Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
12.1.4 The Business Experiment - Partners and Work Performed
Five key partners took part in the design and development of the VHE for online
gaming. These partners are Andago of Spain, ATOS Origin of Spain, BT Group plc
of the UK, the Centre of Research in Pure and Applied Mathematics (CRMPA) of
Italy, and the University of Rey Juan Carlos (URJC) of Spain.
Andago provided the gaming platform and the business use cases. In particular
they fed the initial requirements stemming from the business world and the online
gaming sector. Andago also provided (in conjunction with URJC) the resources on
which to test the solution developed.
ATOS implemented the service-level agreement (SLA) (monitoring and evalu-
ation) subsystem for the VHE. More information can be found in D'Andria et al.
(2008) and in section 12.2.1.4. In particular, ATOS focused on the following issues:
• Automatic resources “negotiation” through an “SLA-based” service advertise-
ment and discovery mechanism.
• Monitoring of agreements, considering network related QoS and the network
availability itself as a relevant component of the value chain for service provi-
sioning.
• Platform independent agreement evaluation against the Service Level Objectives
(SLO) inside the collaboration contract at run-time.
In addition to leading the overall experiment, BT provided the security services and
the technical know-how to integrate them. These services include the federation
manager, the identity broker (SOI-STS), the authorization service (SOI-AuthZ-PDP),
and the secure messaging gateway (SOI-SMG) detailed in section 12.2.1.3 and in
Gaeta et al. (2008), Brossard et al. (2008), and (Brossard and Prieto Martínez 2009).
BT also developed the governance gateway (SOI-GGW) which allows the secure
management of the infrastructure and full policy lifecycle management.
CRMPA led the integration task of the experiment and also provided the foun-
dation for the hosting environment based on the GrASP middleware (http://www.
eu-grasp.net) (Gaeta et al. 2008).
Lastly, URJC integrated the Andago Game Platform (AGP) with GrASP to
work in a VHE). URJC focused their efforts on the design and implementation of
appropriate integration architecture between both technologies (AGP and GrASP)
to provide support for the new business model based on Grid services.
12.1.5 Scenario Description
A network-centric application provider, which in the application example used in
this experiment, is an on-line collaborative game platform provider (we shall call
it Andago), engages in a contract with the VHE operator (BEMOL) that allows the
application provider to use other applications, resources and infrastructure services
offered by BEMOL or other parties in order to enhance their user experience. In our
example Andago uses game titles from a Game Application Provider; Game Servers
offered by other parties (Sunny and Saygah for instance).