Community vs. Commodity
building a ‘community cloud’ infrastructure
TFPL Cloud Event
[email protected] @andypowe11
Summary
• background
• the UMF Cloud Pilot
About Eduserv
• not-for-profit IT services company
– single sign-on and licence negotiation for education – 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 the effective use of ICT in ‘public good’
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 Services and the Cloud programme
– research and administrative computing – JANET Brokerage, DCC and Eduserv ‘cloud’ – 4 SaaS projects
– RMAS, DARE and ESB
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
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
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
Our offer
• ability to procure and manage
– virtual machines (VMs)
– ‘block’-level storage associated with those VMs
– general purpose ‘file’ storage, accessed via RESTful web API
– network connectivity, IP addresses and firewalls
• all accessed via a self-service web portal
Timescales
• now
– ‘lab’ environment for use by UMF-funded SaaS projects
• by end of the year
– compute and ‘block’ storage
• early 2012
– self-service web portal – enhanced compute – ‘file’ storage
Designing for education
• everything so far is about ‘commodity’
• community clouds are about tailoring a public cloud infrastructure to a particular community • so… what are the features of the education
community?
• and what impact do they have on design?
Management culture
• lots of faculty/departmental autonomy within institutions
• historically strong IT departments
– often with DIY ethos
• relatively risk averse
– lots of FUD around cloud solutions – data protection, privacy
• but… huge variation across the sector
Design impact
• Cisco UCS blade infrastructure
– dual 6-core 3.06GHz processors with 64GB RAM – designed to scale to >1,500 cores, 8 TB of RAM
• option to lease blades (as alternative to cloud provision)
• UK provision and charitable status • building T&Cs and SLA with
Financial culture
• need to manage multiple funding streams, some of which are ‘owned’ by individual researchers • variable approaches to internal cost models
• general dislike of unpredictable pricing models • …and of credit card billing
• preference for annual billing to reduce invoice-handling
• VAT on services perceived as an issue • however, some evidence that
individual researchers are willing to go to AWS
Design impact
• offer both
– ‘Pay-as-you-go and’ and ‘Virtual datacentre’ tariffs
(c.f. Pay-as-you-go vs. Pay monthly on mobile phones)
– pay-monthly and pay-annually
– credit card and invoice-based billing
• pricing must be competitive with Amazon
Software culture
• widespread use of VMware as virtualisation platform within IT service departments
• some evidence of moves to Hyper-V • preference for OSS solutions in parts • experience of ‘hosting applications’
Design impact
• offer both vCloud and OpenStack • VMware vCloud
– good fit with institutional use of VMware
• OpenStack Compute
– open source cloud platform – strong industry backing
• intention to offer Hyper-V in future • pricing models to encourage
Network as glue
• strong sense of JANET network ‘community’
– with some expectation of ‘free at point of use’
Design impact
• JANET connectivity
– 2-tier Cisco switched network (core and distribution)
– fully resilient with no single point of failure (including dual path to
JANET PoP)
– all ports running at 10 Gbit/s
• good integration with UK
Access Management Federation • no charge for data transit
Preservation
• growing ‘open access’ agenda, particularly around the ‘scholarly’ record
• requires long-term preservation and citation
– of both publications and research data
• often mandated by funding bodies
Design impact?
• not much yet… • Isilon storage
– clustered NAS solution with near-SAN performance
– scalable to 10PB usable
• considering addition of 3rd storage
Scary numbers
• “The world’s currently stored meteorological
data amounts to 10,000Tb and is projected to 350Pb by the year 2030.”
• but Moore’s Law (Kryder’s Law) would suggest that cost of 10PB storage now will be loosely equivalent to the cost of 5EB by 2030
• so, the issue is not one of storage provision per se
Concluding remarks
• community clouds are by definition not true commodity provision
• but underlying platform can be
• achieve scale by developing multiple community-offers
Questions?
umfcloudpilot.eduserv.org.uk
