The IBM research laboratory in Haifa will lead a European project to develop storage technologies in a cloud environment

The scope of the research is more than 15 million euros * 15 large corporations and academic institutions in Europe participate in a European research project

The IBM research laboratory in Haifa will lead a European research project with the participation of 15 large corporations and academic institutions in Europe, for the development of a smart storage architecture in cloud computing, which will make it possible to improve the delivery processes of data and storage services, across borders between countries and between systems produced by different suppliers.

The new venture - Vision Cloud, the investment in which will amount to 15.7 million euros, will deal with the main challenges currently facing storage clouds, including maintaining an effective cost structure, data mobility between different providers of cloud services, security and the computing power required to ensure the quality of the service .

The new association for carrying out the research includes standardization bodies, media companies, telecom companies, bodies dealing in the fields of medicine and business organizations.

The researchers who will participate in the Vision Cloud project, English acronym for "Storage Services for the Future Internet", will develop a new approach in which data is represented by smart objects that include rich information describing the content of the data and how it should be handled, replicated or backed up.

The new architecture will use knowledge about the stored content in order to improve the ease of mobility of the data and enable efficient and secure methods of consuming this content. The solution enables easier access and optimization of the service in different types of content - whether it is medical information, information in the field of communication, television programs, organizational storage or personal information.

The rapid increase in the amount of digital information, both personal and organizational, is among the most prominent characteristics of the current decade. According to estimates, 1,200 exabytes of new data will be created this year, while in 2005 a total of 150 exabytes (a billion gigabytes) of data were created. The increase in the amounts of raw information and the dependence on information technology services are expected to increase even more, due to the expansion of the use of data-intensive services, and thanks to the integration and merger between the world of telecom, media and information technologies.

Dr. Hillel Kolodner from the IBM Research Laboratory in Haifa, the leading architect of the Vision Cloud project, noted that "the world creates data at a faster rate than we are able to store it. We are now critically dependent on services that will be able to derive and extract valuable information from the multitude of data available in our hands - in order to lead to more correct decision-making. Optimizing the supply of storage services for large volumes of data will allow the Vision Cloud project to promote a new era of storage in a cloud environment, and offer more flexibility, mid-range and security, while charging the user a fee according to the actual consumption of these storage services."

In the last three years, IBM has been developing a series of cloud computing technologies, in the fields of servers, software and services - as well as within its R&D bodies. IBM's product portfolio in the field of cloud computing currently includes cloud computing for the development of smart services for businesses and application testing tasks, cloud computing for analytical business processing, and cloud computing for smart organizational storage.

The Vision Cloud project, which will be led, as mentioned, by IBM's research laboratory in Haifa, is expected to continue to promote cloud technology, simplify and reduce the development processes of new and data-intensive services, and provide a high level of data security while meeting defined and agreed goals of user service levels (QoS) .

Dr. Dalit Naor, director of the storage research group at the IBM laboratory in Haifa, stated that "users today demand capabilities that go far beyond raw storage at the simple bit level. In order to meet the needs arising from the market, it is necessary to work and focus on information at the higher level, where the collection of bits has meaning in itself, and information about (meta-data) that accompanies it. Information should have a similar importance to the one we currently attribute to the processing power itself."

"digital safe"

Vision Cloud will offer a breakthrough storage architecture that combines a series of innovative concepts. The cloud will handle a rich data model, perform processing operations as close as possible to the storage location of the processed content, allow a data access method based on their content (as opposed to the current methods based on their physical location), and offer integrated work and mobility between systems made by different manufacturers.

With the help of Vision Cloud, service providers, for example, will be able to offer a "digital safe" service, for the secure storage of personal information, including photos, videos, medical records, bank records, and so on. The owner of the information will be able to manage the access privileges to his private data - where each such item of information also includes its own metadata. Thus, medical imaging photographs will also include the date and resolution in which they were taken as well as their decoding reports - in a way that allows different systems to use them, according to the permissions received from the patient who owns these photographs. Vision Cloud will be built with open and standards-based technology, in a format that allows the movement of information stored in a given service company to the cloud environment of a competing company, or to a private cloud that supports these open standards - something that cannot be done in cloud storage systems today.

In addition to the IBM research laboratory in Haifa, which leads the project, partners in Vision Cloud are also the development laboratories of SAP, Siemens, iTricity, telecom service providers: Telefónica, Labs, Orange and Telenor, media service providers: RAI and Deutsche Welle , the Storage Standardization Group (SNIA), the Technical University of Athens, the Swedish Institute of Computer Science and the University of Messina.