A presentation at the JISC Curation in the Cloud workshop, March 2012.

1. Education Cloud
andy.powell@eduserv.org.uk
@andypowe11

2. What is the Education Cloud?
• compute and storage cloud for HE and FE - IaaS
• live(ish) but not yet true cloud
• designed to address the some of the concerns of
HEIs
– data remains in the UK at all times
– operated for the long-term benefit
of the UK academic sector
– directly on the JANET backbone
– I used to say, “lower the costs associated
with IT provisioning”, but … ?
• a „community cloud‟ for education
• built on our Community Cloud
Infrastructure and what we‟ve
learned from the UMF Cloud Pilot
www.eduserv.org.uk/educationcloud

3. What is the UMF?
• 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
– 4 SaaS projects
– RMAS, DARE and ESB
– running until end of March 2012
www.eduserv.org.uk/educationcloud

4. Delivered by Eduserv
• not-for-profit IT services company
• best known in HEIs for OpenAthens and CHEST
• web hosting and development for government
• 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 – JANET POP
• charitable mission to encourage
the effective use of ICT in
„public good‟ organisations
www.eduserv.org.uk/educationcloud

5. Current … future
• VMware vCloud (compute) – ~20 orgs on board
• OpenStack currently on back-burner
• rolling out File Storage
– WebDav and SFTP… RESTful API (a ls S3)
• PAYG and „reserved‟ pricing models
• monthly and annual billing by credit card and
invoice
• …self-service, billing, tape backups for customer
data, second DC for DR
www.eduserv.org.uk/educationcloud

6. Isilon storage
• clustered NAS (with SAN-like performance)
• scalable to 10PB (single addressable space)
• no single points of failure
• data striped across multiple nodes
• MTBF 234 days (minimum 7 days)
• MTDL 4851 years (minimum 1000 years)
• but… need to guard against user/operator error,
catastrophic disaster
www.eduserv.org.uk/educationcloud

7. www.eduserv.org.uk/educationcloud