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The European Commission has granted €6.7m in funding for a research project focusing on analysing which factors slow down network performance within on-premise and hybrid cloud infrastructures, and how such obstacles can be overcome.

The three-year Horizon 2020-backed ‘Scalable and Secure Infrastructures for Cloud Operations’, or SSICLOPS, project will support the deployment and management of multiple public and on-premise cloud computing services to match business needs. The venture is co-ordinated by NetApp, a multinational data management and cloud storage solutions company based in California in the United States.

Manfred Buchmann, vice-president and head of system engineering for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at NetApp, said: “We feel honoured for being selected to contribute our data management and data fabric experience to the Horizon 2020 programme. We are teaming up with industry and academic partners to research the future problems of hybrid clouds in a world where everything is software-defined based on private and hybrid clouds.”

The scope of the project is firstly to research techniques for the management of federated private cloud infrastructures, in particular cloud networking techniques, within software-defined data centres and across wide-area networks. Based on this research, the project then aims to develop techniques for high-performance private cloud infrastructures that allow flexible scaling by the federation of various private clouds, without compromising service levels and security requirements.

Adding further thoughts, Manfred Reitner, senior vice-president and general manager for EMEA at NetApp, said: “Many of our customers work in security-sensitive sectors and demand a clearly defined process for safe data communication across cloud infrastructures.

“Improving the performance and latency of such environments is therefore of immediate interest to us. By collaborating very closely with partners and academic institutions, the SSICLOPS project is a unique opportunity to work on solutions benefitting organisations using federated cloud infrastructures to distribute workloads around the globe and to move data between disparate networks with according security models for user access to cloud resources.”

NetApp will bring technology and knowhow around storage solutions, which form the backbone of many private virtualised cloud infrastructures to the SSICLOPS project. The SSICLOPS consortium consists of five industrial and five academic partners, including NEC, F-Secure, Orange, Deutsche Telekom, Hasso Plattner Institute, RWTH Aachen and the University of Cambridge in the UK.