The Eduserv Cloud: Who, What, Why, When and Where?

The Eduserv CloudWho, What, Why, Where and When?

Matt Johnson, Head of Research, Eduserv

Who?

A history of Eduserv in 3 slides… (1/3)

Started in 1988 as CHEST & NISS at University of Bath Licensing negotiation and gateways services (via Telnet) First UK academic web portal in 1994 Single sign-on service launched 1996

A History of Eduserv in 3 slides… (2/3)

Became the independent charity “Eduserv” in 1999 Core mission to promote the use of ICT in education Primary hosting provider for Department of Education Worked with the Cabinet Office to implement UKonline

A History of Eduserv in 3 slides… (3/3)

Year on year growth since 2001 >3.5m registered users of Eduserv-based services Returned more than £5m in grants to academia New datacentre specifically for education and the public sector

Eduserv in 2011

Stable, trusted provider of services to academia 115 staff (with around 10 further vacancies) turnover of £16.5m in 2009/10 Fully UK based, with no shareholder pressures

Developing new products and services Next generation of Identity & Access Management services Implementing Cloud services for education and government

What?

University Modernisation Fund (UMF) – Cloud Pilot

£12.5m government funded initiative managed by JISC Spread across research and administration services Promoting the use of shared services within academia

Designed to address the major concerns of HEIs Data remains in the UK at all times Operated for the long-term benefits of the UK academic sector Integrated with the JANET network Lower the costs associated with IT provisioning

Eduserv’s Community Cloud Infrastructure

Built to support the UMF Cloud Pilot and other initiatives Designed to support multiple cloud platforms and sectors Will be price-competitive with other Cloud providers

UMF Cloud Pilot to run for 1 year Key outcome is to establish sustainable business models Eduserv investing for long-term development of the service Post-funding (April 2012) Eduserv will continue to operate the

service on a commercial basis

Compute services

vCloud Director compute services: Designed for “enterprise-scale” virtualised IT services Provides vSphere integration with existing datacentres Focussed on organisations rather than individuals

Compute services

OpenStack Nova compute services: AWS-style cloud service running on OSS software Full control over the Cloud environment Aimed at individual researchers and staff/students

Storage services

File-based storage Associated with Compute service VMs

Object-based storage Similar to Amazon S3 capability Multiple data protection levels

Archive storage: Multi-tier storage (Near-line disk, tape) Designed for >30 year archiving of data

What Exactly?

Network infrastructure

Edge network 10 Gbit/s connectivity onto JANET network backbone Service Gateways providing routing, firewall and IPS services

Core network 2-tier switched network (core and distribution) Fully resilient with no single point of failure All ports running at 10 Gbit/s

Compute infrastructure

Compute infrastructure: Blade-based X64 hardware Automated provisioning of physical servers Can be used to deliver both vCloud and OpenStack services

Scalability Initial deployment “pod” with 600 cores, 3 TB of RAM Pod designed to scale to 3,000 cores, 30 TB of RAM Multi-pod / multi-region capability available in the future

Storage infrastructure

Clustered NAS solution Modular approach provides flexible capacity and performance Initial deployment of ~250 TB of usable disk No single point of failure

Highly scalable Capable of scaling to >10 PB within a single name-space Usable capacity (including resilience) of > 87%

Why?

To help realise potential benefits of the Cloud

For the Community As a scalable platform for shared service development Platform that addresses performance, contract and service levels

For Institutions Offering a viable alternative to on-campus datacentre projects Helping to lower CO2 emissions and IT overheads

For Faculty On-demand access to high-capacity storage & compute services

To replace this…

…with this:

And this…

…with this:

And all for less:

£££

Where?

Primary Datacentre

Hosted at Eduserv’s Swindon Datacentre Capacity and power for >600 racks of infrastructure Modular design PUE efficiency design of <1.4 JANET backbone connectivity

Service levels and resilience

Operated by Eduserv 24 x 7 systems monitoring and support Minimum 99.9% SLA

Secondary site to launch during 2012 Support for automated replication of data between sites Will deliver multi-site replication and failover Equivalent to Amazon AWS “Regions”

When?

Anticipated timelines

Now vCloud lab environment for beta testing and early adopters

Autumn 2011 vCloud Infrastructure platform launches

Winter 2011 Web portal with UK access management federation integration OpenStack infrastructure platform launches Object Storage and Archive platform betas

For SeIUCCR attendees

Priority access to the OpenStack Lab environment Early access to the proposed service

Free-tier access to the OpenStack Cloud Similar to the Amazon AWS offer Details to be confirmed, and will be reviewed after 6 months

Register your interest at: http://umfcloudpilot.eduserv.org.uk/

Thank you!

Matt JohnsonHead of Research email: Matt.Johnson@eduserv.org.uk twitter: @mhj_work web: http://www.eduserv.org.uk/researchUMF: http://umfcloudpilot.eduserv.org.uk/