Takeaways from HNSciCloud tender award ceremony

The SLA-Ready project is contributing to the cloud procurement process for the Helix Nebula Science Cloud tender.

This €5.3 million joint Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) tender, led by CERN, will establish a European hybrid cloud platform that will support high-performance, data-intensive scientific use-cases sponsored by 10 of Europe’s leading public research organisations and co-funded by the European Commission. On the 2nd November 2016, the awards ceremony for the successful bidders of the Helix Nebula Science Cloud tender took place in Lyon, France and SLA-Ready was present.

28 consortia submitted their bids (international companies, SMEs and public organisations) but just 4 of them have been chosen as contractors:

• Contractor 1: Consortium composed by T-Systems, Huawei, Cyfronet, Divia (Recording)

• Contractor 2: IBM (Recording)

• Contractor 3: Consortium composed by RHEA Group, T-Systems, exoscale, SixSq (Recording)

• Contractor 4: Consortium composed by Indra, HP, Advania, SixSq (Recording)

The event was an opportunity for SLA-Ready to explore the solutions proposed, the PCP instrument and how they manage the definition of cloud Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

The SLA Common Reference Model is now being used as a foundation for HNSciCloud providers to publish more transparent and trusted SLAs. The SLA-AID will help on the customers side, enabling them to identify priorities when selecting an SLA.