On the cutting edgeScaling up and out with hybrid cloud infrastructure

Singapore’s institutes of higher learning (IHLs) are recognized worldwide for their high academic standards and excellent world-class facilities. Amongst them is Nanyang Technological University (NTU), the fastest-rising Asian university in the world’s top 50. Ranked 41st in the QS World University Rankings 2013, NTU is also placed 2nd globally among young elite universities.

Phase 1: What’s in a hybrid cloud?

The university houses its own high performance computing center (HPCC) within its Singapore campus to provide high-end compute-intensive IT resources for academ-ic research. The HPCC lends itself to the Singapore Center of Environmental Life Sciences Engineering and the Earth Observatory of Singapore where researchers study microorganisms, earthquakes and tsunamis which require vast amounts of computing power. Even with 123 sq m of data center floor space hosting 472 severs and 5,040 processors, the HPCC reached its limit a couple of years ago and was forced to rethink and revamp its architecture.

“We don’t know when there will be a surge in the demand for higher computing power,” said Professor Soh Yeh-Chai, the founding director of the HPCC at NTU. “Our challenge is to figure out how to meet a virtually unlimited and unanticipated demand for computing power that allows our scientists, engineers, animators and students to carry with their work without interruption.”

Research house Gartner (2013) predicts that “nearly half of all large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017.” NTU opted to build a hybrid cloud infrastructure for several reasons: firstly, the HPCC needed to have an affordable secondary data center site as part of regulatory requirements. Secondly, the HPCC team wanted to be able to provide users with a seamless experience that didn’t disrupt their activities.

To ensure that computing resources can be scaled out during resource-heavy spikes and meet unanticipated needs, NTU subscribed to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to cope with unexpected demands. Data was kept secure through an AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) that allowed virtual machines to remain isolated from other AWS users. The university also built a private cloud infrastructure with

[1] Gartner Press Release, Gartner Says Nearly Half of Large Enterprises Will Have Hybrid Cloud Deployments by the End of 2017, October 1, 2013, http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/25993151

Phase 2: Striking the right balance

virtualization and platform management using Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastruc-ture. This set up allowed NTU to scale-up using its existing hardware and facilities and by building vCPU, vRAM and VMs.

However, given the nature of the research that the HPCC supports, the team needed to find a storage infrastructure solution that allowed them to keep the confidentiality of their research data as opposed to storing everything in a public cloud.

“We took several ideas and innovated them together to come up with an infrastruc-ture that replicated the function of public cloud servers with minimal latency. It was designed to be interoperable with our existing private cloud environment and managed by our HPCC team in Singapore,” said Professor Soh.

The HPCC team looked towards building a ‘full hybrid cloud strategy’ that allowed them to balance their public and private cloud environments. To do this, the team worked with NetApp, Equinix and Red Hat, the university’s private cloud provider.

NTU set up private storage hosted at Equinix using NetApp’s FAS3220HA systems and used Red Hat’s cloud management software to manage all components within the private and public cloud environments.

The HPCC hybrid cloud infrastructure is completely unique as it houses three components – a private cloud within NTU, a public cloud powered by AWS and a third private storage set-up at Equinix, powered by NetApp. It extends the concept of a private cloud – compliance and security – into the public cloud and provides a unified user interface (UI) for all users accessing both private and public resources.

“This set-up was borne out of both necessity and creativity. Many people forget that there are still traditional applications that cannot sit and run at a hundred percent performance in the cloud. We deal with many scientific applications that require traditional computing resources but we also have many apps like email that can sit and be managed in the cloud,” said Professor Soh. “Our infrastructure is designed to address the balance that many enterprises struggle with when wanting to implement cloud technologies – migrating to a hybrid environment that allows for vast scaling options without compromising on performance.”

Most enterprises have two choices when thinking of migrating traditional apps to a hybrid environment: they can either re-architect their apps for the cloud or they can embark on an incremental path to cloud computing via a hybrid cloud. However, many businesses are bound by time, compliance, or budget restrictions thus enabling the hybrid approach to gain increasing popularity.

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Secured Channel

Public cloud @AWS Co-location

data center

NetAppPrivateStorage

NetAppStorage

Replication

Private cloud @NTU on premise

data center

“This set-up was borne out of both necessity & creativity. Many people forget that there are still traditional applications that cannot sit and run at a hundred percent performance in the cloud.”

Server

NTU’s HPCC team has gained multiple benefits with its new hybrid infrastructure including fulfilling its regulatory need to have an affordable secondary site for disaster recovery. The storage data is replicated to and from the NetApp systems, hosted by Equinix. The Equinix data center is also linked to AWS which allows it to serve as a backup site in the event of a disaster.

With the new design the HPCC team has saved cost without having to procure new hardware or add members to the team to manage spikes in performance demand. Moreover, the cloud model is one that can be replicated in other sites with similar HPCC demands.

This project by NTU’s HPCC team also won the Red Hat Innovation Awards in The Emerging Technologies Category in 2014. This is the first time a Singapore-based entity has won an award from Red Hat.

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Phase 3: Reaping the rewards

A research-intensive public university, Nanyang Technological University (NTU) has 33,500 undergraduate and postgraduate students in the colleges of Engineering, Business, Science, and Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences. It has a new medical school, the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, set up jointly with Imperial College London.

NTU is also home to world-class autonomous institutes – the National Institute of Education, S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Earth Observatory of Singapore, and Singapore Centre on Environmental Life Sciences Engineering – and various leading research centres such as the Nanyang Environment & Water Research Institute (NEWRI), Energy Research Institute @ NTU (ERI@N) and the Institute on Asian Consumer Insight (ACI).

For more information, visit www.ntu.edu.sg

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NTU HPCC Today

- Increased scalability of resources without compromising security - Achieved great efficiency through automatic resource provisioning - Allowed better use existing resources and saved costs- Implemented a cloud model that can used as reference for similar universities- Achieved greater collaboration between agencies through better resource management

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