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The presentation will demonstrate a survey of cloud services adoption in European NRENs, obtained through the questionnaire circulated among 23 NRENs. Based on these results, the presentation will cover a strategic approach to deployment of cloud computing and services which is driven by a business cases for the users community. A set of information and different aspects need to be analyzed to setup strategic objectives which are desirable, feasible and achievable, and therefor which are worth investing in.

GRNET currently runs more than 11.000 VMs in two flavors of IaaS services. In this presentation we're going to show how we build and provision these IaaS/cloud services. Our solutions have to cater to different needs, from students to labs and from university NOCs to scientists that need computing resources. We're going to present the open source tools, both 3rd-party and in-house developed, that we use everyday in order to deploy, automate and monitor our services.

## Introduction

CESNET, an association of legal entities established by universities and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, is responsible for operation and development of the National Research and Education Network (NREN), National Grid Infrastructure (NGI) and active research in the field of advanced network technologies and applications.

As a provider of scientific computing services for the Czech academic community and a facilitator of international connections to European Grid Infrastructure (EGI), CESNET has considerable experience with virtualization-based solutions such as virtualization as a tool for operation flexibility, on-demand virtual cluster services for scientific computing or HPC cloud.

The national Center CERIT-SC (CERIT Scientific Cloud) offers storage and computing resources and related services, including support for their experimental use. The Center also participates in research and development related to flexible e-Infrastructures and it also collaborates in research activities of its partners.

The CERIT-SC Center was created through a transformation of the Supercomputing Center Brno (SCB), a part of the Institute of Computer Science (ICS) at Masaryk University (MU).

Experiences of broad scale outsourcing of datacenter services in a Finnish UAS

Decision to outsource is always a strategic initiative and needs to be made by the highest management. Before making the decision to outsource there are few questions that needs to be considered and answered: What is the core business of the organization, does the present service support the core business in a strategic level or is it more a supportive service, do we have enough skills and employees to effectively produce service by ourselves, would it make economically sense to outsource, etc.

Conditions for a successful outsourcing are manifold. Main thing is to know what you are outsourcing before you do as well as what is the total cost of ownership - including training and life cycle costs. To find out total costs of an in-house service can be tricky but the better you succeed in this “spy” task the better informed decision you are able to make. In addition to salary and social security costs there are bunch of other “hidden” costs that needs to take into account. Without them in-house production may feel too cheap and you miss the realistic comparison.

There are also other things than money that needs to take into account. You need to figure out what are indirect effects of outsourcing for the organization. What changes are needed if there will be another party to deliver part of the process? How information will flow from one party to the other and back? Will there be lack of confidence between different parties? Will there be temporary or even permanent drop in service level for your customers etc.

In Laurea UAS we have did not go through outsourcing in traditionally sense BUT rather a partial in-sourcing! When Laurea was founded in the late -90’s whole IT-function was outsourced. During the years uncertainty towards an outsourced IT function started to raise and made the management to think whether oursourced outsourced IT was too inflexible and expensive. Requirements of teaching had changed and multinational service provider was not able to bend to these requirements. During the spring 2004 decision was made to perform a partial in-housing which led to a so called hybrid-model where there is a place for in-house and outsourced services. How we have organized our IT is quite different from most of the higher education institutes in Finland.

Come and hear how IT is organized in Laurea University of Applied Sciences, what led to this model, what are the benefits of our current model of operation, what could have been done differently and how we have organized cooperation with our vendors.