Pay-for-use
EGI currently operates within a publicly funded research and academic environment providing services free at the point of delivery with resources bought from grants dedicated to certain groups or disciplines either by direct allocation or by peer review. With the advent of cloud computing, business models and user expectations are shifting towards on-demand and pay-per-use service provision increasing flexibility and agility. This new paradigm provides motivation for EGI to provide new service definitions by enabling the possibility to provide ICT services that can be paid for the use, along with the more traditional procurement of resources to be managed and offered for free to the owners.
This approach also allows researchers and resource providers to better understand costs to access individual services and would enable the creation of innovative business models and pricing schemes (e.g. pay-per-use).
Business Models
EGI provides a number of business models depending on the customer and use case, these can be summarized as:
- B2B: SaaS and/or PaaS providers integrated with EGI providing IaaS
- B2C: Direct consumption of services and support
The EGI Foundation can facilitate 2 separate roles:
- Matchmaker: Identifying a single EGI service provider who can best support the given use case
- Broker: Represent multiple EGI service providers offering a single point of contact. This model is attractive for use cases that require distributed environments across multiple sites, for resource requests that are unable to be fulfilled by a single provider, and having the potential for negotiation of pricing packages.
Providers, Services and Prices
The following table provides an overview of the current service providers within EGI who can support pay-for-use models and the services and pricing offered. All providers listed has provided a signed Letter of Intent stating their abilty to deliver services are a payment basis ensuring both organisational and national legal and policy aspects have been respected.
Provider | Country | Service Type | Services and Resources | Access Policy | Grid Compute Price [HEPSPEC06/hr]* |
Cloud Compute Price [wallclock/hr] |
Grid Storage Price [€/GB/Month] |
Cloud Storage Price [€/GB/Month] |
VAT [%] |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Centro de Supercomputación de Galicia (CESGA) | Spain | Batch + Cloud |
|
|
|
€0.04/core+2GB RAM/hour (+VAT) Example:
|
€0.055/GB/month (+VAT) | €0.055/GB/month (+VAT) | 21% |
Instituto de Física de Cantabria (IFCA) | Spain | Batch (SLURM, SGE) + Cloud |
|
|
|
€0.03 | Minimal storage free, requests up to 100 TB high performance storage possible | €0.05 | 21% |
Institute of Informatics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (II SAS) | Slovakia | Cloud (Openstack) |
|
|
N/A | €0.06/core/h +VAT | N/A | TBD | 20% |
100 Percent IT | England | Cloud (Openstack) |
|
|
N/A | €0.07 + VAT | N/A | TBD | 20% |
TUBITAK ULAKBIM | Turkey | Cloud + Batch |
|
|
€0.05/core/hour + VAT | TBD | TBD | 18% | |
Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC) | Poland | HPC + Cloud |
|
|
|
|
€0,016/GB/month + vat |
€0,012/GB/month + vat |
23% |
CSC - IT Center for Science, Ltd. | Finland | Cloud (Openstack) |
|
|
N/A | € 0.04 | N/A | TBD | 24% |
(*) https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/FAQ_HEP_SPEC06
How to
Request services
- Simply fill out the following service request form: https://www.egi.eu/request-service
Join as a provider
- Any EGI pay-for-use provider must be a certified EGI provider and registered in the GOCDB
- A Letter of Intent must be signed and sent to business@egi.eu along with all information outlined in the table above.
Contact
For any further information contact: business@egi.eu