Speaker
Description
Detailed analysis
The infrastructure consists of first the SLA engine which aims to provide the mechanisms to handle business contracts (SLAs) on which B2B and B2C relationships are based. This module acts from one side as the interface with customers, providing access to the whole infrastructure. On the other side, it interfaces with the lower Grid infrastructure, which deal with the low level resources. Secondly it consists of QoS mechanisms, providing the QoS functionalities that the Grid infrastructure does not provide natively. Decisions are taken by considering computation (CPU and RAM), storage and network resources. It also provides a prediction service to the SLA engine, that gives an estimate on the particular service upon it's been enquired. Third the Virtualization, which allows running applications with particular requirements, offering isolation and security mechanisms complementary to operating system, customization and encapsulation of entire application environments, and support for legacy applications.
Keywords
Business Grid, Cloud computing, virtualization, SOA
URL for further information
http://www.consorzio-cometa.it/s-sicilia/
http://s-sicilia.unime.it/index.php
Impact
The combination of SOA and Grid paradigms will leverage the emerging concept of service oriented market. Business relationships will be regulated by business contracts containing the level of the services in terms of quality, reliability, time constraints, responsibility, penalties and methods of payment.
SME companies will have more opportunities to compete with large enterprises, as huge investments on IT will not be required and costs will be redirected on services subscriptions rather than bare metal.
The benefits that would come can directly impact costs and productivity of companies. Business customers should experience an improvement on their business processes affecting thereby their performance, at the same time reducing costs.
Depending on the type of services, tangible business values might concern accelerating time to market, improving product quality or increasing ROI.
Conclusions and Future Work
One of the next step will be to assess this solution over different Grid domains and measure the relative performances. Moreover, we want to expand the range of virtualized service, to offer virtual data-center solutions. This means providing virtual Application Server, virtual DB, virtual balancers, etc.
Also, we are currently working to migrate our SLA approach from WSLA to WS-Agreement.
Finally, we want to investigate the use of OpenNEbula, to include a management layer for VMs.
