1. Virtual Hosting Environment for Distributed On-line Gaming
Ivan Djordjevic Senior Architect, BT Security Research
OGF20, Manchester, UK, 9th May 2007

2. Presentation Outline BEinGRID project overview
Business pilot overview:
Motivation
Architecture
Business Potential

3. Project Overview --- also, find us at stand 15 ---

4. Project Data Sheet Type of project: Integrated Project
Project coordinator: ATOS ORIGIN
Project start date*: 1st June 2006
Duration: 42 months
Max EC contribution: 15.7 M euros
Consortium: 75 partners
The mission of BEinGRID is to exploit European Grid middleware by creating a toolset repository of Grid services from across the Grid research domain and to use these services to deliver a set of successful business experiments that stimulate the early adoption of Grid technologies across the European Union.

5. BEinGRID Vision Typical Technology Transfer project:
2 waves of Business Experiments involving SMEs in various industry sectors and covering full value chain
Aiming to prove that businesses will benefit from the adoption of Grid technologies
Planning to set up a repository of vertical Grid solutions, available free/at cost to the respective sectors
Cross-activities for support to the business experiments

6. Project Setup Repository BE1 BE2 BE3 ... BE4 BE5 BE18 Trust & Security
Technical
cross
activities
Trust & Security
VO Management
Service & Data Mgt
Architecture & Interop .
Repository
Business
cross
activities
Dissem. & Exploitation
Market Study
Business Modelling .
Mdw-1
Mdw -2
Mdw -n
Selected branches: GTv4, UNICORE/GS, g-Lite, GRIA, WS-*

7. Pilot overview: Virtual Hosting Environment

8. Overview What - Distributed application hosting environment:
Application as a managed service:
Separation of access to different application services at a Host Provider
Provision, management and control of the application service stays with ASP
Outsource deployment and security management to Infrastructure Provider
Assessment Pilot - Internet-based gaming: interactive, multi-player, high-performance.
How - Grid and Web Services technologies for:
Virtualisation of hosting environment for flexible deployment
Standard interoperable infrastructure services for security management
Input from EU R&D projects (GRASP, TrustCoM, NextGrid, ELeGI)
When - September 2006 – February 2008 (18 months)
Who - Andago, AtosOrigin, BT, CRMPA

9. Gaming scenario: Current status
portal HE
User management & billing server
Characteristics:
Static, dedicated game servers
Extreme peaks & lows in demand, due to:
Time / day
Current gaming activity
Low utilization -> high HW cost My
Game HE
Dedicated game servers
Challenges:
Meet low latency requirements
Make available high-performance servers for game execution
Improve interactivity in multi-player games
Utilize advanced statistics and user community management capabilities, offered by different gaming platforms
Need for dynamic adaptation of the gaming environment:
On-demand “hp” provision of gaming servers
Latency-based QoS server selection

10. Gaming scenario: the Vision
VHE
B2B
Messaging
Layer
ASP3
ASP1
ASP2
portal My
Game
Pool of
Infrastructure
Services
HE1
HE2
HE3
Network
Infrastructure
Provider(s)

11. Use cases and dependencies
Create B2B trusted relationships between participants.
Federation
Setup
VO Configuration
Select partners and negotiate agreements
End User
Registration
User registration & joining different gaming communities/clans.
VHE Setup
New game
deployment
Combine capabilities to match service description.
Separation of application & infrastructure capabilities
App Virtualisation
on the VHE
Game start
Provide service instance for an end user
Low latency = high number of players
Application instance
monitoring
Service execution
Game execution
Delete VO information, destroy configurations.
Preserve historic data
VO Dissolution
De-Federation
Remove trusted relationships.

12. High-level Architecture
B2B
gateway
Admin
Location & Discovery Service
Policy Decision Point
Federation & VO Management
Policies & SLA
Configure
Security Token Service
Deployment Service
Hosting
Environment:
Application services
Host & app monitoring
Virtualisation Service VO
partners
Enforce & Run
Configure & Instantiate
Policy Enforcement Point
Client

13. Virtual Hosting Environment Game Platform Provider
Business Opportunity
Users
Virtual Hosting Environment
Gaming Servers
Game Platform Provider
Business opportunity on 2 levels:
- Game platform provider acts as ASP & offers game to an end user (gamer) by consuming capabilities of the VHE
- GW provider offers functionalities for secure app exposure, VHE management and app aggregation to end users – VO participants
B2B GW
B2B GW
Messaging Bus
B2B GW
B2B GW
B2B GW
Community Management System
Gaming Servers
Game Application Provider

14. Business Case: B2B Security Gateway
SOA & WS open standards–based security service
Key offerings:
Protect valuable assets inside and across enterprises
Easily establish and manage security of B2B collaborations
Configure and securely virtualize application services, IT resources, user accounts, ...
Automatically adapt security in response to contextual changes
Clear distinction between service-level security and application logic
Deployment options:
In a box: next generation application-layer firewall
At the service endpoint and/or the SOA execution platform
Network hosted security service
Applicability to a range of sectors:
Gaming
Corporate Resource Planning and Adaptation (e.g. call centres)
e-Education and Collaborative Processes
Two-folded business model:
Andago offers “on-demand, high-capacity” gaming platform
BT offers B2B GW for outsourcing security & VHE management (FOCUS)
Competition
XML & WSS gateway products: Forum Systems, Layer7, IBM Datapower, Intel Sarvega, Reactivity, Vordel.
B2B gateways: Axway, Cyclone Commerce, Sterling Commerce, Seeburger, webMethods, Inovis, Microsoft, Extol, IBM, Oracle, GXS, iSoft, Sun Microsystems, Tibco Software, Click Commerce, iWay Software (all above $10mil annual revenue from B2B software)
There are no WSS security gateways in the market have integrated advanced value-add services for federation, identity management and B2B collaboration management.

15. Market potential …
A SOA web services security appliance “enabled a major financial services firm to slash the time required to implement new Web services connections from 99 days to less than one day, reduced salaried support costs from $40K to $4K per month, enabled it to realize over a 10x annual increase in Web services revenue.” GRIDtoday
Worldwide WSS/content gateway sales “grew 8% between Q1 and Q2 of 2006, reaching $270 million, and are forecast to grow 43% by the Q2 of Annual worldwide sales are expected to hit $2.3 billion in 2009“ Infonetics, 2006

16. … and competition
XML & Web Service Security gateway products: Forum Systems, Layer7, IBM Datapower, Intel Sarvega, Reactivity, Vordel.
B2B gateways: Axway, webMethods, Inovis, Microsoft, Extol, IBM, Oracle, GXS, iSoft, Sun Microsystems, Tibco Software, Click Commerce, iWay Software (all above $10mil annual revenue from B2B software)
There are no WSS security gateways in the market that have integrated advanced value-add services for federation, identity management and B2B collaboration management.
There are no B2B WSS security gateways in the market provided as network-hosted common capabilities

17. Business value Efficiency: Effectiveness: Business Edge:
More efficient software management and deployment: significant cost reduction in the resources spent for deployment
Cost saving for application hosting due to better scalability and interoperability, sustainable, long-term and linear cost savings
Simplicity / Ease of use, due to a common management layer
Effectiveness:
Increased flexibility - separation of provisioning & management of application and infrastructure services
Ability to quickly adapt to change - membership, security policies, SLAs
Business Edge:
High flexibility of security, infrastructure, and membership management of the VO
Improved confidence (e.g. for sharing critical resources) due to traceable end-to-end security process
Improved trust & confidence and CRM due to QoS-based service offerings (SLA negotiation & monitoring)
Provision of security and federation / VO services leveraging existing network infrastructure: added value for Infrastructure Providers
Better resource utilization and flexible pricing models for Hosting Environment Providers
Provides added value for ASPs through:
Reduced time to market (flexibility in service deployment and adaptation)
Outsourcing of non-operational and infrastructure services
Reduced downtime of service availability

18. Dependencies and risks
Partly depends on uptake of Web services technology and SOA for B2B
High-growing market, with still developing standards
Current WSS security gateway vendors are innovative SMEs
Well established web services companies are entering this market, including major middleware vendor corporations who acquire WSS SME vendors
BT may be a new entrant in the market but can leverage on its existing penetration of service integration and of converged ICT services

19. Conclusions

20. Summary
BEinGRID:
Promotes uptake of Grid technologies by European businesses
Three main aspects:
18+7 Business Experiments, each with its business model
A repository of high-level services, motivated by the BEs
Technical and Business Cross Activities, supporting the BEs and filling the repository
Virtual Hosting Environment:
Flexible middleware infrastructure for cross-enterprise collaborations, to support different business models and range of sectors
B2B GW identified as business case
Expected outcome - Grid enabled game platform:
Multiple, “on demand” game servers
SLA-based resource selection
Service Virtualisation over federated trust domain

21. Contact: Ivan Djordjevic { ivan.djordjevic@bt.com }
Thank you
Contact: Ivan Djordjevic { }