T-Systems select to establish an European Science Cloud

• Concept of a hybrid cloud for high-performance and data-intensive use cases
• Services out of Open Telekom Cloud for ten of Europe’s leading public research organizations

T-Systems has been awarded a frame contract for a joint Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP), led by CERN, that covers the design, prototyping and pilot phase of the Helix Nebula Science Cloud. T-Systems, supported by its technology partner Huawei, will develop a solution based on its Open Telekom Cloud (OTC) public cloud service, that has been launched in March 2016 and meanwhile supports workloads from various leading enterprises, SMEs and public sector organizations.

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 organizations and co-funded by the European Commission. A total of 28 multinational companies, SMEs and public research organisations organizations from 12 countries submitted bids during the summer. Next to T-Systems and Huawei another three consortia are selected to develop their concepts for an European science cloud.

CERN is operating one of the world's largest OpenStack private clouds with more than 7,000 servers and 190,000 cores. As more and more research organizations start to use cloud services, demand is growing for dynamic capacity that can be transparently activated in a hybrid cloud. Open Telecom Telekom Cloud, operated by T-Systems and supported by Huawei, is based on the OpenStack open source architecture and facilitates the management and migration of data and resources between private and public clouds.

As part of an earlier procurement in 2016, CERN and T-Systems evaluated the capabilities of the Open Telekom Cloud in a 3-months pilot. “Following the extensive tests, it has become apparent, that Open Telekom Cloud can support the high-performance and data-intensive workloads required”, summarizes Andreas Falkner, Vice President Open Telekom Cloud from T-Systems.

Next to CERN following research organizations plan to make use of the European Hybrid Cloud:

• Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), Italy
• Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY), Germany
• Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, (CNRS), France
• Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT), Germany
• SURFsara, Netherlands
• Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), United Kingdom
• European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Germany
• Institut de Física d’Altes Energies (IFAE), Spain
• European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), France

This is part of the HNSciCloud project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme.