Enhancing Grid Infrastructures with Virtualization and Cloud Technologies Report on Dissemination, Collaboration and Standardization Activities

This document reviews the dissemination, collaboration and standardization activities of the StratusLab project at the end of Project Year 1 (May 2011) -with analysis of progress to date -and describes plans and mechanisms for future activities to improve the project's visibility and enhance external collaborations. Dissemination activities are progressing well. Project visibility is good, particularly within the DCI project community due to the dissemination efforts which encompass participation in events, engagement with related communities, a strong online presence, coverage in the press, and dissemination activities centred around the project results and software releases. Plans for Year 2 will proceed along similar lines with an increased focus on disseminating project results and on training. The project has developed collaborations with several related projects, having signed MoUs with two and developed draft MoU with three more. In Year 2 more of these collaborations will be formalised with MoUs, and the technical aspect of collaboration will increase. Standardization efforts to date have focussed on identifying relevant standards of which the project can make use, while in Year 2 more focus will be put on driving standardization.

Contributors

Conclusions

List of Tables

Executive Summary

This document describes the dissemination, collaboration and standardization activities which have been carried out in the first year of the StratusLab project, provides analysis of the work done, and looks ahead to the second year of the project.

The project has been represented at many events internationally. StratusLab's presence has been in the form of conference booths, invited talks, presentations, panel discussions, posters and tutorials. Over 40 talks and presentations mentioning StratusLab have been given by project partners during the first year. In particular, the project has had a very visible presence at EGI events, with a booth at both the EGI Technical Forum 2010 and the EGI User Forum 2011, and project members have also participated in the meetings of several related projects and communities.

The project is attempting to create a strong on-line presence with the website at http://www.stratuslab.eu/ forming the core of the project's external interface as well as a focus for project members. A redesign of the site is almost complete and it is expected that the new version will go live prior to release 1.0, in June 2011. The on-line presence has been extended to tools such as an RSS news feed and Twitter, along with other social networking tools encouraging users to bookmark or republish pages of interest.

The press has been an important part of the dissemination activity, with the use of press-releases and articles in publications such as International Science Grid This Week helping to spread awareness of the project and disseminate results. Project results are also disseminated through demonstrations and tutorials. Papers targeting relevant national and international journals and conferences are in preparation.

Major dissemination efforts are centred 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.

The user community was surveyed by WP2 to provide input to the project roadmap, and this opportunity was also used for dissemination.

Overall the dissemination activities are proceeding well, with the majority of the planned activities having been completed, and most target metrics met. Some specific conferences and communities which the project expected to target have not been targeted during the first year of the project, but others which were not planned have been targeted instead.

The user discussion mechanism which was expected to be in place by this point has been deployed but has not yet seen very high usage, and other options are being considered. The project blog has also not yet been created, although partner blogs have been used to disseminate release notifications and results.

Dissemination plans for the second year are in place, including a continuation of the release dissemination strategy, increased training effort in the form of participation in summer schools and organising tutorials at conferences, and continued participation in related conferences and meetings.

The collaboration activity is also progressing well with MoUs now signed with EGI and EDGI and draft MoUs with VENUS-C, IGE and Cyfronet. Other MoUs are in development with a number of projects. The project has also engaged heavily with the projects in the DCI area, and other related projects including face-to-face meetings to specifically discuss collaboration as well as participation in workshops and meetings organised by the other projects.

Specific plans for collaboration are being codified in the MoUs with each project, and a general high-level plan to continue to pursue MoUs and collaborations with related projects is also in place.

In the area of standarization, the project has identified some standards which it will adopt and development is complete or in-progress on these. In addition, some input has been made to the standardization process, although this has been limited. As the technology matures this input is likely to increase.

Introduction

Purpose

The purpose of this report is to review the dissemination, collaboration and standardization activities of the project; to analyse the experience from the first year of the project; and to set out plans for the second year of the project.

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 first year of the project. They go on to include an analysis of the activities, highlighting where the project is on-target and any issues or problems encountered, and then plans for year two of the project are outlined. 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 first year of the project. The project published its "Initial Plan for Dissemination, Collaboration and Standardization Activities" (D3.1) [START_REF] O'callaghan | Initial plan for dissemination, collaboration and standardization activities[END_REF] in October 2010. In addition, the quarterly reports have documented the project's progress including its dissemination activities.

Events

StratusLab has been represented at many events internationally. This has included conference booths, invited talks, presentations, panel discussions and posters. A comprehensive list of events at which StratusLab has had a presence is given in Table 3.1.

EGI Technical Forum 2010

Particular emphasis is place by the project on EGI events, which are seen as a focal point for the Distributed Computing Infrastructure ecosystem.

The project booked an exhibition booth at EGI Technical Forum 2010 in Amsterdam and presented posters, demonstrations and other dissemination material. StratusLab had a very visible presence at the event. Project members gave a number of high-profile presentations, listed in Table 3. 1. StratusLab members participated in the session Enabling Clouds for e-Science, which brought together a number of international cloud computing projects.

EGI User Forum 2011

The project booked an exhibition booth at EGI User Forum 2011 in Vilnius, Lithuania and WP3 coordinated the preparation of dissemination materials for the event including t-shirts and demonstrations.

GRNET presented the reference infrastructure provided for interested users. LAL provided training on StratusLab as part of the 'Heavy User Communities' training sessions at this event. Project partners participated in the virtualization strand of the conference program.

Raising Awareness in Related Communities

StratusLab partners have endeavoured to raise awareness of the project in meetings, forums and distribution lists of related European projects in which they participate.

StratusLab was represented at European meetings such as the 8th e-Infrastructure Concertation Meeting (see Section 4 below) and ICT 2010. StratusLab's presence at EGI events is mentioned above in Section 3.2.1 and more detail of the collaboration with DCI projects is given in Section 4 below.

StratusLab members have participated in sessions of the Open Grid Forum [START_REF]Open Grid Forum[END_REF] and other related communities, as indicated by some of the presentation locations in Table 3.1.

Online

The project is attempting to create a strong on-line presence. The project website is available at http://www.stratuslab.eu/ and provides general information about the project, along with news and status updates on the project, an archive of public documents and deliverables, links to presentations and other dissemination material, and the project roadmap. The website content management system is regularly upgraded to get the latest features and security updates.

This site is in active use by the project members as well as forming the core of the project's external interface, and it is regularly updated. A graphical design update is in progress, with the intention to coincide with release v1.0 of the Stratus-Lab distribution. The website allows visitors to provide comments, and the initial use of this feature is to solicit feedback on the project roadmap.

The site integrates Twitter and RSS feeds to provide news about software re- leases, press releases, attendance at events, and other newsworthy items. To date, the project Twitter and RSS feeds have been used to announce the project kickoff, participation in major events, publication of project dcuments and more informal updates on development including such as planning meetings and internal demos. The use of these tools will be continually reviewed and expanded.

Website monitoring was improved to give the project better visibility of the number of visitors and software downloads. Google Analytics gives a clear view of website traffic and, for instance, allows us to visualize spikes in traffic caused by media exposure (See Figure 3.1). AWStats (running locally on the web server) can provide in-depth statistics for non-web files, including software downloads. WP3 has begun to analyze the search engine results for the website and an effort to improve the site's page ranking is ongoing.

The website integrates tools to encourage visitors to bookmark and republish pages of interest to them. This is achieved through a plug-in which allows visitors to instantly create a bookmark to the site in a range of external sites and portals, including Facebook, Twitter and others.

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 [3] and OGF Thought Leadership Series [START_REF]OGF Thought Leadership Series[END_REF] and these have been and will continue to be 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.

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.

A project kickoff press release was created in June 2010, in both general and localised forms. The localised versions were not only translated into the local language, but also had a particular focus on the participation of local institutions. This press-release was widely picked up in both grid and cloud publications, as well as some more general scientific and educational publications. Coverage by major grid and cloud publications included Cloud Computing Journal, International Science Grid This Week, SmartGrid, HPCWire and others. Including smaller local technical and educational publications, the press-release was carried in over fifteen online publications.

International Science Grid This Week

The project worked with the widely read International Science Grid This Week online magazine.

e-ScienceTalk

StratusLab was mentioned in the e-ScienceTalk Grid Briefing entitled Mapping the e-Infrastructure Landscape published in November 2010.

In addition, StratusLab has been in contact with e-ScienceTalk to discuss other the dissemination avenues which they might make available to the project, such as GridCafe, the GridCast blog and the Grid Briefing series.

A full list of references to StratusLab in the press is maintained in the project wiki [16].

Publishing, Demonstrating and Disseminating Results

As indicated in Table 3.1 above, StratusLab has been publicised at a variety of scientific meetings and conferences at national and international levels. In particular, since the first release in November 2010, several demonstrations and tutorials have been given, as well as a number of presentations and talks highlighting the results of the project and the availability and features of the StratusLab distribution.

The StratusLab Marketplace for sharing virtual machine images has also been publicised via presentations and posters at major conferences and this has already generated interest among the user communities.

In addition to dissemination of results of the project's development and research, results relating to the processes of the project, for example, the agile development methodology employed by the project, have also been disseminated at events such as XP2011 in Madrid, Spain and the EGI User Forum 2011 in Vilnius, Lithuania.

A tutorial aimed at introducing System Administrators to the StratusLab distribution was organised at the EGI User Forum 2011 in Vilnius, Lithuania in April 2011. This was very well attended, with 54 participants in total, 24 of whom tried and succeeded in installing and running the StratusLab client.

Proposals for a StratusLab tutorial, a Cloud Computing and Virtualization presentation session, and a session on Agile Processes in Academic / FP7 projects have been been submitted by the project for the upcoming EGI Technical Forum 2011, which will take place in September 2011, in Lyon, France. In June 2010, two surveys were conducted by WP2 which provided input for dissemination activities. The surveys revealed information about the backgrounds of potential users, for example, the majority identified themselves as working in research or educational institutes, most came from the Computer Science/Engineering, Bioinformatics and Physics/High-Energy Physics domains, and there were a large number of Computer Science researchers among the respondents.

These results not only help the project to better identify its core user base, but they highlight areas where the project may need to invest additional effort in order to broaden the audiences reached by dissemination activities. For example, it was recognised that it is necessary to make a stronger effort in disseminating the project aims and results to commercial enterprises as they were under-represented among the respondents. This could be achieved by targeting more industry publications and events as well as academic ones.

An article was published in International Science Grid This Week (http://isgtw. net/), on 24 November 2010, describing the results of these surveys, as well as publicising the first release. More detail on the results of these surveys can be found in deliverable D2.1 Review of the Use of Cloud and Virtualization Technologies in Grid Infrastructures [START_REF] Loomis | Review of the use of cloud and virtualization technologies in grid infrastructures[END_REF].

Publications in the most relevant national and international journals and conferences will aid in both raising project awareness and dissemination of results. All partners have undertaken to identify possible publication targets relevant to the specific area of the project in which they are involved. It is likely that such publications will become more important later in the project when there are more concrete results to report. A full list of relevant Calls for Papers is maintained on the project wiki [START_REF] Stratuslab | Stratuslab calls for papers[END_REF].

The project has begun the process of writing such publications. To date, an initial, internal draft of an academic position paper on StratusLab has been prepared.

The StratusLab grant was also been acknowledged in a book chapter "Architectures for Enhancing Grid Infrastructures with Cloud Computing" by Eduardo Huedo, Rafael Moreno-Vozmediano, Ruben S. Montero and Ignacio M. Llorente (of StratusLab participant UCM) in Grids, Clouds and Virtualization (Springer, 2011).

A poster submitted by CNRS IBCP to the French annual Bioinformatics conference JOBIM 2011 in Paris, June 2011, has been accepted for presentation. The subject is "Virtualisation of Bioinformatics Applications on Cloud Infrastructure" and this specifically targets the bioinformatics user community, introducing the virtual bioinformatics appliances that have been built by the partner CNRS, and the benefit to bioinformatics scientists and engineers of using the cloud service from StratusLab.

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.

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 will inform 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.

For the initial release of version 0.1 on 9 November 2010, we wanted plenty of awareness of the software and the project, but with the focus on those groups who would be most interested in testing a version of the software that was not ready for full production use. With this in mind, the release was disseminated to our opt-in announcements list and relevant online media.

This release dissemination plan was revised for the subsequent releases of versions 0.2 (17 December 2010), 0.3 (15 March 2011) and 0.4 (8 June 2011).

A press release was prepared for the first software development release and distributed to a number of outlets that had been interested previously in our work. This was picked up by HPCwire, Sys-Con, CloudExpo News, DSA Research Blog, and OpenNebula Blog. In addition, an announcement appeared in International Science Grid This Week on 14 November 2010. A subsequent short press release was sent for release version 0.3 to the same outlets.

A major dissemination effort is planned for the upcoming first production release version 1.0, and the release dissemination plan is being updated for this purpose.

Dissemination tasks and metrics

Table 3.2 shows the dissemination tasks that were planned for the first year of the project, as outlined in deliverable D3.1 [START_REF] O'callaghan | Initial plan for dissemination, collaboration and standardization activities[END_REF]. The majority of these have been completed with some still ongoing. In addition to these planned items, StratusLab was present at many more events, a full list of which is given in Table 3. 1. Table 3.3 lists the project's dissemination metrics that will be used to understand the impact of the dissemination activities. Notes: 1 Metric has been adapted from "Number of people on StratusLab discussion list". See section 3.3.3 for a discussion of this metric; 2 Visits between 1 June 2010 -24 May 2011.

In the next section we provide analysis of each dissemination activity to under-

Analysis

Events

StratusLab has been extremely well represented at a variety of events, as noted in section 3.2.1. Almost all of the events identified in the roadmap of events for year one were attended, along with attendance at a large number of additional events which were identified during the year. Participation in these events was very successful, the StratusLab posters, booths, demos, presentations, talks and tutorials all generated considerable interest. The StratusLab booth at the EGI User Forum 2011 received the "Best Exhibition" award (voted by attendees), and the StratusLab tutorials at this event were very well attended. Some specific events in which the project intended to participate, were not attended in year one. For example, it was intended 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. This has not yet been possible, but will be revisited in year two.

A number of invitations to speak about the StratusLab project have been regretfully declined where it has not been possible to find an available speaker from within the project to attend.

Related communities

StratusLab has had considerable success in disseminating to related communities, particularly within the DCI ecosystem. Project partners have given several presentations at events of related projects, and members of related projects have been given access to the StratusLab Reference Infrastructure (See section 4.2.15). The visibility of the StratusLab project within related communities appears to be quite high.

Some communities have not yet been specifically targetted for dissemination. For example, although it was planned to disseminate results of the project to Technology Platform groups in which the consortium partners participate, such as INES and NESSI, StratusLab has not actively worked with INES and NESSI at this point, however there are plans to pursue contact with INES in the near future.

Online

The website has been online since early in the project, and it 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 'StratusLab' or 'combining grid and cloud') but not highly visible for more generic terms such as 'open source cloud '. The project had expected to have a technical discussion mailing list, weblog or website forum to encourage dialogue with the user community and other interested parties. The project has not yet made full use of this medium, but microblogging using Twitter has been extensively used to announce software releases, conference participation, and the status of development.

A discussion feature has been added to the website where users can comment on certain pages and thus far it has been enabled as a test case for the project roadmap page.

Dissemination of this feature has been limited and as registration is not required it is difficult to accurately measure usage to date. Although there have been 233 unique visits to the discussion-enabled page, only one user has posted comments.

A dissemination plan for this discussion feature is being developed to coincide with the release of version 1.0, and other discussion mechanisms are now being investigated. These include the mailing list and blog as well as more technical interaction with users and potential open-source contributors by providing access to a bug-tracking system.

Press

The project has been relatively well covered in the press, in particular iSGTW and other e-ScienceTalk outlets. Spikes in website traffic have been seen coinciding with some press coverage and the project intends to further analyse these in order to identify the most successful press outlets.

There has also been some press coverage within the mainstream press, for example, the localised project kick-off press release was widely picked up by national media, however, this could be improved.

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 had intended to have a paper in a major conference or journal and this has not yet been achieved, but is in planning for year two.

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. This will continue in year two with a very large dissemination effort planned to coincide with the release of version 1.0.

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.

Plans

Table 3.4 presents a roadmap of dissemination activities for the second year of the project. Only those in the relatively near-term can be considered concrete plans. The details of those in the longer-term are likely to change as the project progresses, and many additional activities will be added.

These plans include some activities that relate to the MoU agreed with EGI, described in Section 4.

Events

It is planned to have project representation at a large number of events again this year. Some specifics are given in Table 3.4.

Related Communities

StratusLab intends to broaden the range of related communities to which it disseminates during year two.

Online

Updates to the website and online presence are planned. A redesign of the website look-and-feel has been completed and the new version will go live in June 2011, shortly before the release of version 1.0. The new version incorporates the project RSS news feed and Twitter feed into the main page in order to ensure that the content is regularly updated. It is also more visually appealing with a graphical banner and footer, and includes improved navigation and a reorganisation of some of the material in order to make it easier to find key information.

Press

StratusLab will continue to work with e-ScienceTalk and iSGTW. The project is investigating the possibility of an article in iSGTW shortly after the release of version 1.0, perhaps describing the StratusLab Marketplace and the Bioinformatics appliances which the project has created.

The project will also attempt to have articles published in a broader range of publications, including more mainstream press which would help extend the dissemination effort to the general public.

Results

With the imminent release of the production version 1.0 the project will begin a concerted effort to disseminate the results of the project thus far. Training the user communities will become more important in year two, and several training initiatives are being planned, including tutorials at major user community conferences, as well as the cloud training day given by StratusLab as part of the DCI Summer School in July 2011.

Other results of the project will also be more widely disseminated. The Stra-tusLab Marketplace may be of interest to a very broad range of user communities. The installation of a dedicated test version of the Marketplace for the HEPiX community serves as a test case which may be repeated with other communities in future.

Software Releases

A major dissemination effort is planned for the first production release version 1.0. This will include an announcement posted on the main page of the redesigned webpage, announcement emails sent to the project's announce list and the contact lists of the partners, microblogging on Twitter with project partners encouraged to repost the annoucement, stories on partners' blogs, a press release which will again be localised and targeted to each partners' country and an eventual article in iSGTW which will highlight some of the features of the release.

Going forward smaller more targeted dissemination efforts will continue coinciding with each development release.

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 must actively engage 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

During the project lifetime, collaboration will be pursued according to the plans and agreements in place with collaborators (while allowing for flexibility if circumstances change) and collaboration activities will be reported as part of the project's regular reporting cycle.

Many other concurrent European projects will be interested in the results of StratusLab or will be exploring complementary technologies. This task has set about identifying those projects of interest, and has opened discussions about collaboration with those projects. Memoranda of Understanding have been signed, or are in development with these projects.

Rather than an overall roadmap for collaborations, each bilateral collaboration has its own roadmap, determined by the collaborating contacts and forming part of any agreement between projects.

e-Infrastructure

Charles Loomis (CNRS LAL) participated in the 8th e-Infrastructure Concertation Meeting on 4-5 November 2010, CERN in Geneva, Switzerland (http://www. e-sciencetalk.org/e-concertation/).

SIENA

At the 1st SIENA Roadmap Event, 27 October 2010, in conjunction with OGF30, Brussels, Juan Caceres (TID) represented StratusLab at the Roadmap Editorial Board: a group of national and international distributed computing initiative members, active contributors to standards, and collaborating e-Infrastructure users to serve on an editorial board to provide input for and consolidate the SIENA European Roadmap on Grid and Cloud Standards for e-Science and Beyond -Cloudscape III Use Cases and Position Papers wide input.

TID wrote several sections on the SIENA Initiative1 wiki, which was set up specifically for the writing of the Roadmap. The sections aimed at disseminating the activities carried out in Stratuslab, and consisted of an introduction to the project, a description of challenges and a description of engagement. In addition to that, deliverable D6.1 was uploaded as a reference document for StratusLab's Cloud-like management of grid sites design.

Vangelis Floros (GRNET) participated in the Cloudscape III meeting (March 15-16) organized by SIENA, and presented the project's status and success to date.

OpenNebula

Discussion has begun on promoting new StratusLab features and services (such as enhanced security, and the appliance marketplace) to the OpenNebula community through the mutual project partners.

SARA HPC Cloud

StratusLab members from CNRS, GRNET, TCD and UCM met representatives of the SARA HPC Cloud project in Amsterdam on 11 May 2011 to see how Stratus-Lab could work with SARA on future developments of their HPC Cloud service. Mantychore representatives were also present at this meeting and described their project and technology, which appears to have applications for StratusLab.

NIIF

StratusLab has had discussions with the National Information Infrastructure Development (NIIF) Program in Hungary. NIIF have already developed a working cloud prototype for their users. In particular, they have based their image repository infrastructure around iSCSI technologies. StratusLab has discussed various points for collaboration, in particular around using these storage technologies in the StratusLab distribution.

Cyfronet

Cyfronet, which operates the Polish NGI, approached StratusLab about the possibility of collaboration on cloud deployment in relation to a national project in Poland that will involve cloud computing. A draft MoU has been defined.

HEPiX

Early in the project StratusLab initiated a collaboration with HEPiX in order to provide them with experience in virtualization, cloud computing, and OpenNebula. More recently, HEPiX have provided input on the design of the StratusLab Marketplace and a test version of the Marketplace has been deployed for the HEPiX Virtualization Working Group. This will allow them to test how the Marketplace can help them to publish and to share trusted virtual machine images between their grid sites. A concerted testing effort by the HEPiX people is expected to take place in the latter part of June 2011. StratusLab hope to work with HEPiX more extensively in the future with HEPiX acting as test sites for the StratusLab distribution, and cooperation on the HEPiX "Image Generation Policy" work.

ttylinux

The ttylinux distributions are small, but fully functional, linux distributions that are typically used for embedded systems. Images based on these distributions are extremely useful for testing the StratusLab cloud and for training. Scientists may also be interested in these images because of their extremely fast start-up times. StratusLab has initiated a strong collaboration with the maintainer of the ttylinux distributions in order to make it more appropriate for use in a cloud. Essentially all of the customization done by StratusLab for making cloud ttylinux images have been adopted by the maintainer and now appear in the standard ttylinux distributions. This makes it easier for the project (and others) to keep pace with the new ttylinux releases.

FP7 Proposals

StratusLab partners were approached by a number of project consortia interested in future collaborations for FP7 calls in late 2010. The project issued Letters of Support for four projects.

Distributed Computing Infrastructure Projects

Collaborations with projects in the DCI area were pursued in the form of in-person meetings (where possible) as well as audio conferences between representatives from all related DCI projects. The purpose of these meetings was to build understanding of each project's objectives and to uncover possible collaborations.

A common deliverable Distributed Computing Infrastructure Collaborative Roadmap [START_REF] Newhouse | Distributed Computing Infrastructure (DCI) Collaborative Roadmap[END_REF] detailing the proposed interactions between each of the DCI projects has been created with input from StratusLab and the other DCI projects.

EGI

StratusLab has signed an MoU with EGI which outlines a number of specific areas for collaboration including the development of cloud middleware components based on requirements gathered through the various scientific communities within EGI along with complementary training strategies, cooperation on workshops and technical meetings and development of standards.

StratusLab contributed to and reviewed EGI-InSPIRE deliverable D2.6 on Integration of Clouds and Virtualization into the European Grid Infrastructure.

StratusLab was represented at an EGI Security Policy Group meeting in Amsterdam in January 2011. StratusLab input will be included in a number of security policies which touch on virtualization and cloud computing. StratusLab has been invited to participate formally in the Security Coordination Group under the MoU between the projects.

StratusLab members from CNRS, GRNET, TCD and UCM participated in the EGI User Virtualization workshop in Amsterdam on 12-13 May to map out the future of EGI as a federated virtualized infrastructure.

EDGI

StratusLab has signed an MoU with the EDGI project which allows EDGI to take advantage of a cloud infrastructure with StratusLab providing expertise in building virtual appliances as well as supplying base images for EDGI to build their appliances, and grid appliances for their interoperability testing. StratusLab also provides a test infrastructure to EDGI and use of the Marketplace. The EDGI project instantiates some StratusLab use cases and thus will provide requirements, as well as feedback on their use of the StratusLab tools and infrastructure.

VENUS-C

Project partners participated in several meetings with the VENUS-C project to discuss collaboration between both projects.

A draft MoU with VENUS-C has been defined covering collaboration in the areas of user requirements and experiences and on sharing expertise on standards, accounting, and OpenNebula (a core component of StratusLab). Furthermore, Stratuslab will investigate the use of the shared storage solution of VENUS-C while VENUS-C will investigate developing high-level APIs for some of the StratusLab benchmarks.

IGE

Project partners met with the IGE project about collaboration between both projects, to deploy Globus middleware and services on StratusLab sites. A draft MoU has been defined.

EMI

Since project Q2 Vangelis Floros (GRNET) has engaged in an informal interaction with EMI project. This was initiated by two members of EMI, Shahbaz Memon and Bjorn Hagemeier (both from the Jülich Supercomputing Center) mainly with the purpose for EMI to keep up to date with the developments of StratusLab integration activities. There have been various communications between the two parties answering questions and clarifying specific technical details about the StratusLab cloud solution. In addition, user accounts have been created for EMI members in

Standards

While several of the collaborations in which the project is involved have a standarization component, for example, SIENA, there has been little direct work on standardization to date. The focus so far has been on identifying existing standards which StratusLab can implement rather than on driving new standardization efforts. Gaps have been identified, however, and these are likely targets for future standardization work.

Plans

The project has already initiated a large number of contacts and collaborations with other projects. In year two, we expect that many of these collaborations will be formalised in the form of Memoranda of Understanding. In the short term, we hope to conclude MoUs with a number of projects where a draft MoU already exists, while MoU will be drafted with other projects. Table 4.1 gives an outline of some of the specific MoUs planned in the short term.

Whether formalised through an MoU or not, the existing collaborations are expected to deepen over the course of year two, with more detailed technical collaboration than has occurred to date.

At the same time, other relevant projects and parties for collaboration will continue to be identified.

As a relatively short project, StratusLab must consider the potential for its collaborating partners to contribute to exploitation and stustainability (see Deliverable D3.3 Exploitation and Sustainability First Plan), and this will also be further explored as year two progresses.

Conclusions

This document describes the dissemination, collaboration and standardization activities undertaken by the StratusLab project in year one and the plans for the coming year.

Dissemination has been given a high priority and has been quite successful. Visibility of the project is high, due to the 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 acting as the main external interface for the project as well as a focus for project members. The website has been 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.

While some planned dissemination activities have not yet taken place, many more talks and presentations have been given than was originally envisioned and the dissemination effort is progressing very well. In the second year a greater focus will be placed on disseminating the project results and on training, with a number of specific events planned for these purposes.

The document also gives an outline of collaboration with related projects which are underway. Particular attention must be given to the Distributed Computing Infrastructure projects and, indeed, StratusLab has contributed to a common vision for the DCI projects [START_REF] Newhouse | Distributed Computing Infrastructure (DCI) Collaborative Roadmap[END_REF]. Beyond the DCI projects, StratusLab has initiated collaborations with many other projects and user communities. MoUs have been signed with EGI and EDGI, and draft MoUs have been defined with VENUS-C, IGE and Cyfronet. Other MoUs are in the discussion stages.

Standardization efforts are progressing, the project is implementing a number of standards and has also begun the process of driving standards forward in some areas. Several of the collaborations in place with related projects include a standardization component.

In year two it is expected that the collaborations will deepen and more technical collaboration will emerge, including more work on standardization.

As the first year of the project draws to a close WP3 turns more of its attention to exploitation and sustainability of the StratusLab distribution. This is the focus of the report D3.3 "Exploitation and Sustainability First Plan" [START_REF] Begin | Exploitation and sustainability first plan[END_REF], prepared in parallel with this report.

Effort on WP3 activities was slightly lower than expected at the beginning of the project. This was partly due to staffing issues and holiday periods. Effort has gradually increased to be on target for Q4. Effort in year two should continue to be on target as task 3.3 Exploitation and Sustainability began in Q4, and the dissemination, collaboration and standardization efforts are expected to increase after the first production release version 1.0.

4 . 3 4 . 3 . 1 4 . 4

 4343144 Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Memoranda of Understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.2 Standards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Plans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Figure 3 . 1 :

 31 Figure 3.1: Website visits for Year 1

  3.1 Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3.2 Roadmap of Dissemination Activities for

Year 1 . . . . . . . . .

3.3 Dissemination Metrics and

Targets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3.4 Roadmap of Dissemination Activities for

Year 2 . . . . . . . . .

4.1 Roadmap of Collaboration Activities in

Year 2 . . . . . . . . . .

Table 3 .1: Events

 3

	Title / Event

  StratusLab members have participated in iSGTW Live Chat! on 14 July 2010 and discussed StratusLab in the discussion. The project kickoff press release was also picked up by iSGTW (30 June 2010). An announcement of the user and administrator surveys was printed on 7 July 2010, and an announcement of the release of StratusLab version 0.1 was printed on 17 November 2010, and of version 0.3 on 15 March 2011.StratusLab provided major input for on an article in International Science Grid This Week (http://isgtw.net/) entitled Clouds are rising, with StratusLab which described the results of the StratusLab surveys carried out by WP2 in Q1 and the first software release. This was published on 24 November 2010.

Table 3 . 3 :

 33 Dissemination Metrics and Targets

	Activity	Date	Description
	Website updates	Ongoing	The website content will be continually updated to ensure that the site is	Achieved
			informative and interesting to users
	OGF30/Grid2010 [7]	25-28 Oct 2010	Keynote speech given at this conference by a project participant to include slides	Achieved
			on StratusLab
	CloudComp2010 [1]	26-28 Oct 2010	Keynote speech given at this conference by a project participant to include slides	Achieved
			on StratusLab
	ISC Cloud2010 [4]	28-29 Oct 2010	Keynote speech given at this conference by a project participant to include slides	Achieved
			on StratusLab
	First Release v0.1	Early Nov 2010	To coincide with the first release of the StratusLab Distribution a wide range of	Achieved
			dissemination activities are planned including press releases, mail shots, etc.
	Documentation	Early Nov 2010	Documentation will be produced to accompany the first release and this will be	Achieved
			available on the website
	iSGTW article	Nov 2010	An article is planned in the iSGTW outlining the results of the user surveys and	Achieved
			publicising the availability of the first version
	EMI meeting	22-24 Nov 2010	Presence at EMI all-hands meeting	Achieved
	Website redesign	Q4 2010	A possible website redesign to make it more user-friendly and eye-catching has	Due June 2011
			been proposed
	Social networking	Q4 2010	Further integration with Microblogging, Social Networking or other tools will be	Due June 2011
			investigated
	Search engine optimization Q4 2010	WP3 has begun to analyze the search engine results for the website and an effort	Ongoing
			to improve the site's page ranking is ongoing.
	CloudCamp	Q4 2010	Presence at CloudCamp meeting	Due July 2011
	Project weblog	Q4 2010	A project weblog will be set up -the project weblog has not been created on the	Partially achieved
			webserver, but microblogging using Twitter is heavily used by the project
	EGI User Forum 2011	11-15 April 2011 Presence at EGI User Forum 2011	Achieved
	Training event	Q4 2011	Participation in Joint European DCI Summer School	Due July 2011

Table 3 . 4 :

 34 Roadmap of Dissemination Activities for Year 2

	Activity	Date	Description
	Release version 1.0	Jun 2011	A major dissemination effort is planned for the release of the first production
			version of the software
	Contrail Summer School	Jun 27 -30, 2011	Presentation and hands-on session on OpenNebula
	HPCS2011	Jul 4 -8, 2011	Keynote speech featuring StratusLab
	CloudCamp	Jul 13 2011	Presence at CloudCamp meeting
	Joint European DCI Summer School Jul 11-16, 2011	StratusLab training day on cloud computing
	Parco2011	Aug 30 -Sep 2, 2011 Keynote speech featuring StratusLab
	EGI Technical Forum 2011	Sep 19-23, 2011	Booth, tutorial and talks on Bioinformatics Appliances, Agile and academic/FP7
			projects are planned
	ISC Cloud2011	Sep 26 -27	Keynote speech featuring StratusLab
	Training event	Q4 2011	It has been suggested that a Cloud School could be run in late 2011, either in
			conjunction with another event or as a stand-alone event.
	Release dissemination	Ongoing	Future releases will be accompanied by dissemination efforts targeted based on
			the features of each release
	Project weblog	Q3 2011	A project weblog will be set up
	StratusLab paper	Q4 2011	A StratusLab paper will be submitted to a major conference

Table 4 . 1 :

 41 Roadmap of Collaboration Activities in Year 2

	Activity	Date
	Finalise MoU with VENUS-C	Q5 2011
	Finalise MoU with IGE	Q5 2011
	Finalise MoU with Cyfronet	Q5 2011
	Develop draft MoU with other projects Q5 2011

3.1 Website visits forYear 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

http://www.sienainitiative.eu/

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

GRNET's reference cloud infrastructure providing access to the test installation and tools of StratusLab. This informal collaboration is expected to be formally defined in the coming months in the context of the MoU with EMI which is currently under preparation

Standards and Policy Bodies

StratusLab will engage with standards bodies to drive standardization in a direction consistent with our vision. Possible standardization targets include: Cloud API, Contextualization, Cloud/Grid Interface, Security and Accounting.

The project uses existing standards where appropriate, and engages with standards bodies to extend existing standards or create new standards.

Individuals participating in the technical work packages are best placed to participate in the technical discussions surrounding the standardization of cloud and virtualization services, thus all partners are involved in contributing to standards and policy bodies. This task identifies standards activities of interest to the project, encourages project participants to work in those standardization activities, and reports on their impact within the standardization efforts.

Use of existing standards

The project plans to use the OpenNebula OCCI API based on the OGF OCCI specifications. This feature is not yet in use in StratusLab 1.0, but will be included in future releases.

VENUS-C is developing a data management solution for the VENUS-C that is SNIA CDMI compliant. The CDMI standard complements the OCCI with a focus on data management. The MoU in development with VENUS-C allows for use of this data management solution by StratusLab.

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.

The project has also had initial discussions with SARA HPC about future standards-based clouds using the best of existing standards and if necessary developing new standards, for instance in the area of network management.

Analysis

Memoranda of Understanding

The project is progressing well in this area with MoUs signed with EGI and EDGI, draft MoUs defined with VENUS-C, IGE and Cyfronet, as well as ongoing discussions with a number of other projects which may lead to MoUs in the future. Establishing MoUs is beneficial as it helps to define the relationships between the projects.


Marc-Elian Bégin

David O'callaghan

Christophe Blanchet

Evangelos Floros

Ignacio Llorente

Charles Loomis

Henar Muñoz Frutos

à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau

recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers,

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 identified drivers for sustainability, most notably the continuation of critical infrastructures and future research opportunities. Support for sustainability actions will be sought through public funding from national and international sources, private funding from commercial activities, and community contributions from the existing project partners and from the wider StratusLab user community.

The approaches to sustainability that will be used by StratusLab include direct promotion of the project results, continuous improvement of development processes, evolving the user and developer community, influencing and harnessing national and international cloud strategies, pursuing research funding for further technological development, and integration of StratusLab within national and international infrastructures.

The document describes the current and future work for exploitation and sustainability with a focus on the current project partners. The plan will be updated before the end of the project, with the intention to expand the exploitation and sustainability beyond the consortium members.

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

The purpose of this document is to provide a first version of the exploitation and sustainability plan for the StratusLab project. This document describes the plans to exploit the project results and to ensure the sustainability of the products beyond the project lifetime. The plan will be updated before the end of the project.

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

As described in further detail below each partner is already taking positive advantage from StratusLab and is expected to continue doing so in the near future but also beyond the project lifetime.

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.

During the second year of the project the exploitation plan will be executed and subsequently revised to serve as a plan for the future.

Commercial exploitation

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

SixSq and SlipStream

Beyond its ability to change how we access computer resources, cloud computing has an equally disrupting potential for improving software engineering practices. It is this aspect of cloud computing that SixSq Sàrl is exploiting with its flagship product and service called SlipStream.

SlipStream is an automated engine for creating multi-machine runtime environments, using cloud computing as a backend. SlipStream also integrates a virtual machine factory service. This means that SlipStream customers can reduce their time to market and improve their release cycle significantly, while improving software quality. In this context, StratusLab is instrumental, since it enables SixSq to deliver and deploy its solutions on existing and private customer resources.

Until now, SlipStream was deployed only on the Amazon EC2 cloud service. This limitation was significant, as it made it impossible for a significant number of companies to use SlipStream due to reasons ranging from legal to cultural. SixSq added StratusLab support to SlipStream earlier this year, feeding back and sharing the knowledge gained and lessons learned with the project partners.

Telef ónica I+D Global Cloud Initiative

Telefónica I+D (TID, http://www.tid.es/), which is a 100% subsidiary of Telefónica S.A., works on research and development activities in order to identify those factors that are going to shape the future of telecommunications and the development of Telefónica's businesses. TID is in charge of providing new and innovative products and solutions, which solve customer needs, and can be commercialized by Telefónica's operators (LATAM, Spain, O2 Europe, etc.).

In the context of the 2009-2012 Strategic Plan, Telefónica is performing the Cloud global business project to address Cloud Computing in Telefónica, where outcomes will be available to all of Telefónica's business. The Global Telefónica Cloud initiative comprises three main architecture areas:

• Global IaaS Architecture. This is the common architecture where the Global Cloud Services will be integrated and delivered to customers. It supports a federation of TEF's Global Cloud sites located in different countries.

• Global Cloud Services. Services will be created once but commercialized many times, under a multi-business approach and deployed on the Global IaaS platform. These services can be not only computing and storage services (IaaS and DaaS) but Telefónica applications (PaaS) and services (SaaS).

• Local Infrastructures. The marketing of Global Cloud Services requires integration with the local infrastructure (Service Platforms and Access Network) of each Telefónica Operator Business and, optionally, connection also from/to Customer's Data centres.

Due to this, Telefónica I+D has established the Cloud Computing Area where an IaaS Cloud Product Line is under development. TID is developing new production components in StratusLab. The results will be exploited in the IaaS Cloud Product Line. In order to quantify the return of investment, the TEF Cloud budget for the 2010-2012 period is 30 million euros.

From StratusLab results, TID is interested in:

• Claudia Platform: some of functionalities identified during the R&D and Service Provision at StratusLab have been added to the Claudia Platform.

StratusLab has provided a way of distributing Claudia with a set of tools and documentation.

• TCloud API as Claudia API has been sent to the DMTF for standardization.

In addition, TID is using StratusLab results to continue researching through the in-progress 4CaaSt, VISION, NUBA & FI-Ware PPP-Core Platform projects. The Claudia distribution in StratusLab together the RPM packaging, StratusLab installation tools and manual instructions are used as the basis for distributing Claudia software.

The main TID result in StratusLab is the service manager called Claudia. Claudia is a key element in several initiatives inside the Cloud Area in TID, and Claudia is evolving continuously thanks to requirements coming from business lines and research projects.

The results from StratusLab are used as a basis for other national and European initiatives. The webpage on the StratusLab wiki1 is used for distributing Claudia software and documentation among the different projects.

Commercial Integration and Support

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.

Lately, as cloud computing is becoming more widely accepted, several organisations and industries have been looking for open source, yet robust and well supported IaaS private cloud solutions. SixSq, with its strong expertise in the Stratus-Lab stack and virtualisation technologies is well positioned to provide commercial support to future StratusLab customers.

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 our primary aim is not to commercially exploit the results, UCM offers valueadded services around OpenNebula through the University Office of Technology Transfer.

Additionally, C12G Labs, a UCM spin-off created to manage the OpenNebula open-source project and to provide support subscription and value-added services for OpenNebula, will support and maintain the StratusLab extensions incorporated into the main OpenNebula distribution.

Other commercial exploitation

Preliminary discussions surrounding the CNRS persistent storage service have already been held with Huawei. This opens the door for possible commercial exploitation of the StratusLab distribution and potentially may provide revenue for continued support and development.

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.

At LAL, the computing services department has already deployed a private StratusLab cloud infrastructure to support the rapid testing and deployment of laboratory services. This has helped to streamline upgrades of existing services and identified problems with newer versions before their deployment in production. This also supports the numerous developers within the service by allowing (virtual) machines to be quickly deployed without direct system administrator intervention and without the need to provision or to redeploy physical hardware. Feedback from users of this cloud deployment has helped improve the StratusLab distribution.

LAL is a major partner of the regional grid infrastructure, GRIF, which participates in the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI). The system administrators have already done early tests on running grid Worker Nodes (WNs) within the Stra-tusLab cloud and attaching them to LAL's standard, production grid resources. Once the StratusLab 1.0 release is available, the administrators will progressively migrate the WNs of the grid infrastructure to virtual machines running within a StratusLab cloud. Initially the current generic computing environment will be provided to all users; eventually, customized environments for different scientific communities (Virtual Organizations) will be created. Participation in EGI is a long term commitment of the laboratory and consequently use of virtualization technologies, in particular StratusLab, will be a long term activity.

In parallel with the virtualization of the grid WNs, LAL will also deploy a public cloud service. The infrastructure has already been deployed with the existing beta releases of the StratusLab distribution and some local users are taking advantage of those resources. The service has not yet been opened for wider use because of the lack of a registration service to ensure that cloud users accept responsibility for the actions of their virtual machines and because the currently allocated storage is insufficient. Once those issues are resolved, this service will open for wider use and will be maintained through the end of the project and beyond.

IBCP is already using virtualization heavily for the provision of local services and of grid services within EGI. They have been closely involved in the testing of the StratusLab distribution and will take advantage of it to simplify and to consolidate their local deployment. Their experience will also be critical in the potential use of StratusLab by the national bioinformatics infrastructure, RENABI GRISBI.

Both laboratories have already benefitted 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

TCD has begun to make 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. A system based on StratusLab will eventually supplant the ad-hoc 'TestGrid' system that relies on a somewhat more manual approach to allocating test hardware.

As a grid resource provider and Computer Science research group, TCD will evaluate StratusLab as a platform for conventional grid worker nodes, for GP-GPU worker nodes, and for community-specific services: in particular, 'bridge' services that may be needed to provide public access to grid storage resources in a form suitable for the community.

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 StratusLab 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 is a major provider of e-infrastructure for the Greek Academic community. Among others, the company has been leading the Grid computing activities in the past years, mainly through its strong participation in leading European projects like EGEE, SEE-GRID and recently EGI-InSPIRE and EMI.

For the immediate future GRNET wishes to capitalize on StratusLab's findings and move the existing national grid infrastructure on to virtualized resources. This effort has already started with the initial deployment of a production grid site (HG-07-StratusLab) which was carried out in the context of StratusLab WP5 activity.

The positive results obtained from this experience have led GRNET to start planning the migration of a larger portion of resources used for grid services, to cloud infrastructures running the StratusLab distribution.

In the context of national funding for cloud services, GRNET is planning to exploit part or whole of StratusLab results and integrate them with the rest of cloud services being developed within the company.

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.

OpenNebula

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, telecom, 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. For instance at LAL, the local infrastructure supports collaboration with the European project EDGI and also will be used as a platform for gathering data for a university-supported green computing project.

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 already begun evaluating StratusLab as a virtual platform for EGI grid sites with positive results.

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.

Training and e-Learning

TCD has a strong interest in e-Learning technology, and StratusLab provides the ability to host e-learning testbeds. StratusLab also will appear as a subject of e-Learning material.

Summary

The project has identified several examples of and approaches to commercial exploitation originating with the project partners:

Sustainability

As the number of resources managed by StratusLab in data-centers increases, scalability and management issues are likely to arise, which will also require attention from engineers, developers and system administrators knowledgeable in Stratus-Lab. Further, this exploitation must also be put in the wider cloud context, where innovation will challenge current thinking with new solutions. This will require careful evaluation and evolution of cloud infrastructures.

Reasons for sustainability

To promote the sustainability of the project, there are a number of aspects that serve as incentives.

Continuation of critical infrastructure

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

Because StratusLab and other cloud technologies are the key enablers for convergence of computing infrastructure, it will be critical that they are supported and maintained throughout and after the project. As they are critical, CNRS, for instance, will continue to support and to evolve the parts of the StratusLab distribution that it has developed (e.g. authentication infrastructure, registration service, persistent storage service, and Quattor-based installation) with the existing personnel.

Some parts of the project results and the actors who have an incentive to sustain the parts in question are set out below:

• OpenNebula and core StratusLab toolkit -operation centres, e.g. CERN, LAL

• Marketplace -research infrastructure provider, e.g. EGI

• Appliance repositories and appliances -virtual research communities, e.g. IBCP

The lists of interested actors are not exclusive. For instance, UCM and many others have a strong incentive to sustain OpenNebula. EGI is interested in the virtual appliance repository and Marketplace services (led by TCD within StratusLab). Under the MoU between EGI and StratusLab, EGI will assist in finding a sustainable future for the marketplace. One possibility is that the marketplace will be hosted by an NGI, for example Grid-Ireland / TCD.

In general, EGI views StratusLab as a technology provider and if the technology sees significant uptake amongst EGI resource providers, EGI will have a keen interest in sustaining the software and it may be possible for this effort to be delegated to an NGI or other partner.

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

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.

Paths to sustainability

Several paths must be explored to ensure the required sustainability of the Stratus-Lab results. Partners have already identified promising paths, which we can group as: public funding, private funding, and community contributions.

Public funding

Public funding could come from European sources, such as for example FP7, or national funding, via the respective partners' national funding bodies.

GRNET has secured national funds for developing a comprehensive cloud solution with the aim to provide cloud services to academic users.

The government of Ireland has declared an interest in supporting cloud computing as a source of growth for employment and the economy. It is to be hoped that this will translate into support for existing and future efforts in cloud computing research and deployment of the kind pursued by TCD and Grid-Ireland at present.

Private funding

Private funding is perhaps more speculative and directly linked to our commercial partners' ability to integrate StratusLab into new and existing business lines.

It is hoped that maintenance contracts -from commercial and institutional users -could contribute to ensuring that receiving partners are able to dedicate the required resources to the maintenance and enhancement of the distribution.

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.

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.

In order to attract and retain early adopters of the StratusLab results, and secure their commitment, a public open source plan would help in showing the project's longer term vision.

Approaches to sustainability

Promotion of project results

It is clearly important to promote the project results in order to create a climate where sustainability is possible.

SixSq will continue its effort to promote StratusLab as the best open source cloud solution currently available on the market, which in turn will hopefully generate revenue, as well as attract new contributors to StratusLab open source project.

In general, the plans for project dissemination are described in WP3 deliverables [START_REF] O'callaghan | Initial plan for dissemination, collaboration and standardization activities[END_REF] and [START_REF] O'callaghan | Report on dissemination, collaboration and standardization activities[END_REF].

Community and process development

The community of users and developers around StratusLab must be nurtured to ensure sustainability. This includes support for the development processes used.

The long-term sustainability of UCM's contributions is ensured through its contribution to the OpenNebula open-source toolkit. The OpenNebula project receives funding from several public grants and private sponsors. The OpenNebula open-source project could also contribute to the long-term sustainability of the StratusLab distribution by hosting the new software in its ecosystem and providing the infrastructure instruments to support its evolution and maintenance as an open-source community.

SixSq has put a significant effort in shaping and leading the agile development processes used to produce the StratusLab distribution and service. Without a strong process, efficiency diminishes, as well as the ability for the project to remain ahead of competition. SixSq is willing to remain involved, not only on the development, integration and testing front, but also in continuing to improve the StratusLab processes.

A key point for community-led sustainability is to support the open-source community around StratusLab to allow interested developers to get involved more easily.

Cloud strategy

At present, many organizations and governments are devising strategies and setting priorities related to cloud computing. Partners will aim to have StratusLab considered as an important part of such strategies in which they are involved.

Cloud computing technologies have become a priority in development agenda of GRNET. At LAL, IBCP, and within France, a push for the convergence of existing computing infrastructures based on cloud technologies is already evident. This convergence promises to reduce the costs associated with running a computing infrastructure while simultaneously making it useful for a wider community.

Research funding

GRNET is seeking opportunities to continue the activities taking place within Stra-tusLab with the focus to further evolve those that the company directly is involved with (i.e. provision of production-level cloud services) but also additional ones including core development and technology evolution. A primary avenue for funding this effort will be through future EC project calls, optimally with the same consortium, but also in the context of other collaborations and with an extended research and development agenda.

TCD's involvement in StratusLab and other projects, and the related infrastructure deployment provides great expertise and a degree of leverage for future research and development work. TCD is highly interested in participating in future consortia that would continue development of the StratusLab project outputs. Within Ireland, TCD is exploring links with research centres towards future national cloud computing research. TCD would intend to make use of StratusLab in these collaborations also.

National infrastructure funding

For GRNET It is safe to assume that a significant portion of the existing Stratus-Lab activities will continue to be supported by national funding allocated for the provision of academic and government applications over the cloud.

Existing national computing infrastructures linked to CNRS in France have already starting discussing how cloud technologies can be incorporated in existing computing infrastructures. Funding would be used to expand the available resources, but more critically, also provide manpower for the continued evolution of the cloud software to take advantage of new virtualization capabilities.

Summary

The project has identified a number of incentives for sustainability from within the partners and beyond:

• Continuation of critical infrastructure -for organizations, infrastructures and virtual research communities

• Future research opportunities -for academic, community and commercial researchers

The sustainability of the StratusLab results and project will be pursued along a number of funding paths:

• Public funding -from national and international sources • Private funding -from commercial support and services • Community contributions -from user communities and project partners .

Further, the project has identified a variety of approaches to ensuring sustainability • Promotion of project results -through dissemination and commercial activities

• Community and process improvement -for users and developers

• Influencing cloud strategy -harnessing widespread support for deployment and development of cloud technology

• Research funding -international and national

• National infrastructure support -in France, Greece and Ireland

Conclusions

This document illustrates and describes several avenues for exploration, based on the knowledge accumulated thus far by the project as a whole and by individual partners in particular. The project has identified key approaches and areas of exploitation as follows:

• Commercial integration and support, by project partners including SMEs and large corporations. The project has identified a number of incentives for sustainability from within the partners and beyond, namely, continuation of critical infrastructure and future research opportunities. The sustainability of the StratusLab results and project will be pursued through public funding, private funding and community contributions.

The approaches to ensuring sustainability include

• Promotion of project results through dissemination and commercial activities

• Community and process improvement for users and developers This document provides an early plan for the exploitation and sustainability of the StratusLab project results. This report will be updated during the second year of the project, with the release of 'D3.5 Exploitation and Sustainability Final Plan' in PM24.

•

  SixSq and SlipStream • Telefónica I+D Global Cloud Initiative • Commercial Integration and Support • Other commercial exploitation -Huawei Exploitation of the project results within research e-Infrastructure and by other user communities has also been identified: • Computing sites -CNRS, GRNET, TCD -Private clouds for test and production service deployment -Grid resources in StratusLab clouds -Public clouds • National infrastructures -in France, Greece and Ireland • OpenNebula -bringing StratusLab developments to all its users • Collaborating projects -including EDGI, EGI and Mantychore • Training and e-Learning • Future research -a basis for cloud technology investigation and development

  • 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 and Mantychore FP7 projects • Training and e-Learning, and future cloud research

•

  Influencing cloud strategy to harness widespread support for deployment and development of cloud technology • Funding of further development based on StratusLab from international and national sources • Support for and from national infrastructures

  Paths to sustainability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.1 Public funding. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.2 Private funding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.3 Community contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Approaches to sustainability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.1 Promotion of project results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.2 Community and process development . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.3 Cloud strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

	Contributors Name Bégin, Marc-Elian O'Callaghan, David TCD Partner SixSq Blanchet, Cristophe CNRS Floros, Vangelis GRNET Llorente, Ignacio M. UCM Loomis, Charles CNRS Muñoz, Henar TID Contents 1 Executive Summary 2 Introduction 4.2 5 Conclusions	Sections Editor Editor Contributor Contributor Contributor Contributor Contributor
	Document History References
	Version Date	Comment
	0.1	23 May 2011	First draft of content
	0.2	14 June 2011	Integrated version for internal review
	0.3	14 June 2011	Further proof-reading
	1.0	15 June 2011	Final version.
	1.1	16 June 2011	Change contributor; fix URL
	4 Sustainability
	4.1 Reasons for sustainability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
		4.1.1 Continuation of critical infrastructure . . . . . . . . . . .
		4.1.2 Future research opportunities . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
				4 of

2.1 Purpose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Organization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Exploitation 3.1 Commercial exploitation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.1 SixSq and SlipStream . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.2 Telefónica I+D Global Cloud Initiative. . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.3 Commercial Integration and Support . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1.4 Other commercial exploitation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Exploitation in e-Infrastructures and user communities . . . . 3.2.1 Computing sites. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.2 National infrastructures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.3 OpenNebula . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.4 Collaborating projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2.5 Training and e-Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.4 Research funding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.5 National infrastructure funding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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

funding and community contributions will play a role in StratusLab is co-funded by the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme (Capacities) Grant Agreement INFSO-RI-261552.

The information contained in this document represents the views of the copyright holders as of the date such views are published.

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