Page History

Somewhere in 2009 CSC started to investigate new location for the datacenter which could host next supercomputers. And after 3 years we had one of the most eco efficient DC in the world hosting computing services for the Finnish academia, research institutes and EU projects. Past couple of years we have had production ongoing have shown our selections and design principles were right ones. Very reliable and extremely low PUE in a same DC package, that is CSC Kajaani datacenter.

If creating a Datacenter from scratch is not an easy task, re-organizing an existing computer room into a decent DC can be quite of a headache. This talk will do a survey of several techniques and existing products from vendors that will allow you to transform your old-fashioned computer room into a (almost  :-) ) brand new datacenter. The talk will cover :

- airflow control : how can you create hot and cold aisles at low cost ?
- cooling technologies : are you ready for free-cooling ?
- How can you monitor best ?
- can you improve your PUE ?

For each of these items, we will give cost estimates and achievement difficulty level.

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 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 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.

May I propose a little bit different approach of the subject? Because the purpose of our work is DataCenter (DC) – IaaS – Green IT. So, my presentation will not give you a formula to calculate the cost efficiency of energy in a DC, but in a more global approach, I propose to look at where are the problems, what kind of “solutions” we can expect; and what we can do.

Energy:

Energy is clearly the challenge of the 21th century. Two centuries of “industrial revolution”, something like 1850 to 2050 will have use a very large amount of fossil combustibles, 100 000 000 years of production ! We have no choice we must develop renewable sources of energy at a very large scale.

DCs :

DCs are the “back office” of the internet. Users (most of) see the internet through their smartphone or tablet. Just a very few users know that a single “clic” cost a large amount of energy, very bigger than their personal (terminal) usage. The talk will provide some significant numbers; example : global (world wide) electricity consumption of network enabled devices in 2013 = 616 TWh; global electricity consumption in France in 2013 = 547 TWh !!!

GreenIT

Green … nothing is green or virtual in the ICT world. Just a few countries such as Iceland can provide renewable energy at human scale, but what about building servers and so on and recycling ?

OK, what can we do ?

Ideas to act in the better possible way.

In this presentation Pekka Palin of CSC tells about the co-operation with Box.com, the legal challenges, the pricing logic, the negotiations between Box and the Nordunet-consortium, and user feedback.

CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd is administered by the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. CSC is a non-profit company providing IT support and resources for academia, research institutes and companies: modeling, computing and information services. CSC provides Finland's widest selection of scientific software and databases and Finland's most powerful supercomputing environment that researchers can use via the Funet
network.