UMF Cloud Pilot: architecturing an IaaS offer for higher education

UMF Cloud Pilotarchitecting an IaaS offer

for higher education

[email protected]@andypowe11

umfcloudpilot.eduserv.org.uk

Summary

• background• the UMF Cloud Pilot• design decisions (so far)• business models and sustainability


University Modernisation Fund

• £12.5 million from HEFCE to encourage uptake of shared services in HE– efficiency and value for money as key drivers

• channelled thru the JISC Shared Servicesand the Cloud programme– research and administrative computing– JANET Brokerage, DCC and Eduserv– 4 SaaS projects– RMAS, DARE and ESB– running until end of March 2012


About Eduserv

• not-for-profit IT services company• best known in academia for OpenAthens and

CHEST• web hosting and development for

government sector• 20 year sustainable track record of growth

– >3.5m registered users of Eduserv-based services– 115 staff - turnover of £16.5m in 2009/10– new datacentre in Swindon specifically for

education and the public sector

• charitable mission to encourage theeffective use of ICT in ‘public good’organisations


UMF Cloud Pilot overview

• compute and storage cloud infrastructure• designed to address the major concerns of HEIs

– data remains in the UK at all times– operated for the long-term benefit

of the UK academic sector– integrated with the JANET network– lower the costs associated

with IT provisioning


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 serviceon a commercial basis


Delivered from

• our Swindon Data Centre– capacity and power for >600 racks of infrastructure– modular design– PUE efficiency design of <1.4– JANET backbone connectivity via

new JANET PoP


Service levels and resilience

• operated by Eduserv– 24 x 7 systems monitoring and support– minimum 99.9% SLA

• desire to launch secondary site during 2012– support for automated replication of

data between sites– will deliver multi-site replication

and failover– equivalent to Amazon AWS

“Regions”


Architected for scalability

• Cisco UCS blade infrastructure– dual 6-core 3.06GHz processors with 64GB RAM– designed to scale to >1,500 cores, 8 TB of RAM per ‘pod’– multiple ‘pods’

• Isilon storage– clustered NAS solution with near-SAN performance– scalable to 10PB usable

• connectivity– 2-tier Cisco switched network (core and

distribution)– fully resilient with no single point of

failure (including dual path toJANET PoP)

– all ports running at 10 Gbit/s


Our offer

• vCloud Compute• OpenStack Compute• VM Storage• File Storage• JANET connectivity• all accessed via a self-service portal

integrated with the UK AccessManagement Federation

• … with possibility of long termtape archiving in the future


Timescales

• now– vCloud Compute ‘lab’ environment for use by UMF-

funded SaaS projects

• by end of the year– pricing details (mid-October)– vCloud Compute general availability

• early 2012– self-service Web portal– OpenStack Compute availability– File Storage beta


Design decisions

• Cisco UCS– good fit with other activities, options for offering

blade leasing

• Isilon– NAS with SAN-like performance, flexible capacity,

no single point of failure

• VMware– good fit with institutional vSphere services

• OpenStack– good backing from industry,

where OSS momentum seemsto be


Business models / sustainability

• for us, ‘cloud’ is part of a spectrum that spans co-lo right up to highly managed services

• our cloud offer is geared to both the ‘institution’ and to ‘individuals’

• competitive pricing (<Amazon)• billing – credit card and invoice• policies for security, SLA,

privacy, etc.• announcing pricing mid-October


vCloud pricing model

• ‘enterprise’ offer primarily for institutions (rather than individuals)

• virtual datacentre ‘tariff’ model• monthly commitment (compute and storage)• invoice-based billing• free introductory tier (probably lasting 2 or 3

months)• pay-as-you-go model to meet short term

requirements• note that vCloud will carry price

premium to meet VMwarelicensing costs


OpenStack pricing model

• designed to appeal to individual researchers• pay-as-you-go (hourly) model• instance sizes comparable with Amazon• payment by credit card / Paypal• introductory free tier – 12 months of

a micro instance• be interested in views on a more

predictable ‘tariff’ model forresearchers?


Storage pricing model

• priced both as part of ‘virtual datacentre’ tariff model and separately as pay-as-you-go

• looking at whether we price VM Storage and File Storage separately or have single storage offer and let Isilon migrate storage automatically


Connectivity pricing model

• data transfer will be free (in and out)• public IP addresses above the standard allocation

(probably one per customer) will be charged on a monthly basis


Concluding remarks

• we’d welcome feedback on:– the cloud platforms we support– integration with campus authentication– pricing and billing models– anything else…

• get in touch at umfcloudpilot.eduserv.org.uk(where we are also blogging our progress)

Questions?


Education

UMF Cloud Pilot: architecturing an IaaS offer for higher education