A tool for managing the X1.V1 platform on the cloud

Abstract

The X1.V1 platform is a service oriented architecture, deployed on a set of Virtual Machines, that integrates services for managing fundamental activities in the ehealth scenario, such as Patient Identification, Clinical Document Repository, Prescription, and many others. The efficient provisioning of such services to citizens and to health professionals requires the adoption of increasingly powerful computing systems, in order to ensure that the growing number of service requests are served in acceptable time, even in case of computational peaks. Porting the X1.V1 platform on the Cloud could address the problem of the computational requirement mutability, since Cloud elasticity allows the reallocation of resources to Virtual Machines when necessary. This paper proposes a framework for managing the execution of the X1.V1 platform on the Cloud. This framework enables an easy, quick, and secure management of the Cloud resources allocation and reallocation to X1.V1 Virtual Machines, in order to enhance the platform performances, optimize resource utilization and, consequently, reduce the whole services cost. The design of the framework is focused on security aspects as well, because unauthorized accesses could lead to serious inefficiencies of the ehealth services. Finally, besides describing the architecture design and implementation of the X1.V1 Cloud manager framework, this paper also presents a set of experimental results which confirm the validity of the proposed approach to solve the X1.V1 platform performance issues in distinct reference scenarios.