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Increasingly, data is stored in seemingly private containments in public locations. This poses challenges due to the differences between perceived and actual safety of the data. Safety here refers to security, privacy, reliability and availability. The talk will present two software prototypes for file storage and simple relational databases which can be used in multi-user environments to offer non-expert users a safe environment for their data across multiple locations.

elfCLOUD is a Finland based secure cloud platform. The platform combines the privacy of private clouds with cost-efficiency and ease of maintenance of the public clouds.

The entire architecture has been designed from the ground up with primary focus on information security and end-user privacy. Content is always
encrypted locally on the users' device before transmitting to the cloud. The content keys are never sent to or stored on the elfCLOUD servers in usable format. Secure cloud assisted key sharing within and across organizations is supported and facilitated in a user-friendly manner.

The elfCLOUD platform provides open APIs and open-source client libraries as well as a set of readily available client applications for day-to-day file management, sharing, folder synchronization and backups.

VSB-Technical University of Ostrava has its own datacenter which runs on some modern technologies - converged 10GE, smart disc storages, virtualisation.

The first part of presentation describes technical infrastructure of datacenter - networking, servers, storages and virtualisation.

The DC's services are offered mainly to university users. Other institutions (universities, high schools, etc.) can connect their networks to datacenter and run their own servers or virtual machines in our datacenter.

The second part of presentation describes offered services, network connections between datacenter and institution's network, practical experiences and future plans.

Use of hardware acceleration for high-density network traffic monitoring will be presented during the talk with a special focus on efficiency, footprint reduction and acceleration of open source network monitoring tools. All these concepts provide significant cost reduction compared to commercial solution while they can be easily combined and integrated.

Virtualization offers higher infrastructure utilization, faster service provisioning and significantly reduces the data center footprint. A couple of years ago, Academic Network of Republic of Serbia (AMRES) acknowledged these benefits and started a project which aims to virtualize server infrastructure in AMRES datacenter. Due to lack of funds AMRES was forced to turn to some low-cost solutions (open source virtualization platforms) such as Citrix XenServer and Proxmox. In this session we will present the AMRES virtualization environment and share some of the experience we gathered during these years.