EU Horizon 2020 program grants EUR 6.7 million for cloud performance optimisation project coordinated by NetApp

•         Three-year project aims to create high-performance private cloud infrastructures
•         Findings to facilitate secure data sharing across smart environments

The European Commission’s research and innovation program Horizon 2020 has granted EUR 6.7 million in funding for a research project for which NetApp is providing the technical coordination. The mission of the three-year project is to analyze which factors slow down network performance within on-premise and hybrid cloud infrastructures, and how these factors can be overcome. The goal is to support deployment and management of multiple public and on-premise cloud computing services to match business needs. Advancements in this space will for example support infrastructure needs of smart city projects around the world.

The scope of the project named Scalable and Secure Infrastructures for Cloud Operations (SSICLOPS, pronounced “Cyclops”) is firstly to research techniques for the management of federated private cloud infrastructures, in particular cloud networking techniques, within software-defined data centers and across wide-area networks. Based on this research, the project then aims to develop techniques for high-performance private cloud infrastructures that allow flexible scaling by the federation of various private clouds, without compromising service levels and security requirements.

The SSICLOPS consortium initially consists of five industrial and five academic partners. The Technical Manager for SSICLOPS is Dr. Lars Eggert, Technical Director for Networking in NetApp’s Office of the CTO, based in Germany. He leads the Technical Management Committee, responsible for coordinating the technical and scientific efforts of SSICLOPS. NetApp is bringing technology and know-how around storage solutions, which form the backbone of many private virtualized cloud infrastructures to the SSICLOPS project.

Manfred Buchmann, Vice President and head of System Engineering EMEA, NetApp
“We feel honored for being selected to contribute our data management and data fabric experience to the Horizon 2020 program.  We are teaming up with industry and academic partners to research the future problems of hybrid clouds in a world where everything is software-defined based on private and hybrid clouds.”

Konstantin Ebert, Senior Director Middle East, Eastern Europe, Africa, Russia & CIS, NetApp, on the relevance of this EU project for the Middle East
“With the proliferation of smart cities around the world a solid infrastructure must be in place supporting cloud computing and a solid uninterrupted network performance in order to operate a smart, high scale environment. Consequently, the findings of the SSICLOPS project research can also benefit or support government initiatives such as “Dubai’s smart city”, in the UAE, to sustain business performance and economic growth through a higher performing and more secure private cloud infrastructure.”

Manfred Reitner, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Europe, Middle East, and Africa, NetApp
“Many of our customers work in security-sensitive sectors and demand a clearly defined process for safe data communication across cloud infrastructures. Improving the performance and latency of such environments is therefore of immediate interest to us. By collaborating very closely with partners and academic institutions, the SSICLOPS project is a unique opportunity to work on solutions benefiting organisations using federated cloud infrastructures to distribute workloads around the globe and to move data between disparate networks with according security models for user access to cloud resources.”

Partners in the consortium include NEC, F-Secure, Orange, Deutsche Telekom, Hasso Plattner Institute, RWTH Aachen and the University of Cambridge, among others.