Pinakastra™_PrivateCloud_For_Indian_Academia-FAQs

1.  Executive Summary

The private cloud infrastructure for a university provides a flexible and scalable solution for managing the university's IT resources. With a private cloud, the university can centralize its data storage and computing resources, allowing for better resource utilization and cost savings. Additionally, a private cloud allows for greater control over data security and access, which is critical for a university environment.

The private cloud infrastructure can be customized to meet the specific needs of the university, such as supporting a wide range of academic and administrative applications, as well as providing remote access to resources for students and faculty. With the ability to rapidly provision and deprovision resources, the private cloud can respond quickly to changing demands, such as during peak enrollment periods or when new research initiatives require additional computing resources.

Overall, the private cloud infrastructure provides a robust and flexible solution for the university's IT needs, with the ability to scale and adapt to changing requirements. With its emphasis on security, control, and customization, the private cloud infrastructure is an ideal choice for universities looking to streamline their IT operations and provide reliable access to resources for students and faculty.

• Only 5.84% of engineers are employable in software-related jobs at start-ups.

• Around 3% engineers possess new-age skills in areas such as AI, Machine Learning, Data engineering and Mobile technologies. On an aggregate level, employability in these areas is around 1.5-1.7%.

• The US has a much higher proportion of engineers, almost four times, who have good programming skills as compared to India.

• A much higher percentage of Indian engineers (37.7%) cannot write error-free code, as compared to China (10.35%).

• Only 40% of engineering graduates end up doing an internship and 36% do any projects beyond coursework.

2. Why private cloud & Hyperconverged Infrastructure?

3) Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ's) - Cloud for Indian Enterprises

3.1) What are the advantages of having a private cloud in our institution?

Major benefits for the Institutions & researchers orgs

•  Runs the workloads of public website, intranet, and student information systems

•  Easy sharing of documents as they are stored within the private cloud and is quickly and safely accessible to authorised people.

•  Easy lab setup and teardown (Different lab setups that would need probably a weeks time to setup, will be done in a few minutes)

•  You can deploy educational stacks on the infra. (All digital educational components can be privately hosted)

•  Precise data control

•  More managed courseware and effective and optimised usage of IT infrastructure within the Institution

•  Supports faculty in their research by providing fast and convenient computing and storage resources

•  The capital expenditure (CAPEX) and operational expenditure (OPEX) will have a considerable reduction and will decrease the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the systems infrastructure in the college.

• A project like this can reduce the university’s data center CAPEX by 60%; IT management tasks by 33%, and electricity costs by 80%.

3.2) What are the advantages of having a private cloud to students and researchers?

Major benefits for the students and researchers

•  Students will have the opportunity to experience the future of the computing world well before they step into the future careers, enabling them to be industry ready while they are graduating from the Institution Resulting in more successful students.

•  A cloud platform in an educational institution will encourage students to do projects in various cutting edge technologies.

•  Students will be able to provision computing resources for their projects themselves with a self-service dashboard within the quota of resources they are entitled to by the IT dept staff.

•  A streamline access control mechanism for the cloud resources will have enough security measures.

•  By saving the snapshot of every lab session, a single lab exercise can be spanned across multiple sessions by jumpstarting to the previous lab status in a few mins.

• GPU-as-a-Service can enable high end computing available through PCI-passthrough to multiple  people at same time.

3.3) What are the technologies that can be supported in the cloud? Are they aligned to our curriculum prescribed by our university?

 All recent technologies mentioned below are heavily dependent on a cloud platform that helps the students industry ready straight out of college. Every university is aligning their curriculum w.r.t to this industry trend.

• Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Machine Learning (ML)

• Internet of Things(IoT)

• Software Defined Networks (SDN)

• Network Function Virtualization (NFV)

• Mobile Applications

All the below laboratory sessions can be seamlessly handled with the help of a private cloud setup & thin clients.

• Data Structures and Object Oriented Programming Laboratory (C++/Java)

• Operating Systems Laboratory (C/C++)

• Analysis of Algorithms Laboratory (C/C++/Java/Python/R)

• Database Management Systems Laboratory (Oracle/Sqllite/Mysql/PostgreSQL/MongoDB)

• Computer Networks Laboratory (C)

• Web Technology Laboratory (Lamp Stack, Mean Stack, Ruby Stack, Django Stack, HaProxy, Nginx)

• Software Engineering Laboratory

• Mobile Application Laboratory (Node.js, Backend Server Programming)

• Data Analytics Laboratory (Hadoop, Hive, Apache Spark)

• Final year projects on latest technologies (Cloud, AI, ML, IoT, Edge Computing, SDN, NFV etc)

3.4) What is ROI an educational Institution can expect from such a cloud implementation?

A project like this can reduced the university’s data center CAPEX by ~80%; IT management tasks OPEX by ~40%, and electricity costs by ~60% every year

Note:This ROI calculation is purely indicative and only for reference, actual calculations may differ based on the cloud capacity and the cloud deployment model opted by the Institute.

3.5) What are the cloud deployment models available?

3.6) What is the minimum hardware requirement for setting up a highly available private cloud in our organisation?

For an enterprise grade private cloud setup with all high availability and resilience features, we would require atelast 3 Pinakastra HCI nodes to begin with and it can be scaled up quickly as per the demand in future.

3.7 ) What are technologies readily made available as single-click applications in Pinakastra™?

3.8) When you say you will remotely manage our private cloud infrastructure, how do you make it possible?

We are all talking about cloud computing, deploying a cloud and Using a cloud, so it will be very naive  for us to say, we will not be able to handle things remotely from our Bangalore office. The below diagram shows how Pinakastra Computing engineers manage the private clouds across PAN india remotely from our office.

Complete automated DevOps setup for every Pinakastra™ clouds PAN India

Network Operations & 24x7x365 remote Pinakastra™ support team

3.9) How much time is required to set up a private cloud for our organisation?

Pinakastra™ is a turn-key private cloud appliance which will be built as per the needs and shipped or remotely built on a on-premise existing hardware, for setting up a production ready private cloud we would require 30 to  45 working days from the date of PO. 

Note:The hardware provisioning time is not included in this timeline as due to COVID-19 pandemic all the hardware deliveries from China & Taiwan are having a delay (Usually it is approximately 2 weeks of time)

3.10) When we talk about the cloud, the very common question is about its security, how do you manage the security of the private cloud installation in our premises.

Pinakastra Computing helps in deploying an enterprise grade cloud that would be compliant of industry security standards with following features.

Cyber security (CIS Benchmarks & DISA STIG guidelines)

• The CIS benchmarks & and implementation of DISA STIG guidelines add security and rigor around multiple components of a Linux system, including user authentication, service configurations, and package management that forms the cloud infrastructure. All of these configurations add up to an environment that is more difficult for an attacker to penetrate and use for lateral movement.

Meet compliance requirements

• Industry compliance programs, such as PCI-DSS, ISO 27001/27002, or NIST 800-53 are taken care of during the initial deployment. Many of these programs require hardening standards to be applied to critical, production Pinakastra environments.

Deployment without disruption

• Security is often at odds with usability. Pinakastra deployment provides the greatest security benefit without disrupting production systems.

3.11) What are the cloud support models? Do you have defined SLAs?

The advantages of the transition to cloud are clear to many customers, but buying and building private and hybrid cloud solutions can sometimes be a challenge. Customers are seeking a partner to not just troubleshoot operational issues but to make their whole cloud journey a success.

Enter Pinakastra Computing. Our support team is dedicated to providing world-class support to our customers 24 x 7 x 365. Our tiered customer support model is based on four levels of escalation. Initial response times and target resolution times can range from several business days to as little as 1 hour based on the level of the request. For the customer who appreciates self-service access, Pinakastra Computing also has a wide variety of online support resources designed to answer the majority of our customers’ questions.

Pinakastra Computing offers software SLAs and an aggressive hardware RMA process to address the most demanding uptime requirements.

13.2) Which are the universities that have their own private cloud setup already?

In India, many institutions like IITs already have HPC clusters and Cloud exclusively built for their students, but we need to democratize the availability of computing resources on a larger scale.

• University of Cambridge

• Carleton University

• The university of Edinburgh

• Monash University of Australia

• University of Huddersfield

• Humboldt University

• University of Hawaii College of Education 

• Cardiff University

• Tsinghua University

• Virginia Tech

• University of Texas

• Oregon State University

• Yale-NUS College, Singapore

• Gjøvik University College

• Keele University

3.13) How to compare features provided by other HCI or Cloud vendors?