Private Cloud Computing Example: "State cloud computing"

The case of the K-12 Education Institute in Illinois State, through its business-driven cloud computing project, shows us how cloud computing service delivery can have a deep, long-term impact on an IT department.

Illinicloud's CTO, Jim Peterson, is the technical director of Bloominton K-12 Education, starting from the start of a project to address a familiar, thorny and enduring challenge: supporting IT infrastructure in schools. Although 870 school districts may have the same needs, IT operations need to be addressed in different districts, he said. The problem, he says, is that some school districts have a surplus of resources, while in other districts there is no resources, so the project's administrators want to solve the problem by adopting a cloud computing model.

"There are 20 school districts with an oversupply of infrastructure, and we have chosen three from a geographically distributed factor." He said, "excess infrastructure resources" means idle storage resources, underutilized application servers, or even available data center space in some cases.

Peterson said the idea was easy for end users to experience, and even school executives were listening to the internet and had witnessed Amazon's proven business model of cloud computing as a practical way for IT staff. One of the key reasons for the success of the project, he says, is the ubiquitous, superior private networking capabilities provided by the National Central Management Service. The Illinois Century Network provides services to the entire state and provides a central hub for designing Illinicloud.

"It's very fortunate and interesting to have such a closed network, and we don't have to pay any cost for it." "Peterson said.

Free web resources are a big incentive to start building cloud computing. Unlike public hosting, the security and data management costs involved in the project are also exempted. Peterson added that since data centers were already running in school districts, they had not paid for the floor space involved.

changing classroom IT requirements

With modern technology pouring into classrooms, Peterson says, it needs are changing as well; multimedia files quickly overload the local system with the exception of basic technical tools such as e-mail and desktop support.

"They may need a new academic platform, some schools may need to back up, others may need more services, but not enough people to manage," he said.

One example is Learn360, an online education service that is hailed as a great tool by Peterson, but its actual use is worrying in the case of many schools with limited internet resources. Illinicloud naturally becomes a suitable substitute.

"We manage all their video files," he says, "and they all love it." ”

For him, Peterson says, the key is the ability to integrate different resources into an amorphous pool of resources. He prides himself on being a neutral vendor because he can do whatever he wants with his own management, off-the-shelf hardware and software. Illinicloud works with CDW to stop using existing IT products on the market, and CDW offers some services.

"We have NetApp, 3PAR and EMC, we have sun company staff, but these are not important to us." "he said.

There is a greater challenge in starting the delivery of software as a service (SaaS) style automation because many traditional software vendors used by Illinois are not ready to be incorporated into a centralized architecture.

"We're working on SaaS products, but it seems to be a bit slow," he said. "All of our vendors, such as library automation software, are not ready to implement cloud computing." ”

State agencies and school districts are quick to feel the benefits of cloud computing

"The main use cases are storage and disaster recovery," Peterson said, which is the most pressing requirement for many school districts anyway. Although it's closed, it's not really Amazon's Web service-style self-service cloud. Illinicloud gets demand from the school's top level online, then starts delivering the service and delivers the bill, but Peterson says it is far better than the regular, local-level approach to supply. Centralization of resources enables Illinicloud to allocate resources more efficiently.

Administrators in other states are also experiencing the efficiencies associated with the gradual consolidation and commercialization of basic IT services. Indiana, a system administrator at the information Technology office in the state of Spicuzza, says his department currently runs about 2,500 physical servers and 800 virtual servers deployed on a number of local individual application servers, providing services such as e-mail. This is part of the Indiana State's long-term drive to move state institutions away from localized it deployments to form a more centralized IT model.

"When you have several workers who can manage 10 Exchange servers instead of managing one server per person, that's the big benefit," he said.

Spicuzza said he did not think Indiana had a successful cloud computing project. Because he still needs to do a lot of manual work, there are now a few tools, such as the precise software company's application performance management, that can help him get a more intuitive picture of how the system works, which was unthinkable before. Prior to the advent of the monitoring tool, Spicuzza said that once end users and developers complained about abnormal interrupts and slow systems, he had to physically visit the site to trace the problem. Now, he has a tool and test data for discovering and troubleshooting problems.

"I may not be able to say exactly what went wrong with the application, but I can tell them what went wrong," he said.

Spicuzza said the changes in Indiana State were quite logical when local institutions needed more resources, and they had no extra budget to hire consultants or invest in new systems. There is no need to adopt a OIT state at all. Spicuzza that a single old-fashioned local it operator is disappearing, and that as demand grows, so does his team.

Even though many companies do not operate on the same scale, many of them are in line with the needs of IT professionals. No matter what toolset or service scope is provided, there is no way to prevent the development of more tasks with fewer resources and fewer manual operations. It's really not good news for it people working in the data center, but it's a great boon for customers ' stretched IT budgets and end users. Welcome to your state cloud.

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