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View Page Historyh2. Converging Clouds
The Contrail Project is all about finding solutions to a rather new problem: cloud computing.
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After decades in which companies used to host their entire IT infrastructures in-house, a major shift is occurring where these infrastructures are outsourced to external operators such as Data Centers and Computing Clouds. However, although this market is in rapid expansion in Europe, this growth may soon be hindered by user concerns such as lock-in within a single commercial offer (which reduces the necessary competition between many infrastructure providers), ownership and privacy issues of the data stored in the Cloud, and the lack of performance predictability of current Clouds.
To allow open access to shared computing resources, the vision of the Contrail Project is that any organization should be able to be both a Cloud provider when its IT infrastructure is not used at its maximal capacity, and a Cloud customer in periods of peak activity. Resources that belong to different operators will be integrated into a single homogeneous Federated Cloud that users can access seamlessly.
h2. Expected outcome of the Contrail project
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Supply of, and demand for computational capacity is elastic. Some companies are are falling short, others have capacity in abundance. More often than not the need or surplus in computational power or storage capacity is temporary. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the surplus of one corporation could (temporarily) alleviate the wantage of the other. A consortium of ten organisations from six European countries started on a collaborative project to enable just that. The Contrail project aims to design, implement, evaluate and promote an open source computational cloud wherein users can limitlessy share resources.
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h2. The Contrail project will run for a period of three years and will show tangible results:
# Contrail will provide a complete Cloud platform which integrates a full Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service offer.
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# Contrail will allow Cloud providers to seamlessly integrate resources from other Clouds with their own infrastructure.