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EU plans summer launch for Optimis cloud toolkit

Smaller businesses targeted for cloud deployment

An EU-funded project to develop open source cloud deployment tools for business will be ready for launch in June.

So far the EU has spent £8.5m in development funds for the Optimised Infrastructure Services (Optimis) project, which is aimed at helping service providers to roll out public, private, and hybrid cloud architectures, particularly for smaller businesses. It was set up as part of European Commissioner Neelie Kroes' effort to advance the use of cloud services among European business

"This cloud strategy goes beyond a policy framework by stimulating new research and innovation, and the creation of pan-European partnerships to create better cloud environments and give European businesses, especially SMBs, a platform on which to innovate with new products and services," said Csilla Zsigri, Optimis project spokesperson and director of consulting services at 451 Research, in a statement.

The Optimis tools set up a trust, risk, eco-efficiency, and cost (TREC) framework for assigning architectures and the policies to run virtual machines in the cloud. A 'broker' function assigns loads to infrastructure providers using the TREC guidelines to give the best fit with policies. Data protection safeguards are also built in and the final code will come out in June after an extensive beta testing.

"Once the full application service is up and running, the toolkit monitors both the TREC levels and the application KPIs and if the SLA is compromised, it takes corrective action and for instance it automatically bursts to a different cloud environment," said Ana Juan, head of the service engineering and IT platforms lab at Atos. "The Optimis toolkit helps eliminate the risks involved in building cloud environments and we hope this will encourage more European SMBs to create new cloud applications and services." ®

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