The goal of the RESERVOIR project is to increase the competitiveness of the EU economy by introducing a powerful ICT infrastructure for reliable and effective delivery of services as utilities, analogously to electricity and telephony. This infrastructure will support the setup and deployment of services on demand, at competitive costs, across disparate administrative domains, assuring quality of service. In doing so, RESERVOIR will lay a foundation for a service-based European online economy, where services - which have become critical to our business environment - are transparently, scalably and flexibly provisioned and managed for the benefit of businesses and citizens.

The prime deliverable of the project will be an architecture and a reference implementation of a service-oriented infrastructure (SOI) which "building on open standards and new technologies" will provide a dependable framework for delivering services as utilities. We will demonstrate how this infrastructure supports the deployment of complex service scenarios that are not otherwise supported by today's technology. We aim to achieve quantified and significant improvements in service delivery productivity, quality, availability and cost.

From a scientific standpoint, our work will contribute to the state-of-the-art by:

• Significantly advancing virtualisation and grid technologies and deeply integrating them, thereby creating a basis for the next generation SOI, where services and their associated resources are effectively delivered "without boundaries" of geography and configuration.
• Developing service management technology capable of exploiting the strengths and addressing the challenges presented by our infrastructure, e.g. monitoring service execution and resource utilization, and triggering service relocation and resource reallocation decisions as needed to assure compliance with Service Level Agreements across disparate domains.

Policy Context

RESERVOIR is a research project partly funded by the European Commission as an Integrated Project under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) sponsorship program.

Some of the related FP7 projects are:

• FAST project is addressing the defining a reference architecture and implementation of an open platform supporting the retrieval, combination and utilization of front-end layer components in a next- generation, global Service-Oriented Architecture;
• MASTER project is addressing the provision of methodologies and infrastructures that facilitate the monitoring, enforcement, and audit of quantifiable indicators on the security of a business process, and that provide manageable assurance of the security levels, trust levels and regulatory compliance of highly dynamic service-oriented architectures in centralised, distributed (multi-domain), and outsourcing contexts;
• SLA@SOI project is addressing the definition of a holistic approach for the management of service level agreements (SLAs) and to implement an SLA management framework that can be easily integrated into a service-oriented infrastructure (SOI);
• SOA4ALL project is addressing the definition and implementation of a comprehensive framework and infrastructure that integrates four complimentary and revolutionary technical advances (Web principles, Web 2.0, Semantic Web, and Context management) into a coherent and domain independent service delivery platform.

In addition RESERVOIR is monitoring the developments in a number of research initiatives, which are exploring ways to overcome the ossification of the current Internet, including:

• OGF (Open Grid Forum - www.ogf.org) is an international research and standardisation community dedicated to accelerating grid adoption to enable business value and scientific discovery by providing an open forum for grid innovation and developing open standards for grid software interoperability.
• FIND (Future Internet Design: www.nets-find.net) is a new long-term initiative of the NSF (National Science Foundation) research program. FIND considers what the requirements should be for a global network of 15 years from now, and how it could build such a network based on clean-state approach. The philosophy of the program is to help conceive the future by momentarily letting go of the present - freeing our collective minds from the constraints of the current state.
• GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovation Program: www.geni.net) is a research program addressing serious problems facing today Internet and the systems it supports: inadequate security, reliability, manageability and evolvability. GENI aims to provide a facility where large-scale experiments could be carried out, enabling proposals to be realistically evaluated. In so doing, GENI would transform the way science is done in this field.

Description of the way to implement the initiative

The high-level objective of the RESERVOIR project is to provide a technology foundation for a internetscale data center where resources and services are transparently and flexibly provisioned and managed like utilities. Specifically, RESERVOIR will introduce a next-generation IT infrastructure for deployment of complex services across different administrative domains, while assuring QoS and security guarantees.

RESERVOIR deliverables document and report on the technical progress of the project including the Reservoir architecture, the Service Manager, Virtual Execution Environment and Virtual Execution Manager.

All RESERVOIR project deliverable reports are available at RESERVOIR Framework Downloads

Technology solution

The key technologies developed by the RESERVOIR project are:

• Migration enablement of both virtual machines and Virtual Java Service Containers across network and storage boundaries.
• Distributed management of virtual infrastructures across sites supporting private, public and hybrid cloud architectures.
• Algorithms for the allocation of resources to conform to SLA (Service Level Agreement) requirements.
• The creation of a formal Service Definition Language to support service deployment and life cycle management across RESERVOIR sites.
• Security mechanisms for the safe deployment and relocation of virtual machines across physical machines, and RESERVOIR sites.
• The development of a business information model as well as business oriented payment and billing mechanisms to charge for resources used across one or more RESERVOIR sites.
• Testbed development to benchmark performance of actual industrial use cases in a RESERVOIR environment.
• Automated Service Lifecycle management for service provisioning and dynamic scalability.
• Testbed development to benchmark performance of actual industrial use cases in a RESERVOIR environment.
• The development of a business information model as well as business oriented payment and billing mechanisms to charge for resources used across one or more RESERVOIR sites.
• Security mechanisms for the safe deployment and relocation of virtual machines across physical machines, and RESERVOIR sites.
• The creation of a formal Service Definition Language to support service deployment and life cycle management across RESERVOIR sites.
• Algorithms for the allocation of resources to conform to SLA (Service Level Agreement) requirements.
• Distributed management of virtual infrastructures across sites supporting private, public and hybrid cloud architectures.
• Migration enablement of both virtual machines and Virtual Java Service Containers across network and storage boundaries.

Lessons learnt

The lessons learnt must be added by the project's responsible after evaluation of the results of the project.