[esip-semanticweb] ESIP Semantic Web testbed proposal

[Raskin, Rob (388M)]

This is a drafr ESIP Tesbed proposal for Virtual Private Servers (proposal developed primarily by Judy). This proposal needs to be finalized this week.


Virtual Private Servers (VPS) for the ESIP Testbed
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Provide a VPS to host tutorials for ESIP meetings and telecons, as an adjunct or replacement for pre-configured virtual machines (VM). Some of the telecon participants complained about the difficulty and instability of using virtual machines. A VPS/cloud server is desirable for these reasons:

Many organizations but especially cooperating federal agencies have trouble allocating networked resources in a timely fashion. Once allocated, server resources are usually static and can't be easily upgraded to accommodate changes in requirements. Network access and
extended bandwidth is also sometimes an issue. There are commercial services offering VPSs for short or long-term subscription. These are virtualized servers partitioned from a high-performance single server. Partitioning allows for a independent operating system installation, dynamic memory and storage configuration, and administrative operations. The servers are hosted in data centers (in the 'cloud') with high-bandwidth connections and choice of data center location. The benefit to many organizations is the immediate access to high-bandwidth, high-capacity server resources, and the cost is low compared to the cost of internally provided resources. Static resources don't offer the flexibility of virtualized servers with a variety of automatically installed operating system distributions and immediate dynamic memory and storage upgrades. A VPS can be used as a adjunct or replacement for locally installed virtual machines. The VPS is globally accessible, can provide a centralized, consistently configured repository for software applications and files and can host almost unlimited instances of web servers and web services for individual or group access.

As an example for semantic tutorials, the server may instantaneously host a number of experimental SPARQL query processors, deploy data extractors, host a number of RDF stores, multiple hybrid databases, a number of web servers each with variety of ports configured for services -- all of this going on at the same time the tutorial instructor displays web-based presentations for follow-along to the group.

Testbed activities require a robust infrastructure on which to develop and support ESIP products. The candidate service should include:
- a datacenter facility environment with dedicated bandwidth, available out-of-band management and a 100% uptime service level.
- high performance server matched to the demands of the ESIP activities.
- virtualized host services with dynamic, configurable RAM, bandwidth and storage.

ESIP Community Benefits: High-performance infrastructure support for Federation development and production products and services.
Cost: $1000

Note: Cost estimate is for virtualized, datacenter-hosted server with 2048MB RAM, 64GB storage, 800GB monthly bandwidth for $79.95 monthly. The next upgrade is 4096MB, 128GB and 1600GB for $159.95 (approximately $2,000 yearly).