Implementing private cloud at IIT Roorkee: an initial experience

Cloud Computing has emerged as a promising technology to provide computing resources as public utility. Its features like cost effectiveness, pay per use and scalability have attracted many organization to adopt cloud computing environment in order to cut down IT cost. Hence market is blooming with the cloud vendors like Amazon, IBM who provide Infrastructure as a service. It saves the organizations form the complications of building infrastructure and hence the organization can concentrate on the quality of services and products to be delivered. Though the features like cost effectiveness and scalability have made cloud popular, at the same time, the features like multi-tenancy has refrained some of the organizations dealing with confidential information, from adopting cloud. This is because in the changed computing paradigm, the information of the client is present in the vendor's premises. This implies less control over the data. For educational institutes, which need to secure the confidentiality and privacy of data, a private cloud can be a good solution. Hence we propose private cloud architecture for educational institute which can provide Infrastructure as a Service to the students and teachers without compromising the confidentiality of information. The proposed architecture has been deployed using open-source cloud computing tool kit called OpenNebula. It has been compared with traditional computing infrastructure. Results show that our architecture increases resource utilization up to 85%, thus increasing the efficiency.