Hybrid Cloud a Viable IT Service Delivery Platform
Hybrid cloud is a viable IT service delivery platform, according to Loughborough University.
The University collaborated with Logicalis UK to move a complete enterprise application stack back and forth between an on-campus private cloud and Logicalis’ hosted cloud, via JANET (Joint Academic Network).
The cloud solutions are based on Cisco’s unique Unified Computing System (UCS), NetApp Storage platforms, and CA Technologies’ automation and orchestration tools.
Loughborough notes that this alliance has also demonstrated the true capabilities of cloud as far more than just a hypervisor workload enabler.
For this project, Loughborough leveraged Logicalis’ innovation in cloud infrastructure and its connection into JANET, to automate a total infrastructure move between data centres located over 200 miles apart.
This automation, claims Loughborogh, was completed within minutes.
Loughborough University adopted Logicalis’ Cooperative Cloud as its strategic ICT platform in 2010. For the purpose, the company leveraged Logicalis’ JANET-connected hosted cloud as the institution needs new capacity in the future.
The University is now ready to quickly move real IT services between on-site private and off-site shared hosted clouds. Because Loughborough is using private cloud it has also been able to save more than £2million in data centre regeneration costs.
“What we have achieved in this exercise rips up the rule book on what cloud means to customers. The industry has been so inwardly focussed on hypervisor-based clouds that it has forgotten that real organisations, like Loughborough, have a myriad of operating systems and workloads,” said Simon Daykin, CTO, Logicalis UK.
“In successfully automating the move of an entire infrastructure and application stack in this way, we have proven that cloud is more than a vanilla slice of hypervisor paid for with a credit card. This is not an engineering experiment; this is a real, live, demonstrable and adoptable approach for secure enterprise application cloud deployment.”
By Anuradha Shukla
