Here’s A Cloud Marketplace That Makes Sense Built For European Scientific …

May 13, 2014

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Seemingly the trend of the moment is to set up cloud marketplaces – while smaller vendors such as CliQr and Bitnami have been down this route for awhile, recently IBM came to the party and introduced its own version. I was a little skeptical about the IBM IBM approach – in my mind a cloud marketplace needs to have some kind of specific value proposition to be viable and sustainable – and simply amassing a few different products under the title “Marketplace” doesn’t really do it for me.

But when I hear of marketplaces set up to meet the needs of specialist customers, things get more interesting, this is what we’re hearing rom a consortium of European providers who are building on top of an existing initiative to create a federated cloud marketplace for science.

The Helix Nebula Initiative has been established by public and private organizations to build a multidisciplinary cloud platform for data intensive science. The idea being that enabling the federation between different cloud vendors means that science organizations can tailor their service provider to the specifics of a project and that the inertia that exists when trying to move vendors is lessened as much as possible. Given particular European legislative and regulatory requirements, the marketplace also ensures that its vendors meet these particular requirements.

The vendors behind the initiative are Atos Atos (via Canopy its cloud offering), CGI, CloudSIgma, EGI, Interoute, SixSq, The Server Labs and T-Systems. The initiative embraces another couple of existing programs (and, as an aside, there is something decidedly European about this massive use of acronyms) namely GÉANT and EGI – GÉANT being the pan-European research and education network that interconnects Europe’s National Research National Research and Education Networks while EGI is the pan-European federation of publicly funded computing, storage and data resources to support science, research and innovation in Europe. Between the two programs there are 50 million users across 10000 institutions.

The Cloud Marketplace itself will be operated by CGI and branded as the Helix Nebula Marketplace (HNX – yet another acronym!). By federating public sector data center resources from within the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) HNX intends to enable EGI’s research communities to use HNX services within a hybrid cloud model.

Beyond simply Europe however, the Cloud services are offered to the global research community, for both publicly-funded and commercial Research and Technology Organizations of diverse sectors, including healthcare, oil and gas, financial, high-tech, and manufacturing. This scope will enable large-scale and High Performance Computing deployments from the start.

Beginning in May 2014, customers will be able to use the marketplace to choose between various suppliers or combinations of suppliers offering independent cloud services, and to buy, use and manage such cloud services seamlessly.

The Helix marketplace makes sense and continues on from the large-scale research programs that Europe has been executing in recent years, most notably the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. While cloud marketplaces as a class I can take or leave – such a highly specific marketplace with obvious value to its users makes sense – it will be interesting to see what sort of science comes out of the Helix Nebula Initiative.