Analysis of relevant business scenarios and objectives in distributed data centres

Status of the task: In progress

Title: Project Coordination with EC

Activities carried out during the task:

Ensuring that all milestones are met and that all reports are prepared in accordance with the contractual requirements is the objective of this task, which further involves the financial administration of the project and its funds; smooth and timely communication with all the EC offices and the completion of all reports and Financial Statements for the reporting periods foreseen in EcoMultiCloud will be performed in T6.2.

Status of the task: In progress

Title: Project Management and Coordination

Activities carried out during the task:

Under this task, all aspects of the project will be handled. A time schedule and resource plan will be defined from the beginning, which will be continuously monitored and updated after each project meeting. Mr. Carlo Mastroianni will be the key responsible of Project Management, monitoring project progress, assigning resources and tasks and coordinating the work of different teams involved. Mr. Mastroianni will also be the main responsible for defining the corrective actions to overcome potential deviations that may arise and minimize impact on the overall project progress.

Status of the task: In progress

Title: Commercialisation plan and Communication

Activities carried out during the task:

In T5.3 we defined a communication plan to make EcoMultiCloud known, support its strong scientific background, its go-to-market plan and its spread in the virtualization and cloud providers’ niches. The plan has 4 different stages, and will involve together traditional media and new media, combining the different phases and the different languages of communication, in order to create an organic and linear communication plan. We engaged several Cloud providers to gather feedback about the proposition and fix the offering accordingly. We also engaged System Integrators willing to resell the solution, and engaged analysts to validate the soundness of our proposal and get in touch with DCIM and DCSO providers to close additional partnerships.

Status of the task: In progress

Title: Continuous Business Innovation Plan revision and IPR review

Activities carried out during the task:

In T5.2 we revised the business plan and reported the major change in the market, the partnership between VMware and Amazon AWS, a move to get more enterprises to move to Amazon AWS over other Cloud vendors, and to protect VMware’s leadership in Enterprise-level virtualization. With VMware Cloud on AWS, it will be easy for customers to operate a consistent hybrid IT environment using their existing VMware tools on AWS, and without having custom hardware, applications, or models. On the other hand, this adds up a new use case for EcoMultiCloud: the Hybrid Cloud. With VMware Cloud on AWS, a geographically dispersed data center environment can include an environment operated in the Cloud. The Data Center Transformation to the Cloud is process already started for many enterprises, so being able to offer a solution that walks with the customer in the journey is a great asset for the project.

We defined a business model to close a “complex sale” such as the EcoMultiCloud one, which is a sale that involves many buyer personas. The business model is based on a two-stage strategy: lead generation and ROI sale. We defined a lead generation strategy to generate a funnel of qualified leads with the presence of an empowered and committed internal sponsor, who will help to win the customer. The second phase is the actual sale; we provide a detailed forecast of the return on the investment to the prospect, so that EcoMultiCloud price point will be favourable to the customer.

We updated the financial forecasts of EcoMultiCloud, taking into account costs to be sustained and revenues foreseen with the defined business model.

Status of the task: Complete

Title: Customer Development Activities

Activities carried out during the task:

In T5.1 we analyzed in-depth the Corporate IT market, with a specific focus for data centers, virtualization and cloud computing. Enterprise Datacenters market is increasing steadily at a nearly 6% CAGR pace. Virtualization market is increasing at a 5% yearly pace. It is the technology used on top of physical hosts running inside datacenters, and is a de-facto standard in datacenters. The main vendors are VMware and Microsoft. Cloud Computing is the hottest market in the Enterprise-level IT, with a growth measurable with a 30% CAGR. The main vendors are Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM and VMware.

We defined the ideal customer for EcoMultiCloud. We defined an indirect go-to-market strategy, based on the creation of a value-added-channel, made of companies already working in the IT of large enterprises. We defined the communication plan needed to build the channel, and generate awareness and preference around EcoMultiCloud.

Finally, we listed the categories of competitors, and we analysed in depth VMware and VMTurbo, the main competitors, as they offer a subset of the features of EcoMultiCloud, while we explained EcoMultiCloud competitive differentiation through the analysis of the features that are unique of EcoMultiCloud.

Status of the task: Complete

Title: Validation Metrics and Plan

Activities carried out during the task:

The main business advantages of EcoMultiCloud solution are: Inter-Cloud management, risk mitigation, real-time adaptation and scalability. In accordance with these business advantages, the goal of this task has been to define a set of metrics and procedures to assess the capabilities of the devised solution.
The main activities in this task have been:

(ii) we individuated the quantitative and qualitative targets related to such metrics;

(iii) we defined a validation plan containing the activities and the experiments that will be performed by Eco4Cloud to assess the defined metrics and confirm the achievement of the related targets.

Moreover, we recognized that there is a clear lack of standard metrics about the efficiency of the computational components of data centers. Accordingly, we introduced a new metric, the HUE (Host Usage Effectiveness) that intends to fill this gap. This metric will be used to assess the efficiency of the strategies and policies for the assignment and redistribution of the workload among the data centers.

Status of the task: Complete

Title: Distributed Architecture Specification

Activities carried out during the task:

The objective of this task was to describe and detail the architecture of the EcoMultiCloud solution, which is logically organized in two layer:

(i) the upper layer, with a global knowledge of the system
(ii) the lower layer that autonomously operate in local data center

We defined the role of the main upper layer component, Orchestrator, which performs the decision based on data collected by all the local applications that operate at lower layer. We described how the algorithms of the upper layer can be profitably tuned to achieve different business goals (e.g. costs saving and/or performance improvements).

We designed the lower layer in accordance with two configurations, Master and Master/Slave. We designed the local dashboards in order to work in complete autonomy on each data center. Furthermore, we designed the protocols for the interaction and communication among the actors involved in the system.

Finally, starting from the requirements described in the Task 1.2, we defined the functionalities of the Orchestrator and of local dashboards of the single data centers. Starting from the analogous classification of requirements, performed in Task 1.2, we classified the functionalities into User functionalities (Reduction of energy cost, Use Green Energy, Load Balancing, etc) and System functionalities (Network Security Policies, Service availability, Distributed Orchestration, etc.).

Status of the task: Complete

Title: Requirements Elicitation and Functional Design

Activities carried out during the task:
In this task we expanded the high-level analysis of Task 1.1 by eliciting and formalising the main system requirements. Specifically, we identified the main technical constraints, such as the capacity of single DCs and their ability to perform inter-DC migrations, the latency and bandwidth requirements of long-distance migrations, the possible downtime perceived by users, the security policies etc.
The requirements analysis has been performed following the software engineering principles. The requirements have been identified and described following a classification on three points of view.
Since EcoMultiCloud has a hierarchical architecture, the requirements were divided into two categories:

Local Requirements and Global Requirements.

Local Requirements are the specifications of the subsystem that manage a local data center, whereas the Global Requirements are the specifications of the top level ‘orchestrator’ that coordinate the inter-data center operations.
Furthermore, the requirements were categorized into functional and non-functional. Finally, an additional discrimination among the requirements has been made, by individuating User and System Requirements.

Status of the task: Complete

Title: Analysis of relevant business scenarios and objectives in distributed data centres

Activities carried out during the task:

The objective of the task was to analyze the relevant business scenarios and objectives in the scenario of multi-site data centers, which are typically dislocated on a geographical scale and are remotely connected through a wide area network.
The main activities performed during the task are:

(i) we investigated the state of the art in the field of energy-efficient data centers, with a specific focus on
geo-distributed data centers;

(ii) we described the main business scenarios that can benefit from the EcoMultiCloud solution: Hybrid Cloud,
geographical data centers and software data centers;

(iii) we individuated the main stakeholders that are involved in a multi-DC solution, in particular the data
center administrators and managers, and the final users;

(iii) we analyze the main benefits that can derive from the EcoMultiCloud solution, such as: maximize the
utilization of available capacity, reduce energy and CO2 consumption, minimize costs, balance the load.

Moreover, we outlined the main characteristics of the hierarchical architecture defined by EcoMultiCloud, and the main features of the two involved layers, the upper layer, which is used by the data centers to communicate with each other, and the lower layer, which is used to manage the workload internally.

Status of the task: in progress

Title: Software Integration and Testing

Activities carried out during the task:

The objective of this task is to integrate the software modules deployed in the previous tasks, specifically in tasks T2.1, T2.2 and T2.3, in order to combine them and produce a complete prototype.
In particular, this task will allow us to fully integrate the Upper Layer and the Lower Layer, so that the policies for workload management can be automated in accordance to the business goals.
So far, we have started the integration of the modules that collect the data from single data centers and send them to the Orchestrator module of the Upper Layer, so as enable the latter to execute the algorithms for workload distribution. After completing the integration phase, we will define and perform a set of tests to ensure that the modules correctly interoperate among each other and are able to interact with the virtualization platforms of the DCs.

Status of the task: in progress

Title: Preliminary Analysis of the Policies for Workload Allocation and Redistribution

Activities carried out during the task:

This task, based on the execution of T2.1, T2.2 and T2.3, aims to define different policies for the management and redistribution of the workload across the data centers.
The policies can vary depending on the different types of application (i.e., on their resources usage) and on the different and sometimes alternative business goals specified by the end users. The evaluation of the workload management policies includes the assessment of some of the performance metrics defined in T1.4 such as: involved costs, load balancing, energy consumption, quality of service, etc. So far, the activities have concerned the individuation of the different policies, differentiated in accordance to the business goals, and the definition of a set of scenarios on which each of the policies should be applied.

Status of the task: Complete

Title: Implementation of the LM and DCM Communication Protocols

Activities carried out during the task:

The objective of this task was to define and implement the main modules of the Communication Layer of the EcoMultiCloud platform. In particular, we defined the communication protocols that allow the nodes to interact with each other, while addressing the security issues involved in the architecture. Specifically, we individuated the security aspects regarding the development of the EcoMultiCloud solution: following the best practices in the state-of-the-art of the security field, we adopted a multi-tier architecture in order to ensure data protection and system inviolability.

The main modules implemented in the Communication Layer are:

(i) the module used by each data center to transmit the local state to the Orchestrator

(ii) the module used by the Orchestrator to ask a Local Datacenter which are its best VMs to migrate

(iii) the module that asks information to the Local Data Center about the best target resources to accommodate the migrating VMs

(iv) the module that executes the inter-datacenter migration

We produced a user guide that includes an installation manual and a guide for the installation and utilization of the Communication Layer modules.

Status of the task: Complete

Title: Implementation of the DCM Data Models and Analysis Features

Activities carried out during the task:

The objective of this task was to define and implement the main modules of the Upper Layer of the EcoMultiCloud platform and, in particular, the high level consolidation Data Center Manager (DCM) module.
We deployed the VMware vApp that performs the logic and functionalities if the DCM module, in a VMWare environment. As for the implementation of the modules of the Lower Layer, we adopted the software engineering model referred to as “incremental model”, which allowed us to take advantage from aspects learned during the development of earlier versions of the software.
We also defined the software interfaces for the connections between the EcoMultiCloud Orchestrator, belonging to the Upper Layer, and the different Local Data Centers.
Specifically, the implemented modules are:

(i) the module that represents and processes information regarding to the distributed data center environment

(ii) the features and modules that transmit/receive high level information to/from all the other data centers

(iii) the modules that combine the information collected from the data centers and take decisions about the distribution of the workload among the data centers

As for the modules of the Lower Layer, we produced a user guide that includes an installation manual and a guide for the installation and utilization of the Upper Layer modules.

Status of the task: Complete

Title: Implementation of the LM Data Models and Monitoring Features

Activities carried out during the task:

The objective of this task was to define and implement the main modules of the Lower Layer of the EcoMultiCloud platform, in particular, the local consolidation manager (LM) module.

We first designed and implemented the VMware vApps, deployed in a VMWare environment, which performs the functionalities of the LM module. We defined the development environment and the technology adopted for the deployment.

To support the implementation activities, we adopted a well-known software engineering model, i.e.,the “incremental model”, which allows the developers to take advantage from aspects learned during the development of earlier versions of the software.

In particular, the implemented modules of the Lower Layer are:

(i) the module used to represent and process information regarding the local data centers

(ii) the module that collects and processes the information related to the hosts and VMs running on the local data centers

(iii) the module that executes the algorithms that selects the VMs to migrate

(iv) the module that executes the algorithms that allocate locally the VMs migrated from another data center

We also produced a user guide that includes an installation manual and a guide for the installation and utilization of the Lower Layer modules.

About Us

Contact Us

Recent Posts