Cloud Services
Overview
AfricaConnect is one of a series of EU-funded projects that provide infrastructure to connect research and education communities (R&E) in regions outside of Europe and to interconnect them with the pan-European GÉANT network. It has contributed to providing not only dedicated high-speed R&E connectivity but also research collaboration platforms in a growing digital cooperation space across Africa.
Cloud has brought new attention to research and education communities. Cloud provides ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned for seamless access. Such resources include virtual servers, storage, applications, and services that are specific to the research and education communities.
Hardware
As an outcome of the AC3 project, ASREN
installed high-end servers in its Point-of-Presence (PoP) located at Slough -
UK, consisting of powerful CPUs, Terabytes of storage capacity, and hundreds of
Gigabytes of RAM.
The servers are deployed as a “Private Cloud”
virtualized infrastructure, to enable ASREN to run the long-needed network
operations and management functions, and some administrative application
services which are essential to the ASREN organization.
Examples of network operation
functions are performance monitoring and fault monitoring software applications,
which have been deployed for 24x7 network monitoring and automatic
notifications in case of failures and/or issues on the peerings with NREN
partners across the Arab region and with other Regional RENs like GÉANT. These functions
are now deployed using long-established NOC software applications and represent
the core functions of the ASREN NOC (Network Operation Center) to manage connectivity.
Examples of administrative services are ASREN DNS (Domain Name System) which is
critical to manage the asren.net domain, a request tracker system to manage and
follow-up requests from client NRENs, a mail transfer agent (MTA) to manage
mailboxes and mailing lists of the domain, and federated
identity management systems.
The ASREN Private Cloud platform
provided crucial support to the Federated Identity training that was organized
to build capacity aiming at AAI development for member NRENs. This has been
facilitated by provisioning several virtual machines for the instructors and
trainees, allowing them to get access to hands-on components and training
scenarios executed in a real-life network environment.
Services
As an outcome of the AC3 project, ASREN installed high-end servers in its Point-of-Presence (PoP) located at Slough - UK, consisting of powerful CPUs, Terabytes of storage capacity, and hundreds of Gigabytes of RAM.
The servers are deployed as a “Private Cloud” virtualized infrastructure, to enable ASREN to run the long-needed network operations and management functions, and some administrative application services which are essential to the ASREN organization.
Examples of network operation functions are performance monitoring and fault monitoring software applications, which have been deployed for 24x7 network monitoring and automatic notifications in case of failures and/or issues on the peerings with NREN partners across the Arab region and with other Regional RENs like GÉANT. These functions are now deployed using long-established NOC software applications and represent the core functions of the ASREN NOC (Network Operation Center) to manage connectivity. Examples of administrative services are ASREN DNS (Domain Name System) which is critical to manage the asren.net domain, a request tracker system to manage and follow-up requests from client NRENs, a mail transfer agent (MTA) to manage mailboxes and mailing lists of the domain, and federated identity management systems.
The ASREN Private Cloud platform provided crucial support to the Federated Identity training that was organized to build capacity aiming at AAI development for member NRENs. This has been facilitated by provisioning several virtual machines for the instructors and trainees, allowing them to get access to hands-on components and training scenarios executed in a real-life network environment.
ASREN is proud to provide its NREN community with a set of Cloud services to meet their needs. Examples of potential services include, but are not limited to:
- Infrastructure as a Service
(IaaS) – a cloud computing model that provides on-demand access to computing
resources such as servers, storage, networking, and virtualization.
- Virtual machines with
powerful computing resources for scientists and educators to run simulation
models and host services for scientific research.
- Virtual
machines with Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for Artificial Intelligence and
Deep Learning research.
General
purpose virtual machines for the NRENs to run applications to help their
management functions, like networking, operations, and identity management.
General
purpose virtual machines for the NRENs to run applications to help their
management functions, like networking, operations, and identity management.
