EU Initiates Cloud Storage Research With €15.7m Funding

The European Commission is investing €15.7 million in a research programme that will investigate cloud storage technologies and processes.

IBM’s research team in Haifa, Israel, will lead the project with contributions from SAP, Siemens, the National Technical University of Athens and the Swedish Institute of Computer Science.

Solving Advanced Cloud Storage Challenges

Called Vision Cloud, the project will attempt to solve advanced cloud storage and retrieval challenges, particularly those applying to video recordings.

Hillel Kolodner, lead architect for Vision Cloud and a researcher at IBM Haifa, described a few of these challenges. He said that a company circulating a video link to conference attendees may not want to give access rights to the enterprise’s network. The team will develop a way for access to be allowed while not putting security at risk. Another twist to this problem is that access should be enabled for any mobile device.

Also in the video arena, the team will not only tackle how to attach metadata tags to unstructured information, such as video, but also how the video can be made more accessible. This will necessitate the development of programs, called storelets, that will run inside a database.

For example, a storelet could be developed that will automatically use speech recognition to analyse recordings or video clip soundtracks and convert them into written documentation. This transcript could then be translated into various languages and distributed with the recording.

Building standards

An important development will be to develop standards for database mobility and federation. This is an essential step for cloud storage that will allow a database to be moved from one provider to another. Kolodner said that if there is to be competition between storage providers there must be a way to freely move data at the request of the customer.

At the moment, he said, the customer would have to download the data to their own premises and then upload it to the new provider, effectively doubling the time it would take if the data could be shipped directly between the providers. Additionally, the providers being specialists in storage could make use of extremely fast dedicated networks to further speed up the process.

Even this time saving would not be suitable for an always-on business which would expect uninterrupted access. So developing a system that allows data to be moved and catalogued while the user’s business system is connected to both providers would be required for the migration which, with enterprise databases may take several days or weeks.

The Vision Cloud team has been given the initial funding on the basis that the research will continue for three years.