The StratusLab initiative was started in November 2008 to explore the integration of cloud technologies and services, especially virtualisation, into existing Grid Infrastructures.

We believe that hybrid platforms combining aspects of grid and cloud technologies offer advantages to both resource providers and to end-users. Using cloud technologies for resource provisioning would enhance failover and redundancy solutions, provide “elastic” sites able to expand available resources, and permit machine migration for flexible load balancing. The underlying virtualization would allow end-users to tailor their computing environment to avoid failures from misconfigured systems or from insufficient allocations of, for example, disk and memory. Grid technologies would continue to provide the glue to federate the distributed resources and the services for high-level job and data management.

The StratusLab project has opened two surveys to collect requirements for the StratusLab cloud distribution and to understand the existing experience with virtualization/cloud technologies in Europe.

• End-User Survey aimed at users and potential users of virtualization/cloud technologies.
• Administrator Survey aimed at providers and potential providers of virtualization/cloud technologies with an emphasis on grid resource centers.

Your opinions matter! Please take some time to complete these surveys. The surveys will be open until 30th July.

Our current activities focus on the identification and evaluation of technical, security and operational challenges in the different integration scenarios of Cloud to enhance Grid infrastructures:

• Operation of a Grid site in a commercial public cloud
• Execution of a virtualized Grid site on private and hybrid clouds
• Provision of infrastructure cloud-like interfaces to Grid sites

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