"The NUVEA project has the ambition to tackle the very poor efficiency of the market of Cloud computing. In fact, Cloud IT users are totally dependent on oligopolistic infrastructure suppliers, while solutions are not yet available to mitigate the environmental impact of the fantastic market growth. The necessary balance between cost-driven providers, and performance-driven customers, is not properly addressed by the available IT infrastructure management technologies, and no one can really specify or manage the “performance-on-cost” ratio of the operated infrastructures. On the one hand, customers have little control over their dedicated infrastructure and how it is managed, architectured and hosted. On the other hand, despite the struggle for market shares, providers show low efficiency in their operations, as servers are actually loaded at an average of 18% of their capacity, while energy represents around 75% of the total cost of IT infrastructures.
This is where New Generation SR introduces the NUVEA project, enabling to perform an efficient and optimized real-time selection of Cloud resources, with respect to a certain Quality of Service and energy consumption.
The objective of NUVEA is to deliver to customers a ""distributed cloud infrastructure manager online platform"" which will allow them to take over, manage, benchmark and optimize permanently their distributed IT infrastructure, independently from the underlying cloud resource provider(s), in a highly flexible and real-time manner. The NUVEA platform will start from the customer’s needs and wills, settings and preferences; its internal algorithm will elaborate and implement in real time the best possible resource allocation policy, taking into account the characteristics and monitoring parameters of all the available capacities at different providers, like energy consumption / price or equipment status (idle, critical, available…). The implementation of the allocation policy consists then in picking in real time at different providers the best combination of resources, in order to fit the customer’s needs at lowest cost and risk with respect to his preferences.
The “NUVEA interface dashboard” will give the customer a comprehensive display of the state of his infrastructure (architecture, virtual machines location and status, parameters of the different data centers involved…) as well as billing parameters, and will allow him to define or modify his own targeted “quality on cost ratio”.
NUVEA's ambition, is no less than:
o Optimize IT infrastructures uses with a totally non-intrusive management software, giving better results than “physical” improvements like innovative cooling, for lower capex,
o Give back the hand to the customer on the market of cloud computing,
o Set up a favorable environment for the emergence of a green and sovereign cloud in Europe.
To this end, the purpose of the NUVEA H2020 Phase 1 project, as a “feasibility study”, was to release the first commercial version of the NUVEA software, with technical relevance and reliability proven on “early adopters”, and to provide the definition of technical specifications required for the further development of NUVEA online platform. Beyond this technical key target, the project also planned to deliver a more detailed business-plan, supported by a deepened market study."
