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cover story: customer case story

WWhen Franklin University, the third-largest private university in Ohio with classes taught at five Midwest locations as well as online, needed an updated IT infrastructure to match the needs created by an evolving mission and rapid growth, the institution turned to cloud computing. Franklin’s IT team was certain that the fluid computing environment of a cloud, with shared servers, often in disparate locations, delivering applications and data, was the right fit. But instead of tapping into the commercial cloud of services available over the Internet, Franklin built its own, using VMware virtualization software and high-performance physical servers from Hewlett-Packard to create two redundant data centers that deliver pooled services.

“From an IT perspective, we’ve become an online service provider as we’ve grown,” says Director of IT John Miller. “What led us to the internal cloud was the need for flexibility and high availability. We’re not comfortable, at least yet, with using services from a generic public cloud, so we’ve created many of the same benefits inside our organization.”

Franklin University bUilds a cloUd oF its own, providing the services to sUpport its rising enrollment and global reach.

private

brings sUnny Forecast For growing University.cloud

John Miller, Director of IT, Franklin University, Columbus, Ohio

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It’s not unusual for organizations to be lured by the advantages offered by cloud computing but wary of perceived security threats in the public cloud, says Forrester Research Analyst James Staten.

“The main value proposition for the private cloud is security and control, while still providing agility and scalability,” he says. “The private cloud doesn’t replace the public one. You still need a bridge to the larger cloud, but it offers some of the same benefits.”

wanted: inFrastrUctUre to sUstain growth

Franklin has been offering professional degree and certification programs tailored to the needs of working adults in central Ohio since 1902, building a computing infrastructure as needs and technologies emerged. But in the late 1990s, a Franklin professor and his students developed an online learning management system that automated functions from registration through work submission and instructor feedback. The learning management system was soon adopted for the entire university curriculum, triggering a shift in the way Franklin delivered its offerings. As a result, more than two-thirds of the university’s courses are currently presented entirely online and 100 percent of them have online content, according to CIO Jeffrey Brotherton.

Franklin maintains a main brick-and-mortar campus in Columbus with several satellite physical facilities in Ohio and Indianapolis, but the 11,000 students currently enrolled are geographically scattered among all 50 states and at least 50 foreign countries. In addition, Franklin has partnered with the U.S. Army, community colleges across the U.S. and schools in nine foreign countries to deliver the university’s curriculum from partner facilities.

“For us, the internal cloud comes out of strategic growth requirements and

the realization that our services can’t be unavailable to students for any length of time,” Brotherton says. “It also provides a way for us to bridge the gap between our technology desires and the budget.”

In late 2007, Franklin performed a business impact assessment of all the applications and services the IT department provided to the university. The goal was to determine what the loss of any resource — from financial applications to the learning management system — would mean to the institution’s business operation or to student satisfaction, and how long it took for an outage to have an impact. Results of the assessment sent an unmistakable message to the IT department, Miller says.

“We were delivering most of the Franklin University curriculum to almost all of the students,” he explains. “The administration and the students wanted to have resources available 24x7, so we had to keep evolving toward a high availability model.”

It was also clear from the assessment that virtualization would be central to the new model, says Virtualization Architect Richard Caldwell. “What we found out was that the growth of the university was not sustainable from an IT standpoint without virtualization, and we quickly launched a pilot and development process,” he explains.

Franklin began the virtualization pilot in 2007 on a VMware platform. At the time, the university’s IT infrastructure was running on approximately 150 physical servers, with the learning management system alone requiring about 60 servers to handle operations, development and testing. The school has grown substantially in the intervening years and the IT department now maintains 260 servers — but just 54 of them are physical machines. About 80 percent of Franklin’s servers are virtualized now, and that figure will grow to 90 percent in the future, says Miller.

But a burgeoning virtual environment does not necessarily make for an internal cloud, adds Caldwell.

“The internal cloud was the eventual outgrowth of that process of virtualization

and development,” he says. “You’ve created a cloud when you’ve reached a point where you focus on delivering services, rather than on servers and applications and where they’re located.”

According to Forrester’s Staten, a private cloud makes different demands on an IT department than a virtualized environment.

“IT guys who know virtualization often think they know cloud computing, but there’s a real experiential gap,” he notes. “The degree of standardization and automation in the cloud can require some different skills and approaches to supporting technologies.”

Franklin’s private cloud really took shape in 2010, when the university built a second remote data center, with redundant Internet connections to the primary data center, on the Columbus campus. Applications are distributed, shared and moved between the two facilities in a fluid computing environment that spreads the processing load and provides maximum flexibility and availability. Stored data is continuously replicated between the facilities, enabling rapid failover and disaster recovery.

“Our vision is to be able to move resources back and forth between the two data centers at will. If we’re having performance issues in one data center, we can allocate resources on the fly with minimum impact on the end user,” says Miller. “We’re managing the resources on the back end and providing that online service. And if we had a catastrophic disaster in one data center, we could fail over to the other data center in a few hours.”

virtUal necessitiesSome groundwork was necessary

before the university could create its cloud of computing resources, says Miller. Franklin upgraded its virtualization technology and now runs VMware vSphere 4.0. The vSphere 4.0 platform enables the dynamic utilization of computing capacity by automating resource management. The software

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also provides automation for capacity and performance management. Cost reporting tools simplify chargeback and offer full cost transparency for self-service resource requests. Using the vSphere platform streamlines setup and provisioning of servers, says Miller. A new VM can be up and running a service half an hour after its request is approved, as compared to 20 hours for a physical server (and that’s after the shipment arrives).

Through CDW•G, Franklin began replacing its old server hardware with HP ProLiant DL380 G6 physical servers, which pack enough performance punch to support as many as 30 virtual machines. The DL380s run on Intel Xeon

5500 processors, which optimize computing power while minimizing energy consumption. The servers provide up to 144GB of memory, Serial Attached SCSI, PCI Express Gen2 data transport options and integrated technology to support VMware virtualization. HP Insight software running on the DL380s provides management and monitoring capabilities and also enables rapid server deployment and provisioning.

“When you virtualize your environment, you’re definitely placing a lot of reliance on each of your physical servers,” Caldwell says. “If we have 30 virtual servers running on a single piece of hardware, we have to be sure that hardware has sufficient

capacity and management features to do the job.”

Franklin also had to ramp up its NetApp storage infrastructure to support the virtual ecosystem and handle replication between the two data centers. The university runs NetApp storage area networks in each of the data centers and uses NAS appliances from the same vendor for network file shares, says Caldwell.

“The storage that you base the environment on has to be well configured and very robust,” he says. “It’s the ability to replicate storage between the two data center locations that gives us higher availability and immediate disaster recovery capability.”

Replication between the data centers is one of many reasons that overall network architecture and design can’t be overlooked as factors in making the cloud model work, says Miller. Franklin relies on Cisco switching and has recently adopted Cisco’s Nexus converged storage and networking architecture.

“You can create redundant services using VMware, but if you don’t have the network set up to properly fail over, it doesn’t do you any good,” he notes. “You need a strong network architecture that supports the cloud concept. That’s equally as important as the virtualization.”

early and endUring roiFor the IT team at Franklin, the

move to virtualization and then to an internal cloud was an almost inevitable decision in order to keep up with the university’s growth. But Brotherton still had the not-so-easy task of securing funding for the project, which has so far required about $2 million in investments, he adds.

“I had to sell up to the administration and sell down to some of my own IT people who were skeptical of the changes we wanted to make,” he says. “You’ve got to convince people

counting on the cloud

Whether organizations buy services from the vast public cloud with its astonishing array of offerings or build a private cloud like the one at Franklin University, cloud computing is here to stay.

The model of distributed processing that delivers information assets as services on-demand provides a host of benefits, with some of the most important listed below.

• Flexibility. Computing resources are directed where they are required at any given time.

• Redundancy. Shared processing and automatic failover maintain performance and tame the threat of disasters or network interruptions.

• Reduced hardware and software costs. Both public and private cloud implementation require less hardware, fewer software purchases and lower maintenance costs.

• Cost control and visibility. Users only pay for the computing services they use and know about levels and patterns of usage.

• Reduced energy costs for private clouds. Fewer pieces of hardware are used more efficiently, saving on overall energy consumption even if the servers in the cloud are more powerful.

• Reduced virtual server sprawl in private clouds. Self-service provisioning requires approvals, policies and, often, mandated expiration dates for virtual machines.

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a little at a time. You don’t want to overwhelm them with the thought of one massive project. It’s best to parse it out in manageable chunks. But once you’ve done it and start looking at the ROI, it’s so good you say, this is too good to be true.”

Because hardware in the university’s main data center was reaching end-of-life and licensing contracts were running out, Franklin was able to build its cloud with the second data center at just 15 percent above the cost of refurbishing the original center, Brotherton says.

The virtualized infrastructure saves the university a half-million dollars annually in hardware lifecycle replacement costs alone, says Brotherton. An internal study has also shown that the cost of maintaining a virtual server over five years is about $5,000, a sixth of the cost of maintaining a physical server over the same period. Brotherton, however, sees the savings as even more substantial.

“In addition to the physical server, you have to have network-attached storage, and most of our systems were running on clustered servers for high availability,” Brotherton says. “So to put up a single application in the past, we ended up with two servers and the storage and would be looking at $40,000 or $50,000. We can do the same thing with a single virtual server and the savings ratio is more like 10-to-1."

looking aheadFor the near future, says Miller,

cloud computing at Franklin will have two main focuses: the continuing process of building a robust disaster recovery and continuity of operations plan and a project to deploy virtualized desktops to students.

“The redundant data centers were a tremendous step, but DR planning is one of those things that is never done,” says Miller. “You have to continue to tweak as new products and services become available.”

Desktop virtualization is already being piloted with one class, and its use will spread through all the university’s courses, says Miller. The long-term vision is that all Franklin students will work on virtual desktops, from which they can access curriculum and the learning management system from any computer at any location. Increased access will amplify the power of the learning management system, which includes registration and scheduling, as well as course work, assignment submission and online communication with instructors, Miller adds.

For Brotherton, virtual desktops are the next logical step in the optimizing of Franklin’s information infrastructure.

“We’ve consolidated the network, consolidated the phone system and consolidated the servers into the cloud, so why not desktops,” he says. “We’ll make our final adjustments after the pilot. Then our basic desktop will be a virtual machine, and we’ll again be working in the cloud.”

While virtual desktops will provide significant advantages in delivery and management of services, the greatest benefits may be those that accrue to online students, says Brotherton. In the past, some classes at the university were only offered face-to-face because they involved expensive software support.

“That meant the 67 percent of our students who study exclusively online couldn’t take the class,” he says. “If we offered them online, each student

had to buy the software. The virtual desktops bring a Franklin education back within reach to someone who’s not in central Ohio, or who flat out can’t afford a $600 software package.”

Forrester’s Staten recommends a parallel strategy that uses both the private and public clouds.

“Organizations should think about their application portfolio and put the right app in the right place,” he explains. “The value proposition for the private cloud is security and control — it’s a great place for unique intellectual property. The public cloud is usually the place for apps that need to be accessed by customers, partners or remote users, or apps with elastic consumption patterns.”

For now, Franklin will continue to expand and refine its internal cloud, but Brotherton does not dismiss the possibility that the school will eventually use more services from the public cloud — it already uses a hosted payroll and customer relationship management (CRM) applications.

“Higher education is cautious about releasing information. We want it to be absolutely secure and in our control,” he says. “We also want to be able to bring any information back if we end a relationship with a vendor. We’ve decided that right now we and the vendors aren’t ready, but that may change in a year or two. As we grow, we may move our overseas operations to the public cloud.”

John Miller, Director of IT; Jeffrey Brotherton, CIO; Richard Caldwell, Virtualization Architect; Franklin University

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