doing more for less: the benefits and practicalities of collaboration (178793068)

7/27/2019 Doing More for Less: The Benefits and Practicalities of Collaboration (178793068)

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Doing More for Less

Doing More for Less:

The Benefits and Practicalities of Collaboration

Matthew Burfeind, Massachusetts College of Art and Design

Rhys Davies, University of Leeds / YHMAN Ltd Debbie Pepper, Colleges of the Fenway

Carlos Varum, Emmanuel College

Thursday

Oct 17th, 2013

8:00 AM - 8:50 AMMeeting Room 213A



Colleges of the Fenway – Who We Are

Emmanuel College (est. 1919)

Coeducational, liberal arts,

Catholic college, 1,750 students

Massachusetts College of Art & Design (est. 1873)

Only public college of art in U.S., coeducational,

1,802 graduate and undergraduate students

Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and

Health Sciences (est. 1823)

Coeducational, three campuses,

two in Massachusetts, one in New Hampshire


Simmons College (est. 1899)

Undergraduate college for women, coeducational

graduate programs


Wentworth Institute of Technology (est. 1904)

Coeducational undergraduate college,

focus on engineering and architecture,

3,636 undergraduate students

Wheelock College (est. 1888)

Coeducational liberals arts college

focus on youth and family


focus on youth and family



Colleges of the Fenway – What We Do

Total enrollment: approximately 12,000 undergraduates.

Location: a close geographic area on the Fenway, adjacent to medical and cultural facilities,

public transportation, in the heart of Boston.

March 29, 1996 - The COF Principles of Collaboration signed marking the beginning of significant

collaboration. 17 years.

Goal: To add value to student’s academic and co-curricular opportunities while seeking innovativemethods of investing in services and containing the costs of higher education.

Services : Consortium includes – The Global Education Opportunities Center, Intramurals Program,

Performing Arts Program, Training and Development Programs, Center for Sustainability, Colleges of

the Fenway Area Network and numerous joint contracts and collaborative purchases, cross

registration and Grant Funded Programs such as Emergency Management and The Teaching and

Learning Collaborative.



Project Overview

• What was the problem

• Two colleges recognized common need concurrently

• Colocation

• Colleges of the Fenway (COF) was able to facilitate process

• Centralized support/management

• COFAN network• Timing, Trust, Opportunity



Why Colocate?

• Facilities issues

• A/C maintenance and costs

• Space planning & construction

• Getting our ducks in a row

• Inventory management

• Network cleanup

• Physical cleanup



Why Collaborate?

• Reduce costs

• More effective as a team

• Knowledge sharing

• Ongoing opportunity

• Expand our existing relationship

• Opens door for additional collaboration

“If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”



How to Collaborate

• Shared project management

• Shared purchasing power

• Shared responsibility

• Pushing each other to succeed

• Shared technical resources

• Filling in gaps• Redundancy

• Shared infrastructure



Network Design

• Separate but shared circuits

from each college to colocation

facility• Two 300MB circuits

• Load balanced with failover

• Use of COFAN fiber to connect

colleges



Lessons Learned

• Colocation

• Save money, space, power

• Improve environment, efficiency, redundancy

• Collaboration

• You don’t need to be part of a consortium to collaborate • It's not easy, but you get through it

• Save money

• Timing and trust are critical

• Using staff more effectively



• Introduction

• What is YHMAN ?

• What was the problem we needed to solve, the vision & approach?• What have we achieved ?

• What are the lessons learnt ?

• What are the next steps?

The benefits and practicalities of collaboration

‘Doing more for less, better’

Agenda, ‘Doing more for less, better’

©YHMAN Ltd



Beyond the UK JANET Services

offer onward connect to:

UK Internet Peering

US Internet2

Europe GEANT NetworkJapan (NI) & China (CERNET)

YHMAN was established in 1998 as one of the first JANET Partner

Networks in the UK

2 x 30Gbps resilient

Internet / JANET

connections

What is YHMAN? - A regional network with Global connectivity

©YHMAN Ltd



12

The Local picture

• Secure.

• Resilient,• ‘Limitless’

bandwidth,

• Free at point of

consumption

What is YHMAN? - The local picture

©YHMAN Ltd

h h bl d d l h & h?



Drivers for Change

• Budgets under pressure = demand for more service at lower cost

• Growing Shared Service agenda, both nationally & locally• Unbalanced assets across the Region

• Green targets & carbon footprint reduction

Vision

•To create a collaborative centre of excellence

• To build a mutually beneficial ‘model’ with the belief that:

• by sharing assets (equipment, intellect, funding) we can deliver

more, better, for all concerned

• it can be used for Research Computing, for the benefit of

Academia, Health, Commerce for the greater good

Approach

• To be pragmatic = build, review, commercialise

What was the problem we needed to solve, the vision & approach?

©YHMAN Ltd

Wh h hi d? h Sh d Vi l D C (SVDC)



What have we achieved? – the Shared Virtual Data Centre (SVDC)

• The UK’s first

triangulated

datacentre

• One of the

worlds’ largest

spanning single

resource pool

datacentres

• Has the unique

capability to

span to more

than 3 hubs

©YHMAN Ltd

Wh h hi d? h SVDC hi


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Virtual Data Centre

(Sheffield Host)

Virtual Data Centre

(Leeds Host)Virtual Data Centre

(Leeds Met Host)

Sheffield Host

Default Users

Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam

JANET

Internet

Transit

Leeds Host

Default Users

Bradford, Leeds, York

Leeds Met

Default Users

Huddersfield, Leeds Met, Hull

Tier 1 & Tier 2 Synchronous Write

3-Way Mirror iSCSI Virtual Storage

Resilient

Trusted

Data Centre

Network

YHMAN Access Network

Stretched

Resilient

Storage

Area Network

Compute

& Memory

Resource

Pool

3 Site Cluster

OverlayStretched

Data Centre

Network

Access

Network

What have we achieved? – the SVDC architecture

SECURE

FULL DATA

CENTRE

LOW LATENCYRESPONSE

‘UNIVERSAL’

ACCESS

Wh t h hi d? A f S i



INFRASTRUCTURE-as-a-Service(Rapid service deployment)

SOFTWARE-as-a-Service

(Web, Database, VDI, Custom vApp)

Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service

STORAGE-as-a-Service(Mobile, Secure, Data Management, VRE)

HPC-as-a-Service(Advanced Research Computing)

‘Helping Hands’-as-a-Service(Making IT Work)

What have we achieved? - A summary of Services

©YHMAN Ltd

Wh t h hi d? A h i t


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Wide Area DC Network

Secure Community Cloud Access Network

Secure Partner Tenancies

Shared Application Tenancies

Storage Wide Area Network

HPC Grid

White Rose Grid

‘Big Data’ - Data Mining

NHSUniversity

SECURITY, CONTROL, ACCESS

R e s e a r c h & C o m m

e r c i a l U s e r s

L i n k a g e

v HPC Data Entry & Analysis

ARC

HPC Data Intensive Analysis

Low-to-High Intense Analysis

N8

P&G

Systm1

S m

a r t S e a r c h

A c c e s s M

a n a g e m e n t

R e s e a r c h A s s e t s

M R S E

l e c t r o- m i c r o s c o p e I n s t r u m e n t a t i o n

&B i gD a t a

What we have achieved? – A secure research environment

Wh t h hi d? A h d h i t



What have we achieved? - A shared research environment

©YHMAN Ltd

What have we achieved? 3 products ready to go to market



What have we achieved? - 3 products ready to go to market

Vanilla VM

• 3 way resilient architecture for virtual servers

& data storage• Simple management interface

• Rapid virtual server deployment

• Tiered storage strategy

UniVault www.univault.ac.uk

As a UniVault User you can

• Access cloud data from the UniVault Web Portal &/or PC, Mac and mobile user interface - anytime, anywhere

• Synchronise file amendments via the cloud across your access devices• Copy, ‘drag & drop’, upload folders/files to the cloud

• Share files & folders with others and with project teams securely with file locking

• Collaborate from anywhere, any time from any device (avoid exchanging endless email attachments)

• Safe storage - you know where your data is and who can see it

• Create file version control and monitor change logs

• Unify access through UniVault to local, campus/premise and Public Cloud storage

As a UniVault Administrator you can • Secure access linked to organisational authentication systems (Active Directory or other) and host accounts for

research and collaboration partners

• Easy account management: user groups & policy, secure collaboration for project teams, manage storage

Helping Hands

• Strategy business

& technical advice

©YHMAN Ltd

What are the challenges we faced and the lessons learnt?

http://www.univault.ac.uk/

http://www.univault.ac.uk/



The challenges

• Start = scepticism

• “All talk no walk” • Middle = focus

• “so many opportunities”

• End = commitment & sales; fear; engaging with the right users

• “why would I use this ?”

•We will lose control/jobs

• IT too frequently does not have the right business focus

The lessons learnt

• Communicate and advocate

• Trust each other

• Persevere

• Focus

• Customer Service

What are the challenges we faced and the lessons learnt?

©YHMAN Ltd

What are the next steps?



The Next Steps

• Generate sales

• Develop services• Push the technologies

• Listen, learn, adapt, grow

• To say “Thank you & any questions ?”

What are the next steps?

©YHMAN Ltd

Thank you!



Thank you!

For More Information:

Matthew Burfeind, Massachusetts College of Art and Design

Interim Chief Information Officer

[email protected]

Rhys Davies , University of Leeds / YHMAN Ltd

Director of IT (Leeds) & Chairman of YHMAN Ltd.

[email protected]

Debbie Pepper, Colleges of the Fenway

Director, Operations and Collaborative Services

[email protected]

Carlos Varum, Emmanuel CollegeDirector of IT

[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]










doing more for less: the benefits and practicalities of collaboration (178793068)

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