'With RESERVOIR, our aim is to provide cloud-computing-based technologies that will enable the borderless delivery of IT services based on actual demands to keep costs competitive,' said Dr. Yaron Wolfsthal, senior manager of System Technologies at the IBM Research Lab in Haifa, Israel, as IBM today announced that it is leading a joint research initiative of 13 European partners to develop technologies that help automate the fluctuating demand for IT resources in a cloud computing environment.

As Wolfsthal says, the 17M Euro EU-funded initiative is called RESERVOIR -- Resources and Services Virtualization without Barriers. It will explore the deployment and management of IT services across different administrative domains, IT platforms and geographies.

"You can think of cloud computing as the Internet operating system for business and RESERVOIR as pioneering technologies that will enable people to access the cloud of services in an efficient and cost effective way," Wolfsthal continued. ""With demand for IT resources hard to predict, service providers usually over-provision resources in order to support peak demands and ensure continuous service availability and quality, while other systems run at lower capacity."

 RESERVOIR will investigate new capabilities for the deployment of commercial service scenarios that cannot currently be supported. These capabilities will be made possible by developing new virtualization and grid technologies. For example, Wolfsthal noted, RESERVOIR could be used to simplify the delivery of online entertainment:

"As the distribution of television shows, movies and other videos are moving to the Web, the RESERVOIR project would work to enable a network of service providers to host the different media. Using cloud computing technology, the broadcasters can join forces to reach a service cooperation contract that enables them to tap into advanced services including content distribution, load balancing, and overlay networking across different platforms in different countries."

Any time additional services or infrastructure are needed, they could be rapidly supplied through the cloud by one of the various RESERVOIR-powered sites. For example, if there is large demand for a show hosted by a particular site, it could dynamically 'hire' additional servers and services from other sites that are not being used.

The IBM Haifa Research Lab will lead this computing project and the consortium of partners from academia and industry to pursue this effort. Research partners on this initiative from across academia and industry include Elsag Datamat, CETIC, OGF.eeig standards organization, SAP Research, Sun Microsystems, Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo, Thales, Umea University, University College of London, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, University of Lugano and University of Messina.

RESERVOIR will be built on open standards to create a scalable, flexible and dependable framework for delivering services in this cloud computing model. The technologies developed by this project are expected to serve IBM, partners and customers in the development of modern data centers with quantified and significant improvements in service delivery productivity, quality, availability and cost.

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