Description The goal of the RESERVOIR project is to increase the competitiveness of the EU economy by introducing a powerful ICT infrastructure for the reliable and effective delivery of services as utilities.The main goal of the RESERVOIR project is to increase the competitiveness of the EU economy by introducing a powerful ICT infrastructure for reliable and effective delivery of services as utilities, analogously to electricity and telephony. This infrastructure will support the set-up and deployment of services on demand, at competitive costs, across disparate administrative domains, while assuring quality of service. RESERVOIR provides different advantages: Saving Time and Money: Today, ICT technologies move to Web 2.0, which means that companies supplying internet-based hosting usually over-provision their servers by 500% in order to handle peak loads. Hence, entrance costs for the service provider are very steep which presents a major barrier to small and medium-sized enterprises but also to citizens. RESERVOIR provides a foundation for a cost-competitive service-based on-line economy where resources and services are transparently and flexibly provisioned and managed like utilities. Gathering Clouds: "Cloud computing" enables the vision of hosting applications and data off the desktop and on the web. Currently however, only large companies with vast resources can afford this. The aim of RESERVOIR is to provide the means in order to allow the migration of resources across geographies and administrative domains. In this way, resource exploitation can be maximised and European citizen costs minimised.  Achieving the RESERVOIR Vision The main objective of the project is to supply an architecture and a reference implementation for a service-oriented infrastructure (SOI). This Infrastructure supports the deployment of complex service scenarios that are not otherwise supported by today's technology. The aim is to achieve quantified and significant improvements in service delivery productivity, quality, availability and cost. RESERVOIR will contribute to the state-of-the-art by:  * Significantly advancing virtualisation and grid technologies and integrating them, thereby creating a basis for the next generation SOI, where services and associated resources are effectively delivered "without boundaries" of geography and configuration. * Developing service management technology capable of exploiting the strength and addressing the challenges presented by our infrastructure, e.g. monitoring service execution and resource utilisation, and triggering service relocation and resource reallocation decisions as needed to assure compliance with Service Level Agreements across disparate domains.