute unfunded efforts towards maintenance of the project results. For instance, TCD is likely to make significant use of StratusLab software in future. In the case where dedicated funded effort for development is not available, TCD would still expect to contribute in the form of bug reports, patches and improvements as part of the StratusLab open source community.

Other user communities may contribute in the future and the project's open source plan will provide such communities with a mechanism for participation going forward.

Summary

The project has concrete plans in place for sustainability after the project lifetime, to include The outputs of the project along with the specific plans to sustain them are listed in Table 4.1.

Conclusions

This document has summarised the current status of exploitation of the StratusLab Distribution. Project partners and external entities are actively using the outputs of the project in a variety of ways, including:

• Commercial integration and support, by project partners including SMEs and large corporations. The sustainability plans beyond the project lifetime are also outlined. The project has concrete plans in place to ensure the sustainability of the project's outputs.

Partners are committed to continuing to run the critical infrastructure such as the reference infrastructure, the grid site running on a StratusLab cloud and the Marketplace.

Plans are in place to continue the development and maintenance of most of the software components. StratusLab partners will continue developing various components in the context of other FP7 or nationally-funded research projects, and as part of an open-source StratusLab community. Other components will be taken over, or contributed to, by collaborating projects, for example, EGI will contribute to the Marketplace.

The commercial exploitation efforts of the project have also resulted in several new avenues for sustainability with private funding available to continue development of components which now form part of commercial product offerings.

Finally, future research opportunities still exist and these may lead to further development of the StratusLab Distribution by the project partners or others.

4 Sustainability 4 . 1

 441 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Organization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Exploitation 3.1 Commercial exploitation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.1 DS-Cloud Ready Pack. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.2 StratusLab Certification on IBM PureSystems . . . . . . 3.1.3 Helix Nebula Consultancy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.4 ESOC-ESA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.5 SlipStream . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.6 Telefónica I+D Global Cloud Initiative. . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.7 Advanced service management and scalability prototype . 3.1.8 UCM and C12G Labs consultancy . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Exploitation in e-Infrastructures and user communities . . . . 3.2.1 Computing sites. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.2 National infrastructures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Research Exploitation & Collaborating Projects . . . . . . . . 3.3.1 The OpenNebula Community . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.2 Collaborating Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Training and e-Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Approaches to sustainability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1.1 Continuation of the StratusLab collaboration . . . . . . . 4.1.2 Continuation of critical infrastructure . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1.3 Software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1.4 Future research opportunities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Paths to sustainability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.1 Public Funding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.2 Private funding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.3 Community contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

•

  Continuation of critical infrastructure • Continued development of the software components as part of an open source community as part of FP7 funded projects such as 4CaaSt and Mantychore by existing infrastructures who are using the components, for example, EGI for the StratusLab Marketplace and IGE for the Globus Virtual Appliances through commercial activities by partners SixSq, TID and UCM • Future research continuing the themes of the StratusLab project, or using its outputs

  • e-Infrastructure deployment for cloud and grid infrastructures • National infrastructures that are migrating towards a cloud model • OpenNebula, as a means to bring StratusLab developments to all its users • Collaborating projects including EDGI, EGI, Mantychore and 4CaaSt FP7 projects • Training and e-Learning, and future cloud research

Table 4 .1: Sustainability Plans

 4 as lead developer on the Marketplace, but most of the project partners as well as a number of external entities such as EGI intend to use it and are willing to contribute to its future development and maintenance overall responsibility for the command line clients, but all partners will continue to develop them

	Output	To be Sustained?	Partner

StratusLab is co-funded by the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (Capacities) Grant Agreement INFSO-RI-261552.

Accounting The StratusLab accounting is largely part of OpenNebula and UCM will continue to maintain this functionality.

Port Translation IBCP will continue the development of this component.

Hudson cloud adaptor for StratusLab LAL intend to maintain this component provided it continues to be used going forward.

Future research opportunities

The project results will present opportunities for future research and development, which in turn will promote the sustainability of the project components.

Possible areas of future evolution include:

• Scheduling and advanced placement heuristics • Messaging service for extensibility and scalability

• Scalable storage integration

• Virtual machine translation service

• Application deployment in the cloud

• Bringing computation to the data

The possibility of future research on a solid basis will appeal to academic and other research organizations, including the existing project consortium partners.

In the EGI model, appliance repositories will be widely deployed by virtual organizations using a variety of storage technology: with this in mind future work could investigate accessing appliance images stored in grid storage systems such as the Logical File Catalogue.

FP7 projects in which the StratusLab partners are involved, such as 4CaaSt and Mantychore, will continue research in some of these areas. Other research projects, such as TCD's work on virtualized GP-GPU grid worker nodes are also using the StratusLab outputs for future research.

Other entities may also be interested in the use of the StratusLab Distribution in their research, and the dissemination activities of WP3 have attempted to broadly disseminate the results of the project within the research community and beyond. The dissemination activities of the project have been described in [START_REF] O'callaghan | Initial plan for dissemination, collaboration and standardization activities[END_REF], [START_REF] O'callaghan | Report on dissemination, collaboration and standardization activities[END_REF] and [START_REF] O'callaghan | Final review of dissemination, collaboration and standardization activities[END_REF].

Paths to sustainability

In Deliverable D3.3 a number of possible paths to sustainability were outlined, including public funding, private funding and community contributions. The sustainability activities detailed in this document encompass all three of these paths.

Glossary