Examples
Examples of extensive uses cases on which Contrail components have been tested.
Use cases in the project:
- Distributed provision of geo-referenced data
- Multimedia market place
- Scientific data analysis
- Drug discovery
Other use cases
SLA's
Contrail can be used in many other cases, for instance in Community Clouds. Community Clouds are one of the exciting new developments in the Cloud computing area. For instance all major research institutes in Europe form a community to share computing resources and data infrastructures. They call this e-Infrastructures: infrastructures for eScience. Sharing resources from hundreds of institutes requires federation of the institutes' Cloud resources. There has to be a fine grained access mechanism in which scientific users from one institute can get access to resources from another one. Current mechanisms that are used by these e-Infrastructures do not support SLA's. Implementing these would lead to much better usage of the available resources.
Storage
Science today requires lots of data, one talks about Big Data, hence efficient and reliable storage, as enabled by Contrail is important.
Security
Another example of Community Clouds are developments in the Health Sector. Stringent security restrictions lead to the need of a closed community of hospitals, medical research centres and medical companies, that each have access to part of the data stored inside the closed community. In the Health Sector a large number of organizations work together, each with their own data, that can be very big when they are for instance research data, processing requirements, ranging from basic data processing to number crunching. A federation of private Clouds - from the participating organizations - and public Clouds for low risk Cloud bursting applications will provide the requested security.
Federation
For a Health Sector Community Cloud, federation of Clouds is paramount. This is what Contrail provides, including the fine grained identity management and federated security infrastructure needed in this sector. Contrail PaaS can provide an additional Platform layer, making it easier to deploy and develop applications. The market places developed in the multi-media and geo-data market place use cases, can serve as a basis and starting point for a Health Sector market place.
Of course, your situation may be different from the examples we described on these pages. As a rule of thumb: if you want to connect different Clouds together in a federation, the Contrail software is the right solution for your problem. If not the only one available to you.