Flexiant joins €4.5 million consortium

Flexiant has joined a consortium of leading organisations and universities from the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany and Sweden focused on using real-world data to optimise and make more efficient cloud computing.

Named ‘CACTOS’, the €4.5 million project seeks to address issues arising from the growth and complexity of cloud infrastructure. Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator will anchor the project by collecting and utilising historical data and research. This data will allow CACTOS to optimise differing hardware options to deliver a simulation that will allow complex algorithm based analysis.

CACTOS will use Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator for stress testing applications and modelling behaviours when different IaaS level resources are mapped to workloads. This will help correlate the relationship between workloads and underlying resources with a view towards application specific Quality of Service requirements.

Craig Sheridan, Professional Services Consultant at Flexiant, said: “To understand workloads behaviour during run-time, Flexiant will extract workload traces from the Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator platform. This real-world data will provide actionable insights into the development of optimisation algorithms which can then be used in conjunction with existing Flexiant functionality and in turn clarify where bottlenecks and improvements can be made to optimise and make more efficient cloud computing.”

It is hoped that by optimising services and developing efficiency algorithms CACTOS will provide cost savings and increased speed for cloud services in an ever-expanding market. Sheridan explained. “By making good use of the parameters that can be monitored on a Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator instance, this will result in efficient workload and application management. Flexiant will look towards taking the functionality of the developed CACTOS toolkit to integrate and commercialise the functionality within our core cloud orchestration software.”