Deploying and Utilizing a Statewide Private Cloud

Dr. Curtis A. Carver Jr.Vice Chancellor and CIO

John ScovilleChief Technology Officer

Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia

Agenda• ITS Overview• Example of a PeachNet Service• Clouds• PeachNet Technical Rundown

• Questions, Comments, a Conversation

3,300 mile Private CloudVirtual Library Software Store

Enterprise Security and ePrivacy

Distance Education Learning Management

Enterprise Financials Enterprise BI

Library OperationsStudent Information

Collaboration

Why a Educational Private Cloud?• Cost– Work as a system– Negotiate as a system

• Agility– No contracts and thus 15 minute response.– No set bandwidth, storage, data center, backup.– Particularly pertinent to rural institutions and

research institutions.

Private Cloud

Services

Campus Control

System Control

Shadow IT

Control

PeachNet Service ExampleDesire2Learn– Deployed as Software as a Service to 30/31 institutions.– 100% system availability since launch in May 2012.– 34 million hits a day.

Projected to be 50 million in September.– 15,000 concurrent sessions pretty much 7 days a week, 24

hours a day.

PeachNetGeorgia’s Private Cloud providing:• Bandwidth as a service• Storage as a Service• Backup as a Service• Virtual Data Centers as a Service• Used by:– 31/31 USG institutions,– 7/28 TCSG institutions, – Potentially all DOE schools

Cloud computing is all the rage. "It's become the phrase du jour," says Gartner senior analyst Ben Pring, echoing many of his peers. The problem is that (as with Web 2.0) everyone seems to have a different definition.

As a metaphor for the Internet, "the cloud" is a familiar cliché, but when combined with "computing," the meaning gets bigger and fuzzier. Some analysts and vendors define cloud computing narrowly as an updated version of utility computing: basically virtual servers available over the Internet. Others go very broad, arguing anything you consume outside the firewall is "in the cloud," including conventional outsourcing.

What Cloud Computing Really MeansEric Knorr & Galen Gruman, InfoWorld 2011

What is the Cloud?

Cloud computing is a marketing term for technologies that provide computation, software, data access, and storage services that do not require end-user knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the system that delivers the services.Also, it’s delivery model for IT services is based on Internet protocols.

Wikipedia 2011

What is the Cloud?

• Software as a Service (SaaS). Quite simply, SaaS is a software application hosted in a central location and delivered via a web browser or other thin client.

• Platform as a Service (PaaS). PaaS is a software-development platform that is stored in the cloud and can be accessed via a web browser. It makes a variety of programming languages, operating systems, and tools available to developers, saving them the cost of purchasing and installing everything themselves.

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The capability provided the consumer is to provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications.

Service Models

PeachNet Cloud Storage Service

The cloud-based storage service is based on EMC Atmos, and is similar to Amazon's cloud-based storage service, S3. The native interface is a REST-based (http) API, but there are also a number of other access methods that you can use (including appliances that you can purchase) that are designed to write data to Atmos. The service is designed for large, typically archive dataset.

ADVANTAGESSolution for implementation of NSF mandated Data Management PlansExport control over privacy from a trusted community Scalable flexibility based on your growthFully replicated, redundant, high availability storageMultiple access methods (CIFS/NFS/IFS/Web2.0/Sync & Share)No additional network or bandwidth charges

PeachNet Backup Service

Getting data offsite as part of a data protection plan has been difficult in the past. Plans that look good on paper are often too difficult and cost-prohibitive to implement.

The backup service is based on EMC's Avamar system, which offers source-based de-duplication. But the idea is the same as with traditional systems: You install a backup agent on each host that you wish to backup, and backups are streamed to our backup systems here in Athens. You can login to the backup management system and control various aspects of your backups including the ability to perform self-service restores.

The price is $.30 / GB / retention-copy / year. For example, if you had 10TB of source data with 5 days of retention (50TB total), the price would be $15,000 annually. However, once you get above 100TB total, we have volume discounts ranging from 25% to over 60%.

PeachNet Data Center Service

The Virtual Data Center service provides you with virtual machines that you manage (including console access, the ability to install operating systems, etc.). It also includes a private firewall that you can use to control access to and from your virtual machines.

The annual cost of the service is calculated as follows:• System Administration Personal Services $3,450.00 per Customer• Virtual Machines $ 115.00 per Virtual Machine• Server and related infrastructure* $ 49.00 per GB RAM• Storage $ 1.25 per GB storage

*Note: Server and related infrastructure covers the cost of physical servers, per-server software licensing, and other data center infrastructure. It is charged based on GB RAM, which is a key indicator of total infrastructure usage.

Summary

The University System of Georgia provides a private cloud environment called PeachNet to empower the inspiration and education of the future leaders of Georgia and the world.

Questions, Comments, a Conversation?