Flexiant has marked a milestone in a three-year European Union (EU) funded project to develop framework tools for managing hybrid cloud platforms.
The Scottish cloud infrastructure software firm said it was one year into the €10.5m (£9m) Optimis project it is delivering as part of a consortium of industry and academic partners.
Optimis aims to create a toolkit that will break allow infrastructure and service providers to easily move cloud-based services between public, private or hybrid cloud platforms.
Tony Lucas, Flexiant’s founder, explained that Optimis is designed to support a vision where hybrid clouds become commonplace, as private clouds interact with an ecosystem of public and private providers.
"Optimis is aimed at enabling companies to automatically move services and applications to trustworthy and auditable cloud providers in the hybrid model," he said. “The potential for Optimis is incredible”.
Flexiant’s Extility infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform for data centre, hosting and managed service providers is providing the project test bed environment for modelling real-life business scenarios around managing mixed cloud-based infrastructure, platform or software resource.
This facility is seen as critical for when providers need extra capacity or have problems with their own services.
If a single provider has a problem, the toolkit is being developed so that workloads can be moved elsewhere without users seeing any change.
It is also anticipated to enable new market entrants to offer extra capacity and compete with more established providers.
Optimis is being carried out under the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme for research and technological development.
Atos Origin Spain is the coordinator of the project. The Optimis consortium is made up of the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre; BT, SAP, Flexiant and The 451 Group from the UK; Fraunhofer Gesellschaft from Germany, NTUA from Greece; and the Universities of Umea in Sweden, Stuttgart and Leibniz University of Hannover, City University of London and Leeds, and Arsys of Spain (from June 2011).
