Making money from private cloud infrastructures

The college has spent £65m on an extensive redevelopment project in the past three years

Hertford Regional College (HRC) is putting the finishing touches to a private cloud computing infrastructure that it will use to sell services including mobile telephony, storage, disaster recovery and CPU cycles to other educational establishments.

The college is looking to offset current and anticipated cuts to its budget imposed by the Department of Education by finding extra cash from leasing out its recently upgraded ICT systems. It estimates it will bring in £3,000 to £5,000 of additional income a year just by providing cloud-based access to its virtual learning environments.

“We’re looking to this as an additional source of revenue – we are facing significant cutbacks in education and we have some expertise in these types of systems,” says Daniel Hidlebaugh, HRC network services manager.

“We have not got down to determining how or what we will charge yet, but we are looking to be pretty much 10 to 15 per cent cheaper than anyone else out there. It is not our livelihood so we can afford to offer better pricing.”

HRC’s cloud infrastructure includes IBM blade servers, Microsoft Hyper-V server virtualisation and Systems Centre Manager software, and IBM’s Tivoli systems management platform. The college has spent £65m on a huge redevelopment project in the past three years, fitting out new campus buildings with a fibre-based LAN and extensive Wi-Fi coverage.

The LAN is based on Cisco power over Ethernet switches and routers, which provide 10Gbit/s links to both datacentre and classrooms around the campus, with Virgin Media providing fast WAN links into the college’s systems and services.

It has also implemented a fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) system, which it says is now saving the college up to £3,200 a month in mobile call costs, and will use its expertise to offer outsourced telephony services to other educational establishments.

The voice over Wi-Fi network allows staff and students to make mobile calls over the college’s wireless network for free, rather than routing them over expensive GSM networks, using an Agito software client installed on Nokia E71 and BlackBerry smartphones.

“Everybody is doing too many cellular minutes and they can cut those in half using Agito, or they might need storage or disaster recovery facilities, or CPU power, and instead of outsourcing that they can do it with us, cheaper,” says Hidlebaugh.

The FMC system has also solved the problem of poor mobile coverage in the new college buildings, caused by modern insulation methods and granite facings used in their construction, which effectively blocked GSM signals.

“You know what it is like with IT suppliers, you are bombarded with new technology on a weekly basis and 99 per cent of the time it is rubbish and does not work, and you have to spend huge amounts of time making it work until it is just not cost-effective any more,” says Hidlebaugh. “Agito brought in its box, configured the routing system in about an hour, then the mobile phones for unified messaging and all of a sudden we had mobile coverage inside the building.”

Academic institutions and research facilities have long leased out cutting-edge IT environments and supercomputers to third parties in grid and on-demand computing environments, and while HRC has not offered cloud services before, it has offered consultation to other organisations in the education sector.

“We have done mentoring with other schools and colleges in the area; new networks around virtualisation and that sort of thing because we were one of the first to adopt Microsoft Hyper-V and Microsoft sends people to us. We will do remote management and implementation,” says Hidlebaugh.

Despite its willingness to undercut the cost of other providers’ application, storage, disaster recovery and IP telephony services, the college may face price competition from public cloud providers. This month saw Amazon’s virtual priv ate cloud (VPC) service become available in Europe for the first time, for example. Launched late last year in the US, VPC connects an organisation’s existing IT infrastructure to Amazon Web Services via an IPsec virtual private network connection.