Small College Reaps Big Benefits From Cloud ComputingSmall College Reaps Big Benefits From Cloud Computing

If it were a cloud, Marian College would be something less than cumulous.

But the small Indianapolis, Ind., college, with a student body of 2,100, has dipped into cloud computing. It has virtualized its infrastructure, made virtual servers available over the network practically on demand, and coordinated its internal operations with an outside cloud managed by a service provider, BlueLock.

Given the debate over cloud terminology, the college qualifies at least as a cloud wisp. It also illustrates some of the gains IT gets when it thinks in terms of cloud computing versus adding one more thing to the IT infrastructure.

VMware at its VMworld user group meeting in Las Vegas last September launched what it called its vCloud initiative. It combines old, renamed products with new technology that hasn't arrived yet, with outside suppliers of "cloud" services. Marian College was an early implementer.

"The vCloud initiative is not where we started out," recalled Mike Temaat, network engineer at the school. The college IT department was looking to replace its direct attached storage with a more flexible storage area network, "that was all we were looking for," said Temaat. Then BlueLock got the college to consider "much larger needs further out on the timetable."

By consolidating and virtualizing servers, Marian IT staffers realized "we could do things that small to medium organizations typically don't have the resources to do, including the VMotion or live migration of virtual servers and cloud computing," Temaat said in an interview.

Temaat consolidated 15 servers -- 10 servers in the data center, each running a single application, plus five scattered around the school -- down to three HP ProLiant BL460c blade servers on a single 42-slot rack.

All three serve as hosts to virtual machines, and 16 servers are currently running in the data center, Temaat explained. Two shelves of disk drives for SAN operations are located close to the blades, leaving 32U of space to spare in the rack. Microsoft Exchange for e-mail runs on one virtual server, Microsoft Great Plains financials and FRX financial reporting in another, Three Rivers Systems' CAMs student management in another, an SQL Server 2005 database in another, etc. Temaat can maximize resources available per application, or during slack times, consolidate servers down to two blades through VMotion, if he chooses. He has VMware's virtual infrastructure

In a recent week, IT had to figure out how to train 50 college users in Windows Vista and Office 2007 in a week, while not disrupting the adult students who came in the evening and needed their familiar Windows XP and Office 2003 machines in the same computer lab.

It was "the only classroom lab big enough for both activities" but Temaat had to figure out a way to coordinate the dissimilar computing environments, without requiring the small IT staff to reconfigure the machines for two different sets of users each day.

With the school's new virtualized environment, Temaat was able to fire up virtual machines running Vista and Office 2007 in the data center, and then provision the 25 PCs in the lab with Vista and Office 2007 desktop.

When university staff members were finished training on their VMs for the day, they were shut down, leaving the original Windows XP and Office 2003 systems intact on each PC for the next wave of users.

It wouldn't have been possible to get double duty out of a single computer lab before, Temaat noted.

The VM cluster came in handy as well when the school's CFO decided to go from many individual printers around campus to a handful of departmental, multipurpose printers, to better track usage and get a handle on printing costs. With just days to go before school started, Temaat got the new virtualized print servers and departmental printers installed.

"We gave the ability to support file sharing, [and] pull in more RAM to a particular print server, if it needs it" in the virtualized environment, Temaat explained.

"The biggest change I see is the high availability on nearly everything. With VMware, we can move our resources around in background. The end user sees a lot less disruption, maybe 10 to 15 seconds instead of 10 to 15 minutes," he said.

"That means a lot less stress to us. With few server outages, there are fewer instances where we get 50 calls that the server is down and we have to explain it's not [an] emergency," he said.

Equally important is the more effective backup and disaster recovery made possible by coordinating the internal cloud with BlueLock's external one. Mirror images of the college's running systems can be stored at BlueLock's data center and activated in the event of a failure.

"The ability to encapsulate the internal cloud and move it to the macro cloud off-site -- we didn't have the ability to execute off-site replication before," said Temaat.

He's counting up savings in power and space and a seven-member IT staff's time among the gains. But perhaps best of all, when a department asks for a Microsoft SharePoint server for staff collaboration, he doesn't have to go through a two-week purchase order process and another two weeks of configuration and testing before fulfilling the request.

"Now we can bring up a SharePoint server (as a virtual machine) tomorrow. We can let the department mess with it and do what it wants. When they find out what they want, we can tear down the initial version and built it right," he said.

"We can do a lot more things than ever before," he added.