Hybrid clouds, hypovisors and ‘data centre lite’ mini-pods

The Future of the Data Centre 2012(20th September)

Dr Phil Richards

Director of IT, Loughborough University

Overview

The local problems we were trying to solve

How we did it

The wider problem our sector wants to solve

The barriers to this

Can we break through them?

The problems we were trying to solve

Distributed Data-centres Under Desks (DDUDs)

Holywell Park ‘data centre lite’ mini-podavoiding expensive new build

Resilient local cloud architecturefor high availability

Mini pod 1 Mini pod 2

De-risking the cloud and avoiding major build:Loughborough’s Hybrid Cloud

The wider problem our sectoris trying to solve

Sector: UK Higher Education

Save £100Ms from £23Bn UK HE turnover

~ 2% spent on servers and storage = £460M

Can we save 50% of £460M?

Industrial-scale savings

“… construction of extremely large-scale, commodity-computer data centres at low-cost locations… uncovered the factors of 5 to 7 decrease in cost of electricity, bandwidth, operations, software and hardware at these very large economies of scale.”

Armburst, Armando Fox et al.,Above the Clouds, Berkeley

Examples of industrial-scaleEuropean data centres

Owner Location Square feet

Amazon Dublin, Ireland 240,000

Google Hamina, Finland N/K

HP Winyard, UK 305,000

IBM Dublin, Ireland N/K

Microsoft Dublin, Ireland 303,000

Source: Greenpeace report ‘How dirty is your data?’, April 2011

Janet – our ‘national grid’ for hybrid cloud

Remote industrialdata centre 2

Remote industrialdata centre 1

University or College local clouds

“Hypovisor…

“… refers to containerisation at the bare-metal level, permitting a greater set of workloads on the same infrastructure, including High-Performance Computing.”

Term believed first to have been coined by Gartner Distinguished Analyst Andrew Butler in 2012.

Hybrid ‘hypovisor’ cloud-bursting via Janet:a world first (July 2011)?

Summary

Now we want to run our virtual servers and storage cheaper in the public cloud than locally

Evidence suggests this is possible

Utility provision to us from industrial-scale data centres is required

UK Higher Education may be able to lead this, on the back of the Janet network