06.09.2019

Cloud and earth observation services closer to research and education expectations

Corporate

In the course of 2020, the Luxembourg research and education community should benefit from new tailor-made services on cloud and Earth Observation developed at the European scale. Meanwhile, as their counterparts across Europe, they can already benefit from adoption funds such as vouchers in cloud credits.

Launched in January 2019, the European Open Clouds for Research Environments (OCRE) project aims at accelerating cloud adoption in the European research community. It therefore brings together cloud providers, Earth Observation (EO) organizations and the research and education community. As the National Research and Education Network (NREN) for Luxembourg, the RESTENA Foundation closely collaborates with the OCRE project. This collaboration allows research and education, but also libraries in Luxembourg, not only to easily take part in the project, but also to benefit of its final results.

New solutions to be developed for 2020

After 8 months, the OCRE project is about to publish a tender whose objective is to tailor services for research, education as well as libraries and academic hospitals across Europe. The services will focus on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions and any other cloud-delivered solutions as well as on Earth Observation services. 

As the RESTENA Foundation is one of the 39 National Research and Education Network (NREN) registered in the OCRE tender, all members of research and education in Luxembourg are also registered. The latter will automatically benefit as from spring 2020 from all the services identified in the OCRE framework. All research and higher education institutions in Luxembourg interested in benefiting from the future services are invited to contact the RESTENA Foundation at cloud@restena.lu

Adoption funds for research and education

The OCRE project also supports Research and Education (R&E) institutions to move and work in the cloud thanks to additional adoption funding. The related institutions in Luxembourg can benefit from one of the 30 vouchers of 5,000 euros in cloud credits made available for research use. They simply have to express their interest in receiving vouchers in a dedicated form available on the OCRE project website until 12 September 2019.

Other vouchers in cloud credits, between 1,000 and 5,000 euros are also available for individual researchers from August 2019 onwards. Researchers working in Luxembourg and members of the European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers (EuroDoc) or of the Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA) can benefit from one of them. Another possibility is to apply to the EOSC Early Adopter Programme of the EOSC-hub project, a European project dedicated to European researchers and innovators around advanced data-driven research topic.

A complete cloud offer 

The future services of the OCRE tender will complete the current cloud offer of the RESTENA Foundation named RESTENA-IaaS. At that time, research and education institutions in Luxembourg can refer to RESTENA-IaaS to punctually adapt their computing resources, to accelerate deployment works or event to focus on their user needs while leaving aside technical end resources.

In 2018, the Lycée des Arts et Métiers Luxembourg (LAM) was the first secondary school to make use of a cloud provider from RESTENA in the framework of the GÉANT cloud services for its teaching activities.