Session Abstract

The advent of commercial cloud infrastructure services is a major step toward realizing vision of a utility computing grid providing a marketplace of cost-effective, on-demand computing resources seamless available -- much like the electrical power grid. Internet2 and eleven university members have joined to coordinate a demonstration deployment of open cloud services that results in a technical and business model for the provisioning of multi-vendor cloud services. The ambition is to establish partnerships with vendors that have a mutual interest in an experimental open cloud and who are willing to explore alternative functional specifications, interoperability requirements, user and program interfaces, service level definitions, and pricing models for cloud services. The initial, though non-exclusive emphasis is on compute and storage utility services and the exploration of a number of use cases that are of mutual interest to the universities and participating services providers. Two areas of particular interest are the use of cloud compute resources to expand capacity in response to peaks in demand and for purposes of augmenting existing business continuity and disaster recovery solutions with processor and storage instances in the cloud. The project will include three phases over 18 months, beginning in January 2011.