Virtualization

Sharing computing infrastructure among members can save money allowing for greater flexibility, and, at the same time, increasing efficiency and reliability. NJIT and others have moved to a cloud-based model for IT services. NJEDge is extending the benefits of cloud computing to the entire New Jersey education community.

A Statewide Community Cloud: An NJIT/NJEDge.Net Collaboration

This year, NJEDge.Net collaborated with NJITs Information Services and Technology division on an innovative project to build the foundation for a statewide community cloud that would provide cost-effective cloud-based infrastructure, platform and application services. NJEDge already provides a trusted broadband statewide network to over 50 members, mostly higher education institutions. NJIT has built a local cloud infrastructure and developed a set of robust and scalable provisioning and management processes based on VMwares virtualization offerings. NJIT has virtualized nearly all of its core server and storage infrastructure, deploying over 400 VMs (virtual machines) over several compute clusters in support of its academic, administrative, and research initiatives. Since most NJEDge member institutions offer similar IT services and share common concerns and challenges, the collaboration looks to scale the local cloud resources built by NJIT to a community cloud model that would be accessible over the NJEDge network and propose a business model to leverage the resulting economies of scale. The project began with several technology-based, proofs of concept. Proof of Concept 1: Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity With disaster recovery and business continuity high on the minds of NJEDge CIOs, a first proof of concept began with the failover test of a web-based service to demonstrate high availability through redundancy. The test had a simple webbased service running and active at RutgersCamden, while a copy of the same service was running but inactive at NJIT in Newark. The active service in Camden was intentionally crashed and the inactive service in Newark was activated in fractions of a second, well within reasonable operational expectations. Utilizing Ciscos LISP (locator identifier separation protocol) now available on the NJEDge network, the test demonstrated that a sister institution could help provide high availability of a critical information service.

Proof of Concept 2: Virtual Organizations In a second technology proof of concept using VMware technology, several virtual organizations (vORGS) were established on NJITs local cloud infrastructure. The vORGS technology allows multiple institutions to co-exist and operate separately and securely on the same hardware infrastructure. With NJEDge members acting as separate vORGS, they are able to provision their own VMs with compute and storage resources on demand for any purpose, such as test and development, standby web server, backup site, etc. This proof of concept demonstrates an institution can provision IT services on demand without incurring high setup and ongoing maintenance costs. Longer term, production applications could be deployed in a remote cloud, hosted and managed centrally, but consumed locally all generating an economy of scale that drives down costs for NJEDge members. Survey NJEDge and NJIT are currently gauging the levels of interest in community cloud services through a survey of member CIOs, exploring the possibilities of IaaS (infrastructure as a service), PaaS (platform as a service), and SaaS (software as a service) offerings. The non-binding survey will inform an initial business model for acquiring and supporting community cloud hardware resources. With developing an institution-wide cloud strategy high on the EDUCAUSE Top-Ten IT Issues List for 2012, this collaborative effort by NJEDge and NJIT hopes to bring member institutions significant options for cloud strategies in 2013 and beyond.