Specialist Cloud-based services are going to be one of the features of this year’s development patterns in the Cloud, and they are likely to become an important contributor to the growth in demand for service orchestrators.
A good example of this new genre of Cloud services has just been unveiled by Eduserv, a public sector specialist in web development and hosting. It has announced the launch of Education Cloud for Universities and Colleges. Its target market is the large but unpredictable requirement for burst capacity amongst Higher Education (HE) establishments.
Eduserv’s Education Cloud features both compute and storage resources operating under both VMware vCloud and OpenStack. It supports virtual machines running Windows and Linux. As well as combating the peaks and troughs in compute and storage requirement throughout the academic year, particularly those generated by the demands for significant levels of flexibility from the research community, it also meets the need for off-site Disaster Recovery facilities.
The Education Cloud is a by-product of the UMF Cloud Pilot, developed to host the UMF SaaS projects being undertaken at several UK HE institutions using a grant from the University Modernisation Fund.
The Cloud service will help HE institutions to better support researchers, students and IT staff and maximise spending power.
The service is based in Eduserv’s datacentre in Swindon and will offer Universities and Colleges access to a cost effective Cloud platform to store and access data on demand. The Cloud platform will also help institutions to flex systems so that they can increase or decrease capacity throughout the year, for example during admissions or when closed over holiday periods.
It will exploit Eduserv’s long-standing historical links with higher education, by using the existing connectivity to the JANET backbone, which is dedicated to education and research. It also means that all data will remain in the UK at all times, which will certainly have implications for some areas of research.
There are two pricing models to choose from: pay-per-use and the subscription-based Virtual Datacentre. This should allow both individuals and institutions to choose a flexible solution which can be controlled effectively throughout the academic year.
This approach is particularly valuable for the education sector, cash-strapped as it is during these times of public sector austerity. But its advantages – access to resources on a pay-per-use or annuity payment model rather than up-front capital expenditure on an inevitable long term investment for additional resources that may then spend much of the time idle – also has resonance for businesses in the private sector.
There is a growing argument that many user businesses will find the economic and flexibility arguments of scaling for burst resource requirements increasingly appealing this year. That appeal is then likely to spread towards considering services that offer specific functionality or services, be they SaaS or established development platforms such as those from NetSuite and Salesforce.com.
Here, the ability to short circuit applications and service development cycles by using either a business-targeted development environment or a `packaged’ SaaS service, offers the potential of both shortened development time and lower development costs, leading to the chance for the developers to deliver a faster time to revenue generation for the business.
