SHI helps move the campus to the cloud

If you went to school when I did, your college library experience was more "Dewey Decimal" and less "digital download."

That's assuming you could FIND the library or the Registrar's office before they closed!

But today's colleges and universities are on the verge of moving the campus to the cloud. That means they'll be bringing the centuries-old experience of enlightenment directly to the dorm room, the quad, and the offices of faculty and staff in seconds at any time, day or night.

In the past few years, universities across the country added online degrees to better serve students managing careers and families in tandem with school. Today, students can view grades, pick classes, access campus facility management, and even check out the meal plan menu from their smartphones.

So, what's the next step for 2012? Experts agree that moving the campus to the cloud can help universities manage mission critical applications such as ERP, email, collaboration, business intelligence analytics, and many others. That's why SHI and HP have helped develop an offering under Internet2 NET+ services to address the evolving needs of higher education computing by delivering an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) community-cloud service.

Providing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for I2 members to deploy mission critical applications to the Net+ cloud will allow a safe, simple, secure, and cost-effective way to align existing IT policies, giving universities the ability to dynamically provision and consume IT. This combination of the high-performance network capabilities of Internet2 and the enterprise-grade virtual infrastructure of the HP Net+ cloud will let universities efficiently provision an infrastructure capable of supporting mission-critical applications.

Right now, we are proud to announce that the HP Net+ cloud offering has been in a pilot phase with Indiana University, The University of Notre Dame, Penn State University, and The University of Utah since late 2011.

Although the SHI-powered HP Net+ cloud is an extension of universities' existing IT infrastructure, universities are given their own isolated network within the cloud that is bridged to their internal network.

Because universities are isolated within the cloud, any machines provisioned in the cloud are mapped to IP addresses on each university's internal network. This design provides both a high degree of structural security, as well as a unique capability to seamlessly incorporate cloud-hosted, virtual machines into on-site domain and application architectures. As a result, the university will maintain control and governance through:

• A personalized on-boarding process. 
• Self-service functionality granting customers access to a secure cloud portal through which they can request and manage services, report on usage and billing, and manage their organization's access to the cloud.
• A managed private cloud.
• Financial management through granular reporting, so that universities can effectively manage internal charge-back efforts.
• A responsive, U.S.-based operations team. 
• A user-experience improvement program that gathers feedback from every university as part of our customer-interaction model. University input is analyzed, and our road map is prioritized based on use cases and functional requirements.

Our mission through this offering is to help colleges and universities manage their mission critical applications in a cost-effective way, giving them the ability to dynamically provision and consume IT capabilities.

So be sure to watch this space, because we'll be delivering more on HP and SHI's cloud offering for higher-ed customers as it develops.