In the context of educational institutions, small distributed data centers and labs are becoming increasingly expensive to provision, support and maintain on their own. This leads to preferences towards centralized and integrated data center resource management and network access to the resources. In turn, the data centers are undergoing a transformation driven by the nature of the equipment in them, and by the way they are used. As the computational and storage equipment becomes more powerful and more densly packed, the power and cooling needs are growing as well. One of the challenges is how to provision, manage and deliver such a large amount of physical and virtual resources in an efficient way. In this paper we discuss how NC State University Virtual Computing Laboratory (VCL, http://vcl.ncsu.edu) technology can be used to implement distributed reconfigurable data centers and IT services in educational institutions. We use the NC State VCL implementation as a case study. It extends over four physical data centers and encompasses over 2000 computational platforms -most of them are IBM BladeCenter TM resources, some are HP, SUN and Dell platforms. VCL is an award-winning open source implementation of a secure production-level on-demand utility computing and services oriented technology for wide-area access to solutions based on real and virtualized resources, including computational, storage, network and software resources. NC State has been researching this technology and operating it in production settings since 2004. Currently, NC State VCL is serving a student and faculty population of more than 30,000. There also are VCL pilots with several UNC campuses, North Carolina Community College System, and several of out-of-state universities. VCL technology can host practically any other environment, overlay and virtualization solution, from single-seat desktops in an operating system of choice, to high-performance computing (HPC) clusters. It is a technology well suited for hosting "cloud" solutions of almost any type. We discuss how this technology scales and what its return on investment is, and how it can deliver clouds that offer a mix of resource architectures and ensembles, including those that may integrate traditional main-frames (e.g., IBM System z and System p platforms).
North Carolina State University's development, implementation and hosting of VCL REF is an exemplar case of a successful large-scale cloud service that has been in production for over 8 years across 4 data centers and 2000 computational platforms, serving tens of thousands of students.
Using VCL technology to implement distributed reconfigurable data centers and computational services for educational institutions
IBM J. Res. Dev.
IBM J. Res. Dev.
Computer Science