As of 20 January 2021, the cloud-based digital service providers issuing cloud services for the European research and education community have changed. The GÉANT association, which manages the pan-European research network and through which the Restena Foundation can provide this service in Luxembourg, has negotiated and procured cloud based services from numerous suppliers in a public tender, the second one since 2016. Those are made available for National Research and Education Network (NREN) across Europe, including Luxembourg. Acting as the Luxembourg NREN, Restena offers its eligible institutions willing to adapt their IT resources to meet the changing requirements of their activity on an ad hoc basis to fully benefit of 13 such cloud infrastructures within its  cloud - infrastructure as a service (Iaas) service.

Twice as many providers

The new framework called ‘IaaS+’ comes into force thanks to the European Open Clouds for Research Environments (OCRE) project aiming at accelerating cloud adoption in the European research community. It grants research and education institutions access to different cloud solutions offerings (Infrastructure, Software or Platform as a Service — IaaS, SaaS, PaaS...) within a range of vendors and service providers. 

In Luxembourg, new suppliers have joined Amazon AWS, CloudSigma and Microsoft Azure that have renewed their commitment for the next four years. The Luxembourg catalogue is thus growing from 6 to 13 platforms offering institutions many opportunities to find the tool that best fits their operational needs while supporting their cloud strategy:

1. Amazon AWS (via reseller Rackspace), 
2. Blue Safespring, 
3. CloudFerro,
4. CloudSigma,
5. Exoscale by VSHN AG,  
6. Google Cloud (via reseller Sparkle),
7. IBM (via reseller  SoftwareONE),
8. Ionos (via reseller Bechtle),
9. Microsoft Azure (via reseller Bechtle), 
10. Oracle (via reseller SoftwareONE),
11. Orange NL, 
12. Setco, 
13. T-Systems.

The whole cloud suppliers catalogue for Luxembourg, is available on the OCRE Cloud catalogue.

Diversified services at lower costs

Apart from a wider range of providers, Luxembourg institutions can now benefit from:

• a broadened scope of services from Infrastructure-as-a-Service (essentially, running virtual machines but with own responsibility for the workloads) to the purchase of vendor-operated software services higher up the stack (PaaS, SaaS offerings);
• more substantial price reductions compared to the suppliers' retail prices, as this second round of framework procurement is more competitive than the one initiated in 2016.

As was the case until now, all supplier services are pre-tendered according to European regulation. Therefore, institutions do not need to launch a resource-intensive tendering process for these services. They just need to get in touch with the Restena Foundation, acting as the single and appointed point of contact for members of the research and education community in Luxembourg to access this specific offer.

All connected Institutions to the RESTENA network, research institutes as well as education and cultural institutions across Luxembourg that are interested in using IaaS, PaaS or SaaS services to react to their needs – e.g. to punctually adapt their computing resources, to accelerate deployment works or event to focus on their user needs while leaving aside technical end resources are invited to contact cloud@restena.lu.