DoC Private Cloud
Project Goal
Build a DoC Infrastructure-as-a-service private cloud, very like Amazon EC2 ("Elastic Compute Service") which presents a secure and convenient web interface which enables users of DoC to specify and create VMs and associated storage, automatically install OSes on them and deploy them. Main goal is to virtualize most research servers, decoupling the OS image from the hardware for greater flexibility. Sharing (amortizing) the costs of each machine. One driver of this is EPSRC deciding to only provide 50% of any hardware bid over £10K in future, with the Dept expected to pay the remaining 50|%.
This project will definitely proceed, having been approved by Executive Committee and by two open meetings of Academic staff.
Peter McBrien (PJM) is leading the project, and has laid out two stages:
- a 6 month phase to build a prototype cloud, recruiting a "Cloud Manager" person to join CSG, either temporary or permanent. The Department will spend some significant amount of money, perhaps in the £100-200K range.
- assuming the prototype cloud is successful, it will move into production and the "Cloud Manager" become permanent. Researchers then have the option of adding hardware to the cloud. All members of CSG will become skilled in cloud-related topics, and the "Cloud Manager" will do non-cloud-related problem solving too.
Most crucially: (despite not knowing the exact spec, services to provide, let alone how to implement them) the Department has found a significant amount of money (perhaps in the region of £100-200K) to spend on this project - and this money must be full spent before the end of July. This means that all kit must be ordered, delivered and paid for before the 31st of July. With the Olympics making deliveries difficult, this means that everything must have been ordered by 1st July.
Re: amount to spend, AON suggested CSG prepare hardware proposals for £100K, £150K and £200K, which we (LDK) have done.
Background
Sometime in early 2012, Susan told DCW that DoC were thinking of hiring someone for 6 months into CSG, specifically tasked with building a DoC private cloud. Essentially she said that Exec Committee has found some significant pot of money which needs to be spent this financial year.
She explained the core idea was "virtualisation even for research clusters": at present, research groups buy clusters when they have money, CSG set them up, install "linux du jour" on them, configure fileservers (if part of cluster), tape backups (if part), processing node special software etc.
Then the servers age, the OS is essentially frozen (it's often difficult to persuade researchers that we should reinstall their fileservers, webservers and compute nodes). They become "fragile". Sometimes it's hard to even retire them on schedule (4/5/6 years or whatever). Also these clusters are often only accessible by members of that research group so the resource may not be fully utilised.
Susan's vision: setup a private cloud, researchers add hardware to that cloud's core resources, then create a VM for each cluster node, perhaps tied (1-1 at first) to their own hardware, CSG install that virtual cluster node's OS, researchers work as before - but each node is encapsulated inside a VM. Later, these VMs could share resources - when the group don't need 100% resources, or new more powerful hardware is purchased.
Various discussions with PJM and AON followed, clarifying things. Then further meetings with interested academics were held.
Cloud Services and Software Investigations
CSG have been performing initial investigations of hardware to buy, whether all commodity or investigating commercial filers like NetApp, and possible software that might be able to implement some/all of the required iaas cloud services. Here are our notes:
Cloud Hardware
Susan expressed a serious preference for open source software running on commodity hardware. That way, commodity hardware could be repurposed, even if the cloud project failed completely.
Against that, Peter Pietzuch strongly recommended that we also investigate commercial scalable storage systems - specifically NetApp "scalable NAS" units. We are investigating these and will report back soon.
Possible hardware to buy will be added later, we have done quite a lot of work.. coming soon.
Staff Working Group meetings
In April 2012, the discussion was opened out to all interested staff, and (so far) two open staff cloud meetings have been held. Here are some notes taken by DCW and LDK of the discussions at both meetings.