In the last few years, one of the main problems of the cultural heritage institution is the progressive reduction of the investments. The hardware maintenance and licensing costs greatly affects IT budget. Virtualization addresses the need to streamline and consolidate infrastructure, even if the license costs remain high for commercial clouds. Open source solutions allow you to implement virtualization cloud which performance and functionality are suitable for the masses, without the constraints of hardware certifications and proibitive licenses costs. Our infrastructure allowed us to build a ha virtualized environment using commodity hardware, regardless of specific products or manufacturers. Based on the interaction between a common linux kernel module and a software-based storage pool, is managed by an intuitive web interface. The system provides adequate performances provisioning services like web pages, OPAC, digital resources showcase, cataloging tools, library management, mail, etc.

1. Open low cost HA cluster cloud

Cristiano Corsani – system
engineer - IT department -
Florence National Library

Giovanni Toraldo – OSS
solutions architect at Libersoft
Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012

2. BNCF services
Cultural Heritage Ministry has progressively
reduced the investment

SBN - national cataloguing system

OPAC - online public access catalogue

WWW - our web interface

Digital data access - public access to our digital storage

Internal services - library management and Intranet services
Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012

3. BNCF data center costs

Open Source – reduce costs of:

SOFTWARE: development and maintenance

LICENSING: server, apps and 250 workstation

Virtualization cloud – reduce costs of:

HARDWARE: maintenance and electricity costs
Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012

4. Virtualization
Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012

5. Commercial solutions

Hypervisor license - depends on CPU and/or memory

Orchestrator license - live migration, HA, backup, …

Certified hardware – limited hardware supported

Centralized storage system – needed for HA
Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012

6. Our Open solution

Open hypervisor
it comes with Linux kernel in standard distro

Orchestrator
live migration, ha, backup, … intuitive and web based

Commodity hardware
only very low requirements needed

No centralized storage system
special network filesystem is used instead physical storage
Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012

7. Compare
3x Sun Fire (2 x quad-core Xeon, 24GB RAM, 2 x 500 GB SATA2)
3 HOSTS 6 CPU 72GB RAM 1TB Storage
Commercial Our Open
Hypervisor license 4000€ + 12000€/year ---
Centralized storage
5000€ ---
+ FB lan
Hardware 20000€ << 20000€
Installation +
500€/day 500€/day
Maintenance
Our Open Cloud is: open, simple, easily scalable and affordable
Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012

8. Open details
Giovanni Toraldo, OSS solutions architect in LiberSoft
 Virtualization (OpenNebula and Proxmox)
 Massive long-term storage for digitalized resources
(GlusterFS)
 Migration to Open Source desktop/server platforms.
(Ubuntu and MooseFS)
Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012

9. Open hypervisor
 Freely available: on your GNU/Linux
distribution;
 Enterprise-ready: powerful mix of enterprise
features and a rich set of partners.
 Support: widest range of hardware without
hassles (Thanks Linux!)
 High-performance: top-level virtualization
benchmarks for Windows and Linux workloads.
Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012

10. Open VM management software
 OpenNebula
 Adaptable: highly modular.
 Proven: massive scale production
environments;
 Interoperable: XML-RPC, EC2, OCCI
 Proxmox
 Easy to deploy: ISO installer or from bare
Debian
 Easy to use: centralized web management
Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012

11. Low-end hardware requirements
 The simplest virtualization host is...
your laptop:
CPU with virtualization extensions;
 A bunch of available memory
 A bunch of available disk space
 Use your workstations to prepare VM
before starting them in production.
Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012

12. Focus on storage
 Shared storage is not an option for live
migration and High-Availability.
 A good storage solution:
 Availability: the sky should not fall on our heads;
 Scalability: we add new bricks when needed;
 Price.
 Common choice is to use a dedicated
NAS/SAN (NetApp, EMC, QNAP and so on).
Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012

13. Our choice: GlusterFS
 GlusterFS is an open source distributed
network filesystem.
 How it works?
 Aggregate available disk space on your
hosts;
 Replicate data: HA and prevent data-loss;
 Data available via LAN with standard
protocols: FUSE, NFS, CIFS.
Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012

14. GlusterFS advantages
 Scalability: to Petabytes and beyond!
 Affordability: use commodity hardware;
 Flexibility: deploy in any environment;
 Linear performances: no degradation;
 HA: replicate data on multiple places;
 Unified namespace: like a folder on a
local disk
Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012

15. Credits
Cristiano Corsani – system engineer - IT department
Florence National Library

Email: cristiano.corsani@beniculturali.it
Giovanni Toraldo – OSS solutions architect at
Libersoft

Email: gt@libersoft.it
Low cost cloud for BNCF EVA Florence 2012