. . Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2011 10:04:14 -0500 From: Dwight Hines <[log in to unmask]> Reply-To: [log in to unmask] To: [log in to unmask] Subject: [Net-Gold] How Clouds are Transforming Education, Research and Libraries . How Clouds are Transforming Education, Research and Libraries Bill St. Arnaud Ottawa, Ontario, Canada http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/2011/12/ how-clouds-are-transforming-education.html . A shorter URL for the above link: . http://tinyurl.com/7vgjyzk . I am forwarding this in toto because it will be of interest to you specifically, and to many of your readers. St. Arnaud is a good man and knows what tech stuff is good and is junk, and inbetween good and junk. dh Link provided for omitted parts DD . ========================== . *How clouds are transforming education, research and libraries* Bill St. Arnaud Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 7:10 AM Blessed, Endorsed, Recommended, and Approved by D. Hines . [I recently the great pleasure of visiting JISC and JANET in the UK and was very impressed on their understanding of the potential of commercial clouds to radically transform education, research and libraries. Clouds promise to unleash researchers, educators, administrators and librarians from the mundane tasks of administration and other services freeing them to focus on their core interests. . Clouds may also radically transform campus network architectures as they continue the trend of driving more and more traffic away from local servers to distant cloud providers. In fact some research and education networks are concerned that the next explosion in traffic will not be from higher education institutions, but from community colleges, further education and elementary schools. As these institutions look to replace textbooks with iPads and similar devices where all the education materials and library tools are located in the cloud, the need for high bandwidth fiber connectivity to every education institution will be critical. . For the research community exploding data volumes mean that data management activities often become all-consuming. It is this realization that recently led a number of researchers such as Ian Foster to launch Globus Online. It aims to provide complex and time-consuming research management processes via SaaS (Software as a Service) using commercial clouds. In the first phases of this project, it will be focused on relatively simple processes, like data movement. But the goal is to make the discovery potential of massive data, exponentially faster computers, and deep interdisciplinary collaboration accessible to every one of the million or more professional researchers worldwide not just a select few ?big science? projects. . The Globus Online is particularly designed to address the needs of small science projects. It is believed that small science is where most scientists work and where the vast majority of discovery occurs, but it's an area that hasn't seen a lot of focus in terms of infrastructure software. It's also an area where big problems are emerging (because of the data deluge) and where the traditional big science approach (build a big team, construct a custom software solution) isn't feasible. . Big increases in data generated within research laboratories entail more demands for more careful data management. Researchers need not just data storage but full service data lifecycle management processes, encompassing data collection, storage, sharing, metadata, search, archiving, provenance, etc. Establishing and efficiently executing such processes would demand substantial time and resources that most researchers do not have, and cannot easily acquire. The Globus Online initiative proposes to outsource the entire lifecycle management process to a third party developed and operated by dedicated staff who are experts at performing relevant tasks reliably, securely, and at scale. . JISC is actually putting theory into practice by developing a number of cloud based tools for researchers as shown below. . But as Ian Foster points out, this move to clouds will also require a new third party delivery organizations to develop the common services for researchers, educators and librarians that will operate on commercial clouds. As you can see from the following pointers JISC is leading the world in developing these services using commercial cloud services brokered by JANET. And as noted in the JANET blog, I suspect that many commercial cloud services will provide their services for free, or almost free, to the research and education community. . The value proposition of universities or colleges operating their own servers or clusters I think is going to rapidly disappear in the coming years. . Most importantly these cloud services will allow universities to dramatically reduce their carbon footprint by using zero carbon commercial cloud providers as recently demonstrated by SURFnet in their SURFnet 7 launch of connecting lightpaths from the Netherlands to GreenQcloud in Iceland. University and college computing facilities can represent anywhere from 15-40% all electricity consumption at a typical institution-?BSA] . SAVING LIBRARIES . http://www.jisc.ac.uk/inform/ inform32/SavingLibraries.html . The battle for time and resource . A new cloud-based service is set to transform the way libraries work, unleashing librarians from their admin burden to focus on services for students and researchers. . This cloud service is called the Shared Academic Knowledge Base plus, or KB+, and will be a database covering all ?subscribed resources? from a UK higher education perspective. That includes data such like publication information, holdings and rights, subscription management, organisations, licences and evidence such as usage statistics and financial data in an online catalogue across all UK academic libraries. . SNIP . Cloud Services for researchers . https://www.globusonline.org/inthenews/ accelerating-discovery-by-outsourcing- the-mundane-an-interview-with-ian-foster/ . Accelerating Data Intensive Science by Outsourcing the Mundane . http://www.slideshare.net/ianfoster/ rpi-talk-foster-september-2011 . JISC cloud services for researchers . http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/umf.aspx . UMF Shared Services and the Cloud Programme The ?12.5 million UMF Shared Services and the Cloud Programme is part of a suite of activities under the University Modernisation Fund (UMF), a HEFCE fund that aims to help universities and colleges deliver better efficiency and value for money through the development of shared services. . SNIP . Bill St. Arnaud Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. . http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/ email: [log in to unmask] twitter: BillStArnaud blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/ skype: Pocketpro JANET UK brokerage http://www.janetbrokerage.ac.uk/ . We?re seeing a number of providers thinking about offering some element of their cloud service for free to the education sector, as well as highly secure government clouds starting to come online too. There?s a fair chance higher education institutions will want to take advantage of all of these offerings to one degree or another and if we do, the management of identity could frankly become a nightmare with multiple cloud providers in use simultaneously. . SNIP . ------ . Bill St. Arnaud Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Green Internet Consultant. Practical solutions to reducing GHG emissions such as free broadband and electric highways. http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/ email: [log in to unmask] twitter: BillStArnaud blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/ skype: Pocketpro . . http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/2011/12/ how-clouds-are-transforming-education.html . A shorter URL for the above link: . http://tinyurl.com/7vgjyzk . The complete article may be read at the URL above. . .