More than IaaS Academic Cloud Services for Researchers 26.04.2018 More than IaaS Academic Cloud Services for Researchers Patrik Schnellmann patrik.schnellmann@switch.ch Linz, 31. May 2017

Infrastructure as a Service 26.04.2018 Infrastructure as a Service How we make the difference with IaaS

26.04.2018 Is there a difference?

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26.04.2018 Differentiation

Strategic considerations 26.04.2018 Strategic considerations If you compete on price, you are lost. With our cloud services we address the market niche of higher education. Therefore we have to carefully position our cloud services!

Swiss community cloud Based on OpenStack and Ceph 26.04.2018 Swiss community cloud Based on OpenStack and Ceph 3’464 CPU cores 20 TB RAM 3 PB Disk storage 10 Gbps network Zurich, University of the Arts University of Lausanne

Use Cases Research Teaching Central IT services Network Simulations 26.04.2018 Use Cases Research Network Simulations Big Data Analysis Physics simulations Biochemistry Teaching Student VM for IT courses Learning environment for big data Academic software (iPython, R, SPSS) Central IT services Off Site Secondary Servers External Monitoring Storage / Backup

26.04.2018 SCALE-UP project Goal Create academic services on the cloud infrastructure User group in focus are researchers and lecturers Duration August 2015 – December 2017 Project partners 8 project partners from universities Funding Co-funded by the program “Scientific Information” of swissuniversities with matching funds of the institutions

Virtual Private Cloud Goal Integrate SWITCHengines virtual machines and storage into the campus network Access easily to systems behind the firewall Profit from scalability and redundancy Results Layer 2 network between campus and SWITCHengines Examples Enhance redundancy for authentication with an additional directory service on SWITCHengines

Big Data Analytics Goal Learn how to use Big Data analysis tools Provision a ready to use Hadoop and Apache Spark cluster. Results Teaching: Sandbox with Zeppelin, Spark, jupyter. Researchers: Orchestration software to deploy cluster Lessons learned Lots of potential in community to learn about Big Data tools Many researchers are happy with just a powerful VM.

Scientific Data Pools Goal Store large quantities of data Manage data sets and share them with other researchers Examples 1000 genomes, Common crawl, Google ngrams Private data sets for projects Lessons Learned No clear definition of “large” dataset: can be a few TBytes Safely storing and sharing the data creates a lot of value

Community Service Hub Goal Create a place for SWITCHengines based & other services Make local services available for the whole community Lower hurdles for offering and obtaining services (procurement, legal framework, SLA, authentication) Example services SWITCHdrive, SWITCHengines IaaS / SaaS via GÉANT Cloud Procurement Geodata service, Lab IMS (openBIS)

Lessons Learned Even small solutions can make researchers happy: 26.04.2018 Lessons Learned Even small solutions can make researchers happy: A powerful VM with a few GBytes of storage covers already many needs. Many researchers still spend more money for coffee than for cloud computing. Many times, local solutions at the university are chosen as alternatives. Know your users and their needs. Then you know how to provide them the best service!

How we differentiate What makes our services unique: 26.04.2018 How we differentiate What makes our services unique: Flexibility to respond to specific needs Direct contact to SWITCH and engineers Integration to university processes (authentication, billing) Swiss location and governing law The biggest asset is the trust our customers have in us!

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