platforms that deliver agility and responsiveness

i2015 Higher Education Technology Briefing to Canada and the USA

Vancouver

Seattle

San Francisco

Sunnyvale, Silicon Valley

San Jose, Silicon Valley

Platforms that deliver Agility and Responsiveness 2015 Higher Education Technology Briefing to Canada and the USA

ii Platforms that deliver Agility and Responsiveness

Contents

Background 1

The Tour 2

Key Takeaways 4

Contextual Setting 6

Shared Services – Private Cloud – Public Cloud 7

Observations on the Journey to the Cloud 9

Eating Their Own Dog Food – NetApp and Cisco Transition to cloud 14

Notre Dame – A Transition Case Study 15

Coursera and the Public Cloud – A case study in Agility 16

Analytics – A Snapshot 17

University-Vendor Collaboration 18

Research Platforms – A Lesson in Engagement 19

Next Steps for Australian Universities 20

Profile of Vendor Partners Technologies/Services 21

About the Author

Peter Sack, an independent consultant with VISTECH Consulting, is a highly experienced IT services professional with particular expertise in infrastructure services and the Higher Education and Government sectors.

He is a skilled strategic thinker committed to aligning technology and business and transforming IT service delivery in line with core business objectives and emerging industry trends. His major area of focus is leadership in strategic transition of services and organisational change. He brings to this assignment, his leadership experience in the Higher Education sector where his understanding of university environments has assisted in targeting the discussion, and recounting the key messages in this report.

ii Platforms that deliver Agility and Responsiveness

Design & layout Linda Cerkvenik

12015 Higher Education Technology Briefing to Canada and the USA

Background

This document recounts the 2015 Higher Education Technology Briefing to Canada and the USA. It describes the lessons and observations and identifies opportunities for Australian universities to exploit emerging technologies and service models based on the experiences and learnings of the tour.

The 2015 Technology Briefing was developed by NetApp, Amazon Web Services and Cisco with three main objectives:• tounderstandhoworganisationsarerespondingtochallengesinmeeting

growing customer demand, greater business agility and cost pressures, and how this translates in a higher education context;

• toassesstherelevanceofemergingtechnologiesandservicesatvendors’global showcase facilities; and

• toenableparticipatinguniversitiestointeractwiththeirvendorsandpeersontechnology and business issues.

The report is geared towards strategists and planners, decision makers and those accountable for IT service delivery in the Australian Higher Education sector.

2 Platforms that deliver Agility and Responsiveness

The Tour

Vancouver

Seattle

San Francisco

Sunnyvale, Silicon Valley

San Jose, Silicon Valley



Vancouver:University of British Columbia talk about the sector-wide shared services initiative, EduCloud and their own private cloud that underpins it.

Steven Manos of the University of Melbourne presents the Nectar Community Cloud supporting Australian researchers and the importance of engagement with the research community.

NetApp discussed their software defined storage solution StorageGRID and the benefits of Service Design.

Seattle:Amazon Web Services give an insider view of the innovations that make AWS cloud unique how AWS are helping organisations transition to cloud services.

University of Notre Dame talk frankly about their own IT transformation and their journey to the public cloud.

San Francisco:Coursera reveal the agile development approach they take to innovate and continually enhance students’ experience.

Sunnyvale, Silicon Valley:At the executive briefing centre, NetApp showcase their Hybrid IT Strategy and open the books on their internal IT transformation and use of their own technologies.

eBay explain the power of analytics in their every-day business operations along with their philosophical approach to technology.

San Jose, Silicon Valley:At Cisco’s headquarters, their Chief Technology Officer talks of technology trends and Cisco IT talk openly about the challenges and approaches to their own internal IT as a Service provision.


Key Takeaways

Vitality of DataAnorganisation’sdatahaslongbeenconsidered valuable but with the rapid expansion of what data can be captured and how it can be analysed for business advantage, stewardship of data has emerged as a vital component of any IT services platform. This increases the significance of data management and the need to retain control over data, and it highlights the importance of data considerations in any go-to-cloud strategy.

Cloud Technology MaturityIt is apparent that cloud has come of age. The breadth of services available on public cloud now reframe it as an alternate data centre, not just a source of on-demand compute and storage. So too, complementary technologies are keeping pace and providing a means to control and manage organisational data and secure interconnectedness to the edge. The importance of data management and the alternate models these technologies enable, mean the hybrid cloud model is likely to be the most commonly adopted ecosystem for now and the immediate future.

People and CultureAll indicators point to People and Culture as a key ingredient into a successful IT transformation, and importantly to note, it became obvious that such a transition to cloud will not material impact IT headcount. Rather, roles will change and need to be realigned with the new service delivery model. The upside is staff can move from undifferentiated infrastructure heavy lifting to providing greater value in how technology is used. However, people do need to be brought along on this journey. They should be involved in the transition and retrained in the new roles and opportunities that present.


StrategyVital to an optimal transition to cloud is a well-considered strategy. Utilising cloud in its earlier incarnation as a source of alternate computing power, provision for burst or dev/test capability, present less complexities – and remains a valid option for certain use cases. But if an organisation is to include cloud as a key component of their IT ecosystem – another data centre in effect – it needs to understand the use cases that exist (or will exist) in its data centre, and design the new ecosystem around them.

The level of maturity the public cloud has reached brings with it the advantage of experience. There are now frameworks available to inform an organisation about to transition and guidance available from leading providers.

Transition JourneyTransition to cloud is a journey. It is a long term play that will typically take three years or more. And it requires investment. The transition “bubble” demonstrates the increase in costs duringanorganisation’smovetotheircloud environment. But the benefits of cloud go beyond cost. They are in the realignment of staff and the value they provide to the University, in increased utilisation and performance from IT investment and in the enablement of innovation and agility.

InnovationThe speed to deploy, the automation capability and the up and down scaling that comes with public cloud infrastructure provides an ideal platform for an agile and innovating development team. This is demonstrated by the Coursera experience and shows how developers of highly interactive applications can experiment with innovationtoenhancetheuser’sexperience. The extreme agile approach taken by Coursera is not for all applications and all teams, but is one universities could consider for their interactive student facing systems.


Technology and the University ChallengeTechnology impacts on all facets of a University. From supporting data requirements in Research and enhancing student experience, to leveraging the power of business analytics and enabling the efficient and effective operations, technology is transforming the University experience across the campus and in most aspects of the student and academic life. No matter what issue a contemporary University faces, technology is likely to be at least part of the answer.

This creates opportunities for University IT teams to take a lead role in technology innovation and be a significantcontributortotheUniversity’ssuccess. At the same time it demands them to be agile and responsive to an ever changing environment.

Key challenges arise such as providing agility and speed in service provision, allowing greater self-service whilst doing so in a secure, supportable way and adding value to the University by driving innovation as well as efficiency. IT must assistpeopletodothingstheycouldn’tdo before and arm them with new skills and‘digitalliteracy’thattheydidn’tpreviously have.

The question of CloudWhilst cloud has been with us for some time, offerings and consumption models continue to change and mature as do the expectations and demands of constituent customers. Implementation (of cloud) brings both promise and uncertainty, and more often than not, universities remain challenged in how best to utilise Cloud Services.

Notwithstanding the sophistication of technology and platforms, these represent the least of the difficulties. In many cases universities have implemented a sound cloud enabling technology base (such as getting data to the cloud) but are yet to define their cloud strategy and the clear policies flowing from it.

In developing a cloud strategy or transition plan greater understanding is sought by IT departments about service provider platforms such as public and hybrid cloud models. Information is required about expected benefits, realistic timeframes and what technical and resourcing challenges should be anticipated. What shape should the cloud take to solve the cultural and skills problems encountered in such transformations and what is its optimal placeintheorganisation’stechnologyecosystem?

Universities have historically favoured on-campus, self-managed data centres. This inclination is changing and increasingly, a less sustainable and supported direction. We are seeing data centre initiatives automatically considering cloud solutions as an option, with some institutions taking this as a default position. Preparing the groundwork for a hybrid datacentre can only be advantageous to such a migration.

ThemeThe theme of the tour was `Platforms thatdeliverAgilityandResponsiveness’.The itinerary focused on demonstrating how organisations are adopting technologies to improve long-term economic performance, as well as responding to specific challenges discussed. It provided opportunities to examine these technologies and architectures at their source and visit enterprises that are making the transition to the emerging service platforms.

The participants heard from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada about their private cloud and moving to a service provider model, and from University of Notre Dame, USA and their journey to the public cloud. At executive briefing centres at NetApp, AWS and Cisco, vendorsprovidedaninsider’sviewof innovations and strategies being pursued to make their products and services unique, and how they were assisting higher education drive innovation and differentiation within their organisations. NetApp and Cisco gave insights into their own internal ITorganisation’sjourneytocloud, and revealed the key challenges and issues faced.

Contextual Setting


EduCloud Server – University of British Columbia (UBC) Despite the scale and collaborative nature of Australian universities, there is little evidence of an appetite to develop cross-institution shared services outside the research IT platforms. There has been a move to establish whole of enterprise shared services within a number of universities. But for IT departments, the focus has been more on creating internal private cloud capabilities, transitioning some services to the public cloud and the development of broader cloud transition strategies.

Contrary to the trends in Australia, the UBC in Canada have embarked on a shared services venture.

UBC is a public research university with over 50,000 students and is one of the largest universities in Canada. In facing pressure to centralise and consolidate services across the University they have responded by evolving their private cloud and moving to a service provider model. With the service front-ended by a sector owned management and governance organisation (BCNet), they now operate a shared service/community cloud providing an alternative to public cloud or on-premise services for universities and schools of the Province.

Unlike Australia, the conditions were right for this style of service to be established and prosper. The Government’sdirectiononsharedservices was seen by the Higher Education sector as a compelling event and the UBC initiative was a means to get ahead of the game and develop a specifically designed service rather than retrofit that of the Government. The absence of resident public cloud facilities in Canada coupled with the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA), effectively ruled out consideration of public cloud.

What UBC have put in place is essentially an on-premise private cloud servicing both UBC requirements and those of the broader sector. Being a provider to customers other than UBC has required the features such as self-service that are available in public cloud. Mario Angers, Senior Manager of Systems, says they have found capacity planning requires a more nuanced approach in a self-service model.

“Greater understanding of required demand is necessary for effective planning,” he says. Whilst they profess that “it is about the performance, not the money”, they make extensive use of over-provisioning to keep cost and thereby price low.

Shared Services – Private Cloud – Public Cloud

Mario Angers of UBC presents the EduCloud roadmap.

“…when the service, price and performance

meets or beats what we can do, we will use a

public cloud service.”Michael Thorson Director

Infrastructure, UBC.


This in turn calls for both capacity planning and capacity management. “With users typically consuming 10% of their requested allocation, the service guarantees 75% of the allocation with the remaining 25% bursting as needed.” Angers goes on to say that “to UBC, the burst represents an immediate candidate for public cloud if and when available and allowable.”

UBC attest that it is their critical mass that makes this service feasible for them as an internal consumer and as a shared service provider. Additionally, through BCNet, they are able to aggregate sector demand and licencing to further increase efficiencies.

This presents one of the key success factors. According to Michael Thorson, Director Infrastructure at UBC, the cost of the service to universities and schools is less that if they ran their own on-premise infrastructure. He also points out that an in-house provided private cloud gives an opportunity to leverage the vast resources and talent that exists in the Higher Education.

At present, the lack of resident public cloud providers in Canada along with the FIPPA rules and performance considerations, make the in-sector managed and operated shared service viable and successful. The EduCloud Server roadmap aims to extend IaaS further into the province, to enable core infrastructure services as-a-Service such as Back-up-as-a-Service, and to provide PaaS and ultimately ITaaS. However, when public cloud comes to Canada, the question will arise that if the price is right (for the desired service level), why do it themselves. Notwithstanding their position as a cloud service provider, UBC are quick to say that under these circumstances, they would adopt public cloud.

Putting shared services aside, Australian universities considering an on-premise private cloud will need to factor in the investment to build public cloud features. As UBC highlighted, to be feasible, they will require sufficient demand and critical mass to do “everything at scale.” Additionally, they will need the capacity planning

and management resources (and automation) to successfully over-provision and achieve acceptable utilisation levels.

To read more about BCNet and the UBC private cloud go to https://www.bc.net/about-us and https://www.bc.net/educloud-server

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Observations on the Journey to the Cloud

This example from Amazon Web Services shows what is now available from the public cloud.

Source AWS WEB site.

What becomes obvious when exposed close-hand to leading technology companies, is the rapid advancement of cloud services and cloud supporting technologies. Whilst data sovereignty and data control remain coercive factors, the traditional fears of public cloud platforms fade away in the face of the maturity of services available. Indeed, the questions have become more about the best application of cloud than whether to make the journey or not.

The breadth and depth of services now available and easily accessible

challenge the case for on-campus data centres. The scale, reliability, agility and pace of change being driven by (not responded too) leading cloud providers can rarely, if ever, be matched by internal IT teams.

With such an array of services available, it becomes not so much a purchase of compute from the cloud as establishing a new data centre in the cloud. Andrew Phillips of AWS, calls it “A very clever or intelligent data centre”, but adds “it is not an IT team”.

Minimal Impact on HeadcountThis statement is an important point. A clear observation across the tour was that the transition to cloud was unlikely to significantly change IT head count. Rather it is skillsets and roles that change. The advent of cloud brings the opportunity to divest staff of mundane tasks and allow them to focus on higher value, more directly business supporting and innovating activities. This was the case for NetApp during their move to the cloud and is currently being experienced by the University of


Notre Dame as they transition likewise. Mike Chapple, Sr. Director of IT Service Delivery at Notre Dame emphasised the positive impact of this change explaining that “as traditional roles and tasks go away, staff looked for ways to provide different value, better ways to do things.”

Another benefit is innovation through association. That is, opening up the advantages available by being resident on a platform that is rapidly changing and constantly innovating. Andrew Phillips goes on to say, “Decisions must be based on what will be available tomorrow, not what is available today. With such rapid change, decisions based purely on the here and now risk an organisation missing out on benefits that will be realisable inside the timeframe for cloud strategy implementation.”

“As traditional roles and tasks go

away, staff looked for ways to provide different

value, better ways to do things.”

Mike Chapple, Sr. Director of IT Service Delivery, University

Of Notre Dame

“Decisions must be based on

what will be available tomorrow, not what is

available today,”Andrew Phillips, AWS ANZ Public

Sector, Country Manager

The coming trend to memory based storage is an example of this. Val Bercovici, Global Cloud CTO at NetApp (a.k.a. Cloud Czar) predicts not only that persistent memory will be the new scale-up but that it will be will be part of cloud platforms three years before it is available as a product to purchase.

Cloud StrategyThat aside, much is said about the speed and ease of provisioning infrastructure in the cloud. Whilst this is true at a broad task level, effective implementation of an enterprise cloud environment requires a well thought through strategy and implementation plan. This was a common and recurring theme throughout the presentations, and the need for considered planning cannot be overstated. Notre Dame, part way into a three year transition to AWS public cloud, gladly admitted having a number of iterations to get it right – they had to then go back to determine how they would be using the cloud, and to define the use cases.

AWS too, emphasise it is not an overnight thing. “The new data centre can be built quickly but transition occurs over time at a pre-determined transition pace” according to Matt Travis, Solutions Architect at AWS. “You need to define the destination, what the data centre ecosystem will look like along with the view of data centre services over time. Then a plan for application and services transition can be determined.”

Whilst Notre Dame have opted primarily for a public cloud solution, observations on the tour suggest that hybrid environments will be the

predominant ecosystem for some time. This is the case for both NetApp and Cisco’sinternalITandthepossiblefuture direction for UBC as predicted by Michael Thorson. Likewise, Zorawar Biri Singh, Sr. Vice President and CTO at Cisco, predicts that hybrid cloud is the likely future model comprising public cloud, a private cloud that looks like public cloud and self-managed data centres to control data.

This implies different types of architectures and operating models and these need to be matched to an organisation’ssystemsusecases,thatis,an organisation needs to understand the use cases in their data centre in order to determine their cloud action plan.

Again, this comes back to the need to have a cloud strategy specific for the organisation. Despite irrefutable similarities across the Higher Education Sector, strategies will vary according to the variables that inform them. University policy, digital strategies and philosophical viewpoints all influence decisions on factors such as:• Capitalversusoperationalfunding• On-premise/Offpremisepreference• Dedicated/sharedinfrastructure• Levelofinternaltechnicalservices• Innovation./agilitydemands• Dataconsiderations• Performancerequirements• Applicationsrequirements

Source: NetApp.


Data ManagementAnother recurring theme and perhaps the major influencer in ecosystem design is data and data management. With data sovereignty addressed (or not) by in-country public cloud facilities, these concerns centre on data management and control of data. The value of an organisation data is now recognised from a number of different perspectives.

According to Spencer Sells, Sr. Director, Product & Program Management Cloud Solution Group at NetApp, “Data is the crown jewels of the organisation.” Sells further advises “you want to keep control of data, you need to be the stewards of data”. Cisco’sBiriSinghismoreemphaticcalling data “the new oil.”

“It’s all about data. Data is the new oil.”Biri Singh, Sr. Vice President

and CTO Cisco

NetApp are reaffirming their brand as a data management company in recognition of this and are emphasising their strengths are in data management software (the data fabric) rather than simply storage hardware. The significance of this position are the options it allows for an organisation in determining the location of data and for data management. In explaining their view of the Hybrid environment, Spencer Sells differentiated private cloud storage where data management resides on purchased assets, from public cloud where the options exist for a pure cloud serviceoronewhereanorganisation’sdata management software resides on public cloud hardware. This latter option equates to managing and controlling data on rented compute and rented storage.

NetApp CEO George Kurian discusses his and NetApp’s perspectives.


InterconnectednessCisco introduce a different but not inconsistent perspective to the discussion. Whilst they did not invent it, they appear to have made the term the “Internet of Things” their own. Not surprisingly then, in a Hybrid world, they underscore secure interconnectedness and the “hyper-distribution” of applications and data – from the data centre to the Edge.

Capacity Augmentation – extend applications in public cloud.• Thenextgenerationdatacentrefootprintcomprisingoptimisedcapexforsteadystatedemandinthedatacentrewhilst

leveraging provider cloud capacity for capacity over run needs.• Plannedpeakworkloadcapacityusingavailableon-demandcapacity• Fortheconstraineddatacentreleverageprovidercloudforadditionaldemand• Offloadnon-production,non-businesscriticalworkloadstoProviderCloud

Dev/Test – Secure enterprise Dev/Test environment in public cloud with access to enterprise Dev environment and tools

Shadow IT Control – IT brokerage of Public Clouds

Deepu Rathi, Sr. Director, Business Development and WW Cloud Go-To-Market,presentsCisco’stakeonthenew cloud approach they say is needed to manage this hyper-distribution. Rathi says “it is about more than public cloud, it is about agility to the edge.” In a hybrid cloud context, he describes Capacity Augmentation, Dev/Test, and Shadow IT Control as example use casestoexplainCisco’sIntercloud Fabric and Application Centric Infrastructure.

Both Cisco and NetApp have employed versions of this approach in their internal IT. NetApp have applications deployed in both public cloud and in-house environments and have established nCloud as a public cloud service for Shadow IT.Inasimilarvein,Cisco’sinternal IT provide a brokerage service extending applications to the cloud when their customers demand it. In the University context, data and network fabrics can enable extending the network and data centre into the cloud to support diverse Faculty needs whilst retaining control over data and security.

Source: Cisco Cloud Strategy.


A framework for transitionWith AWS a leader in public cloud services it is not surprising they have developed a framework for moving to the cloud. Importantly for those about to embark on this journey – or even those that have commenced – the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) is technology and provider agnostic. It serves as a useful advisory guide regardless of an organisations ultimate destination.

As with all IT change, there are barriers to cloud adoption. Blake Chism, Transformation Lead at AWS, identifies factors such as:• Costandcostinganalysis;• PeopleandCulture;• Strategy;• Knowledge,andawarenessthehow

to get there.

For the latter case in particular, Chism describes how the CAF serves to capture this knowledge and inform an organisation. “It offers practical guidance and comprehensive guidelines for establishing, developing and running cloud-enabled environments, and will arm organisations with the tools for the transition to the cloud.”

Chism also highlights that whether your cloud environment is in-house private, public or hybrid, the major success factor is people and culture. This view is supported by the experience at UBC where community engagement was critical to success of their private cloud service. Notre Dame and the internal IT teams at Cisco and NetApp all attribute positive outcomes to attentiveness to people and culture considerations.

“The way you manage your people

model is the single most important component on the cloud adoption

journey”Blake Chism, Transformation

Lead, AWS

In developing their cloud adoption framework, AWS have acknowledged this point. Chism emphasises this as the single most important part of the journey.

NetApphaveadoptedthreeR’s–Realigning, Reskilling and Reassuring. They went so far as to rename roles to better reflect new responsibilities. For example, Storage Administrator to Service Engineer. Notre Dame created the new role of “Cost Ninja” where staff looked at ways to take cost out in the design and use of cloud.

The scope of change extends to the organisation’scultureandperspectives.“The trick to making it work is to make iteasier,notharder”saysAmazon’sAndrew Phillips. “Rather than be called Broker, be called Centre of Excellence and employ people that are passionate about the cloud and about making change.”

It is a JourneyIt became apparent over the course of the tour that the transition to the cloud is a journey that takes time. Cisco IT took three years to get to their new agile methodology – NetApp a similar time frame. Notre Dame are into a transition planned over three years. Blake Chism says it sometimes demands a complete overtime strategy and business case. AWS represents this by the migration bubble.

This illustrates an important point –especiallyoneforuniversities’expectations. Transitioning to a cloud solution will not result in immediate savings. To the contrary, there will be a period of time where costs will increase. The change to a consumption based mode from capital to operational funding will occur, but there will be a time of increased capital and operational spending.

ObservationThese summary observations from seeing and hearing about the current and future state of cloud services in the broadest sense of the term, all lead in the same direction. It is apparent that most organisations and universities specifically, must consider cloud to remain relevant technologically. The IT technology industry has made this determination for some time now and are rapidly advancing on this path. Universities too, seem to be drawing the same conclusion and now, with a variety of levels of preparedness, are beginning to make the journey themselves. There is much to learn from those that have embarked on this journey and from those that provide the platforms and technologies. It is in the institutions ball park to make the next move.

Source AWS.


George Kurian, CEO of NetApp, describes their transition to cloud as “eating our owndogfood.”TheyhavechosentouseNetApp’s“flexibledatamanagementarchitecture” spanning on-premise and cloud data centres as the NetApp IT environment.

Chad Lew, Systems Architect at NetApp’s IT Foundation Service talks about NetApp’s Decision Framework.

Their journey did not start with a business case per se, but “an aggressive intent tomovetothecloud,”sosaysChadLew,SystemsArchitectatNetApp’sITFoundation Service. Using their own “Decision Framework”, they classified their applications using the three categories of the Gartner Systems Model to determine what to locate in the public cloud and what to retain on-premise.

Cisco IT (CITEIS) made the deliberate decision to transform to a service provider model using a hybrid cloud to enable them to compete with cloud providers. However, as Sidney Morgan, Distinguished Engineer working with CITEIS, points out, “To be a portal based provider, you have to define anything you do as a service.” With a permanent IT head count of 3,000 and another 9,000 contractors, CITEIS are of a scale that justifies this investment. It remains a question for universities to answer themselves as to whether there is genuine demand for self-service that warrants the investment required to develop such capability internally.

Eating Their Own Dog Food – NetApp and Cisco Transition to cloud

For NetApp, the biggest consideration was people management and cultural adjustments while Cisco grappled with the balance between innovation and agility, and Production stability and reliability. With a services ratio of 53% changing the business to 47% running the business, they have introduced what Sidney Morgan calls “ITIL light” – loosely translated as adopting Dev/Ops but renaming it continuous delivery and practicing Dev/Ops for development but using ITIL for implementation. Morgan also repositions fail fast as “…learn fast – and only fail once.”

Both organisations have aggressively adopted their own technologies in moving to a cloud model and it is reassuring that they are prepared to make use of the technology and products they present to their customers. It is noteworthy for universities that leading technology vendors face similar challenges in internal IT transformation and that lessons from their experiences can be applied in the university context.

“To be a portal based provider, you

have to define anything you do as a service.”Sidney Morgan, Distinguished

Engineer, Cisco

Categories of the Systems Model SystemsofRecord—Establishedapplicationssupportingcoretransactions,managingtheorganisation’scriticalmasterdata and where the rate of change is low.

Systems of Differentiation — Applications enabling unique processes or specific capabilities. With a medium life cycle but needing frequent reconfiguring for changing business practices or customer requirements.

Systems of Innovation — new applications built on an ad hoc basis to address new business requirements or opportunities. Typically short life cycle projects using departmental or outside resources and consumer-grade technologies.


“…we consider Amazon as just a

new data centre – we treat them as an

equivalent thing.”Bob Winding,

Enterprise Architect

The University of Notre Dame was founded in 1842 and remains one ofAmerica’sleadingundergraduateteaching and research institutions. Notre Dame has also been identified as one of the top 10 collegiate workplaces in the country.

Like many universities, Notre Dame prescribes a cloud first strategy. Their new business initiatives look first to SaaS as a solution then progressively moving to PaaS and IaaS where required. Existing applications and services are being migrated to the cloud following a three year transition plan with an ultimate goal to have 80% of services in the cloud by 2017. Notre Dame have taken an unsurprising approach to transition. Their first year focus was on less mission critical applications and aligning migration with lifecycle upgrades and hardware slated for retirement. This has minimised disruption and allowed reallocation of maintenance and capital renewal funds. Moving 400 web sites as an example, has allowed them to achieve critical mass in the first year.

Source: University of Notre Dame.

To Notre Dame, AWS is another data centre in their technology ecosystem and they treat it as such. However this is a position they had to arrive at. As Bob Winding, Notre Dame Enterprise Architect said, they would do things differently it they had their time over again. As a new data centre, the cloud data centre required a data centre design and it took Notre Dame some iterations to get this right. They needed to determine how they would be using the cloud. They needed to define the use cases.

Notre Dame expect to have a small residual “hyper-converged infrastructure.” They are estimating a ½ rack with 30 VMs for purposes such as human safety, physical plant control and specialised services requiring quick access. Whether this qualifies for the Hybrid Cloud tag is largely academic. For all intents and purposes, they will be predominantly on a public cloud platform.

For Australian universities, there are a number of pertinent observations. In particular, the Notre Dame IT team has not shrunk in size. As Mike Chapple, Sr. Director of IT Service Delivery highlighted, the jobs changed rather than went away. “As traditional roles and tasks go away, staff looked for ways to provide different value, better ways to do things.” In the physical data centre, tasks went from “in-the-door to

out-the-door”. Staff have moved into transition projects and documentation roles and the tracking of financials at the AWS services layer.

As is common with change, people and culture is a major success variable. Notre Dame exposed people to the new technology and held regular training sessions. For them, this removed uncertainty and doubt and changed people into “believers”. They created a team dedicated to the transition, with different types of staff. They rotated staff through this team spreading knowledge and experience whilst keeping the operation running.

With such a comprehensive transition there comes the question of an exit strategy. For Notre Dame this remains uncertain. The challenges of getting data out are potentially addressed by automation capability, but the diversity of what they have and the exploitation of the breadth of services available will make it hard to exit quickly. However at this stage and for the foreseeable future, Notre Dame are not thinking of exiting. They are focussed on completing what is a deliberate and considered long term strategy.

FormoreinformationonNotreDame’sjourney to the cloud visit their web site at http://oit.nd.edu/cloud-first/

Notre Dame – A Transition Case Study


Coursera need no introduction to those in the Higher Education sector. They are one of the leading MOOCs providing universalaccesstotheworld’sbesteducation. It is worth noting, whilst being a disruptive force in education, their aim is not to compete with or supplant traditional University education. Rather Coursera partners with top universities and organisations to offer courses online with the advancement of pedagogy a key ambition.

Coursera not only aims for ubiquitous access to education, they strive to re-invent the student on-line learning experience and to continually enhance it. And they do this by iteration.

“Iteration”, says Brennan Saeta, Software and Security Engineer at Coursera, “is the only way to discover the optimal learning experience. Iteration enables innovation and agility.”

Coursera developers manage and deploy their own code in multiple weekly deployments (average number of code deployments is over 160 times each week). This allows constant improvements to the application. It also enables experimentation. As Saeta explained, new instances are “spun up” to trial new features such as screen mods with a subset of customers. These are quickly turned off if necessary or extended to the full production instance if determined successful.

In a traditional on-premise environment, massive investment in infrastructure and orchestration would be required to enable this development approach. Coursera is an educational and learning platform however, not an infrastructure company. And so from their inception they chose public cloud services (AWS) as their platform.

“The automation and tooling available radically increases developer productivity” Saeta says, and with programmatic control over infrastructure, they are able to maximise utilisation and performance by scaling up and down automatically as loads change. “We target our CPU usage to always be between 35 and 60%. Any time the machines powering a service starts using less than 35% CPU, we scale down”.

For Coursera, the benefits in using cloud services include the cost savings from right sizing and the reduced operational load. Additionally, the use of tags provide unprecedented clarity into cost breakdown.

It is not all plain sailing though. The extensive use of AWS services and dependency on automation and autoscaling mean they are effectively locked-in.

Security too, presents challenges. With “machines” coming and going, benefits of the cloud such as productivity and experimentation place pressure on security systems. Saeta says you have to trust the provider. On the upside, they have “incredible auditing capabilities” and change tracking available via the web services.

ThenatureofCoursera’sbusinessandtechnology environment demands agility to enable innovation. It is clearly specialised and singularly so. Whilst cautioning that the cloud environment he describes is no panacea, Saeta is adamant that without AWS (cloud services), what Coursera has achieved would not have been possible.

In contrast, University application portfolios are diverse and at times complex, with some demanding a methodical approach to development and change control. For these enterprise type systems, the dramatic agility possible with the level of cloud exploitation Coursera demonstrates may not be required. However, the increasing demand for on-line interaction from students and the expectations that come with consumer style apps cannot be ignored. IT departments must look at more agile development approaches and faster-to-market deployment times for student facing applications and services.

FormoreinformationaboutCoursera’sinner workings and how they are building their global learning platform, check out their tech blog at https://tech.coursera.org

To see Brennan Saeta talk about Coursera and use of public cloud go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxD-KUVmTJE

“If I were to start over again in 2012, I’d use

[cloud] again. We could not have built

the platform we have without AWS.”

Iteration is the only way to

discover the optimal learning experience.Brennan Saeta, Software and Security Engineer at Coursera

Coursera and the Public Cloud – A case study in Agility

Brennan Saeta discusses Coursera’s use of AWS.


Analytics has been described as using history as a predictor of the future.

Vikram Tuli, Director of Engineering and OperationsateBayexplainseBay’spredictive analytics as “using signals from the past to create patterns to predict the future”. eBay use this to determine their “Daily Deals.” A process that analyses past behaviour of buyers and sellers in order to guarantee a lowest price offer. They have access to 300 Data Scientists for this process, something universities are unlikely to enjoy. However the important thing, says Vikram “is to know who the analytics are for and what are you trying to solve”.

AWS call their version “Machine Learning.” The Amazon internal data scientist community has been using this for some time, and it has become part of their suit of public cloud services. Models are created by finding patterns in existing data which the “Machine Learning” tool uses to process new data and generate predictions.

On this subject, Kerrie Holley Vice President and CTO Analytics at Cisco talks about “edge data” and the emerging need to process data from edge devices immediately. He says, “We can expect an increase in edge devices and organisations using analytics to make a more engaging experience.”

For universities, the ability to capture transactional and behavioural data – from the network, applications, social media and physical things – is a potential source of intelligence about and promoting student success. Analysing student related data such as attendance, engagement, assessment and results may lead to proactively assessing students, and intervening before a student fails a subject or drops out. This is a great opportunity for universities to innovate and drive higher levels of academic achievement, andultimately,achievetheUniversity’sbusiness objectives.

Analytics – A Snapshot


There appears to be a low level of awarenessinAustraliaofvendors’collaborative engagements with the University community. Examples arose on this tour that suggest otherwise.

NetApp partner in a variety of ways with a goal of “increasing the body of storage-related knowledge and to promote the development of new innovative storage-related technologies.” Two areas of particular interest to universities are Internships and Faculty Fellowships.

• TheInternshipisanopportunityfor graduate students to be part of innovative projects working with the Advanced Technology Group (ATG). They receive mentoring and collaboration with the ATG engineers and gain the benefits of a real world experience;

• FacultyFellowshipsareawayto support university research. NetApp awards grants based on research merit and their interest

in the proposed project. They are typically one year engagements with dedicated ATG members to follow the research progress and collaborate with the research team.

AWS are heavily involved in research as a compute and storage supplier, but they also partner in a contributory way. This includes their Public Data Programme, being the hosting of “gold reference” public data sets; and in providing research grants in the form of free usage credits. Examples are:• TheSKAwheretheyhaveprovided

both hosting of Pre-Cursor data in the Public Data Programme and a research grant;

• The“WeFeel”projectledbytheCSIRO. “We Feel” is a collaboration between CSIRO, The Black Dog Institute, AWS and GNIP. It aims to explore whether social media can provide an accurate, real-time signal oftheworld’semotionalstatebyanalysing approximately 27 million tweets per day.

University-Vendor Collaboration

Collaboration between universities and suppliers is an under exploited area and one universities are wise to pursue further.

In addition to demonstrating collaboration, the We Feel project is an example of Analytics. (source: wefeel.csiro.au).

For more information go to https://atg.netapp.com/?page_id=3653 ; http://aws.amazon.com/grants/ ; http://wefeel.csiro.au/


As suggested earlier, the idea of shared services has been more openly welcomed by the research community. This is exemplified by the Nectar Community Cloud, although, as Steven Manos, Director Research Platform Services at the University of Melbourne says, it is more of a federation than a shared service.

Nectar provides an online infrastructure that supports researchers to connect and collaborate with fellow researchers and share ideas and outcomes to contribute to collective knowledge. Their services include scalable computing infrastructure and software that allow the research community to store, access and process data remotely, rapidly and autonomously.

Running an on-premise infrastructure set controlled by OpenStack presents both challenges and opportunities. “There is the advantage of housing platforms close to data producing and consuming infrastructure,” Manos says “along with the flexibility to configure our cloud and introduce research focused services as we need.”

But running infrastructure is just one facet of the service and limited funding raises the questions of where best to target energies and resources, and how to maximise utilisation while maintaining performance levels. Engagement with researchers is an equally important activity. As Manos explains, “Researchers operate more in a relationship manner than transactional one and institutional boundaries do not register highly in their work priorities. As such they are generally less concerned about the location or source of their technology platforms than having access to the best tools to do the job, and being enabled with the ability to use them”.

The lack of researcher education and awareness of the tools is a key concern confronting Manos and his team. They established a community building arm to address this and created special engagement mechanisms such as the Research Bazaar and Hacky Hour. These are forums where researchers from many different disciplines can come together to share knowledge or seek assistance with coding. The most significant ingredient to this initiative, and one that resonates with researchers, is much of the learning is led by the researchers themselves.

Manos is convinced that their focus on the customer is a real differentiator and has been critical to their success. He predicts the likely future direction of the UoM node will be a move to a hybrid cloud model to allow greater engagement with the Research Community.

The lesson for universities seeking to provide differentiated technology support to their researchers, is that engagement with research community is key. They can take a leaf from the Platform Services “cookbook” for innovative ways and means to do this.

For more information go to https://github.com/resbaz/cookbook/wiki and http://melbourne.resbaz.edu.au/

Research Platforms – A Lesson in Engagement

2015 Research Bazaar Kick-off.

Source: UoM Research Platform Services.


From this Higher Education Technology Briefing tour there are four actions that stand out for Australian universities.

Develop a Cloud Transition StrategyThis activity should be undertaken regardless of the target cloud model. Cloud is becoming more and more predominant and universities are wise to consider their direction now.

Take advantage of the expertise that exists inside leading cloud providers that will assist in developing your plan. As demonstrated on this tour, AWS as an example, can assist you define your strategy using their Cloud Adoption Framework.

• Buildyourbusinesscase–basedon current business requirement and future opportunities;

• Establishapeoplemodel–realign,retrain and reassure;

• Developthecloudarchitectureforyour own specific use cases;

• Createthemigrationstrategyandplan;

• Defineyournewenvironmentoperating model.

Commence your People and Culture programmeStaff need to be part of the journey from its inception. Identify what the IT team’sroleshouldbeandhowtheycanmaximise the benefits of technology. In particular, how to apply the agility and innovation possible through public cloud platforms, and the immediacy and connectedness made available through the proliferation of mobile devices. Develop a plan to expose them to the new technologies and re-train them to be experts in the use of technology rather than the support of technology.

Move from Storage to Data ManagementAs universities evolve from being builders of IT Infrastructure to Brokers of Services (Centres of Excellence), thinking must change from Object Provisioning to Service Provisioning. Therefore, explore your options to take a data centric view of storage rather than just comparing “storage infrastructure.” Design and configure storage platforms from a data perspective rather than that of physical storage devices and introduce seamless management of data from creation to archive.

Exploit your supplier relationshipBeyond the products and services suppliers provide, they have other offerings to help a University maximise the benefits of their investment and assist to achieve their transformation goals. Examples include the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework and NetApp’sOCIandtheresearchcollaboration initiative. As this tour has demonstrated, suppliers want to understand their customers better and want to promote a more partnering relationship. Talk to them about the complementing services they may have to help you get what you want from your investment, or what collaboration opportunities exist to further the university, student and researcher outcomes.

Next Steps for Australian Universities


Profile of Vendor Partners Technologies/Services

Vendor Key Technology Trends discussed Technologies Showcased References/Sites

AWS All Services • AllataHighLevel NA

Cloud Migrations • All University of Notre Dame

People and Process change for Cloud Transformations

• AWSProfessionalServices

AWS and HPC (SciCo)

• HPCCompute,Storage National Centre for Biotechnology Information, CERN, SKA, CSIRO, Baylor College, and many more.

NetApp Private Cloud • UnifiedStorageArrays(FAS)• StorageEfficiencyTechnologies• SecureMultiTenancyStorageandData

Management• HypervisorandApplicationIntegration

University of British Columbia Private Cloud (EduCloud).

Public Cloud, Hybrid IT

• NetAppDataFabric• IntegrationwithAWSElasticCompute

NetApp Global IT

IT Service Visibility and Management

• NetAppOnCommandInsight(OCI) NetApp Global IT

Analytics • FlexPod• CiscoUCS,NetAppFASUnifiedStorage• SAPHANA

eBay

Cisco Private Cloud, Hybrid Cloud

• CiscoEnterpriseCloudSuite• Metapod• IntercloudFabric–connectivitytoAWS,

Azure and public cloud services

Cisco Global IT (CITIES)

Programmable Networks

• ApplicationCentricInfrastructure(ACI) Cisco Global IT

NetApp Global IT

Big Data, Analytics (Internet of Things)

• SAPHANAonFlexPod(CiscoUCS,Nexus9k/ACI, NetApp FAS)

• CiscoDataVirtualisation• HadoopclustersonCiscoUCS

eBay

Cisco Global IT

NetApp Global IT

Connected Campus, Internet of Things

• WebEx• TelePresence• Jabber• SmartSpaces(ActivityBasedWorking)

Cisco Global IT

Cisco & Apple Partnership

• WiFi–QoS,Caching,OptimalAPselectoin• Telephony–iPhoneintegrationwith

Enterprise voice• Collaboration–CiscoCollaboration

solutions integrated with Apple iOS

VISTECH Consulting

platforms that deliver agility and responsiveness

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