The document summarizes the UMF Cloud Pilot project run by Eduserv to design and operate a community cloud infrastructure for UK higher education. The cloud will provide compute, storage and networking resources delivered from Eduserv's new datacenter. Key aspects include using Cisco UCS and Isilon technologies, supporting both vCloud and OpenStack platforms, and establishing sustainable business models for ongoing operation after the initial funding period ends. Pricing and service details will be finalized by end of year with general availability of resources.

1. UMF Cloud Pilot architecting an IaaS offer for higher education andy.powell@eduserv.org.uk @andypowe11

2. Summary background the UMF Cloud Pilot design decisions (so far) business models and sustainability

3. 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

4. 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 foreducation and the public sector charitable mission to encourage theeffective use of ICT in ‘public good’organisations

5. 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 benefitof the UK academic sector integrated with the JANET network lower the costs associatedwith IT provisioning

6. 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-termdevelopment of the service post-funding (April 2012) Eduservwillcontinue to operate the serviceon a commercial basis

7. 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 vianewJANET PoP

8. 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 ofdata between sites will deliver multi-site replicationand failover equivalent to Amazon AWS“Regions”

9. Architected for scalability Cisco UCS blade infrastructure dual 6-core 3.06GHz processors with 64GB RAM designed to scale to >1,500 cores, 8TB 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 anddistribution) fully resilient with no single point offailure (including dual path toJANET PoP) all ports running at 10 Gbit/s

10. Our offer vCloud Compute OpenStack Compute VM Storage File Storage JANET connectivity all accessed via a self-service portalintegrated with the UK AccessManagementFederation … with possibility of long termtapearchiving in the future

11. Timescales now vCloudCompute ‘lab’ environment for use by UMF-funded SaaS projects by end of the year pricing details (mid-October) vCloudCompute general availability early 2012 self-service Web portal OpenStack Compute availability File Storage beta

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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 pricepremium to meet VMwarelicensing costs

15. 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 ofa micro instance be interested in views on a morepredictable ‘tariff’ model forresearchers?

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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)

19. Questions? umfcloudpilot.eduserv.org.uk