Geospatial Virtual Appliances Using Open Source Software

The hype on the Cloud is based on promising cost savings if, considering the new service platform concepts (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) the term comes with, IT resources will be used effectively. Therefore, the trend is moving away from physical systems to more instant and shortterm environments and virtualization is increasingly taking on a key role in various system architectures. This is already well accepted by a few business units such as customer relationship management or marketing, operated from Salesforce.com for instance [1]. However, earth scientific offers featuring specialized functions and services on demand are still rare but of great benefit in order to overcome the global changes in environmental conditions. Only one task from the field of model preprocessing at the DGHM was picked out for virtualization purposes and the results will be introduced in the following.