Session 1: Delivering efficiencies & value for money by sharing services & floating on clods/JISC, Eduserv, DCC, JANET
Spot the typo above – not deliberate, except for the decision to leave it in.
Overview of the JISC Shared Services & the Cloud programme.
JANET Brokerage Service. Discussing the fears & aspirations with institutions & suppliers; ref former, many different perspectives, views, degrees of readiness for cloud services, so no one model. So way forward: working with individual institutions & suppliers to identify appropriate services – sort of against spirit of the Cloud, tailored/customised rather than just out there & generic. Now up & running. Developing framework agreements. Paper to be published soon on email for research students & staff. Working with VLE providers. So JANET doing SaaS – then where does SSPS fit into this? Elephant in the room: sustainability. One stop shop, establish pipeline of brokered deals into FY12/13 – must have financial sustainability model.
Digital Curation Centre. Do your researchers trust IT Services to look after their data? Capacity planning? Post-grant data management? Researchers increasingly keeping stuff longer/externally.
Eduserv. Cloud hosting service. Key thing – pricing to be published on Monday 21st. Broadly pitched below Amazon etc.
Q&A. Eduserv – resilience when only single data centre; second centre tentatively within 18 months. Also looking at preservation centre in the cloud, would require working with other partners. Another comment – single data centre makes it a non-runner. Could be used as backup centre/second site for an institution – but not primary. Maybe bursting, overflow etc. So would you site an operational service there, like, say, DARE? In reality, needs practical approach to resilience in a cloud context – the way backups etc are provided by, say, Amazon will not necessarily conform to the usual expectations.
Session 2: JISC & the Beanstalk/JISC
Flexible service delivery etc presented through the medium of pantomime, coincident with the launch of the new JISC infoNet resource suite ‘Improving Organisational Efficiency‘. I was relieved to hear that guerilla EA doesn’t mean ‘John Townsend jumping on stage in a monkey suit’. Apart from that, you had to be there. & then I got me coat.
