StratusLab

StratusLab is a European project partly funded by the European Commission. SixSq is a founding member of the consortium.

SixSq, responsible within the StratusLab consortium for integration and testing, has put significant effort to ensure that the distribution can be installed and configured very quickly. In fact, for simple deployments, system administrators can turn existing physical infrastructures into IaaS cloud within minutes. The idea being that simple things should be simple, this is why the StratusLab distribution ships with sensible defaults, which will work in most of the cases, at least to start with. 

With the release of version 1.0, the fully open-source StratusLab distribution now offers a complete solution for creating and managing cloud-based infrastructures.  It integrates the OpenNebula virtual infrastructure manager with tools such as the Claudia platform service management toolkit for dynamic service provisioning and scalability; a Marketplace allowing scientific user communities to create, search for and share customised digitally-signed virtual machine images; persistent storage allowing users to create and access disks on remote cloud storage resources; a web monitoring tool, and a comprehensive set of easy-to-use command-line tools for system administrators and users.

StratusLab Features

Here is a list of the main features included in StratusLab v1.0:

• Fully production-ready release with many bug-fixes and enhancements over previous versions
• OpenNebula 2.2 virtual infrastructure manager
• Claudia platform service management toolkit for dynamic service provisioning and scalability
• Marketplace allowing user communities to create, search for and share customised digitally-signed virtual machine images
• Base OS images available in the Marketplace as well as grid and bioinformatics appliances
• Persistent storage allowing users to create and access disks on remote cloud storage resources
• Sophisticated web-monitoring tool
• easy-to-use command-line tools for system administrators and users
• authentication proxy service which allows cloud authentication via X509 grid certificates
• Manual and Quattor installation options

The StratusLab cloud distribution also includes unique features to facilitate the integration of cloud and grid technologies, such as the authentication Proxy service which allows user authentication via a range of credentials, including X509 grid certificates, integration with the Quattor fabric management toolkit widely used in Grid sites, and a set of grid server appliances available through the StratusLab Marketplace.

Previous public releases are already in use in production infrastructures, with a Grid site currently running on a StratusLab cloud as part of the Greek National Grid Infrastructure.  With the release of version 1.0 it is hoped that other grid sites will follow suit, bringing the benefits of cloud computing to the broader European distributed computing infrastructure ecosystem.

The StratusLab project is funded through the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). Visit the website for more information on how to use the StratusLab cloud reference infrastructure or to install your own cloud.

The StratusLab distribution brings the benefits of cloud computing to the European distributed computing and grid research infrastructures, making sites easier to manage and enhancing flexibility and energy efficiency by allowing site administrators to deploy services on a private cloud.  Future releases will look at adding cloud federation and scale-out to commercial cloud services to meet peak demands.  This will result in major benefits for European academic research and is part of the European Commission strategy to develop European computing infrastructures.

Get Started with StratusLab v1.0

Check out the StratusLab Reference Infrastructure to try out a StratusLab cloud, download the StratusLab Client interface tools. 

Install your own StratusLab cloud

Resource providers install your own public or private cloud with StratusLab 1.0.  Find all the documentation and instructions for downloading the software. 

Documentation and community support

Full documentation for StratusLab version 1.0 is also available.

You can also view and comment on the StratusLab project roadmap.

Please see StratusLab's support page, or contact the StratusLab support mailing list if you have questions or feedback on the StratusLab distribution, or to get access to the StratusLab reference installation.

Commercial support

Need support for your evaluation of StratusLab?  Get in touch directly with SixSq (please remove the _NOSPAM_ from the address).

Further to providing support, we can also help you better understand how to integrate StratusLab with your existing infrastructure and services.

The StratusLab Team

The StratusLab project brings together six organisations, all key players with recognised leadership, proven expertise, experience and skills in grid and cloud computing. This collaboration presents a balanced combination of academic, research and industrial institutes with complementary capabilities. The participating organisations include theCentre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France; the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain; the Greek Research and Technology Network S.A., Greece; SixSq Sàrl, Switzerland; Telefonica Investigacion y Desarrollo, Spain, andTrinity College Dublin, Ireland.