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Is It Time for a Private Cloud?

You probably remember from my recent post on What “The Cloud” Means to Your Company that there are both public clouds and private clouds. We defined private clouds are resources shared by one organization. More specifically, private clouds offer dedicated server space that is hosted either internally or externally. The platform can be managed in-house or a third party can support and maintain the hardware and applications.

A private cloud provides your company with a pool of IT resources that can be allocated across departments. This allows you to quickly and easily deploy services based on the needs of your employees. The old process of buying a new server to support the requirements of a specific business unit has been replaced with a system that allows you to create virtual servers and carve out the necessary resources to support your team.

Understanding how other organizations use private clouds to optimize their business is helpful to identifying opportunities within your own business. The state of New Mexico embraced this model to cut costs, accelerate service provisioning and reduces its carbon footprint. The first video on this page offers a look at why and how they built a private cloud network.

Another example is CareCore National, a specialty benefit-management company that collaborates with healthcare providers and insurance firms to authorize an average of 45,000 medical procedures daily. They needed the ability to analyze very large data sets while also helping to lower healthcare costs and improve quality of care at the same time.

Implementing VCE’s Vblock Infrastructure Package, built with industry-leading technology from Cisco, EMC and VMWare, allowed them to realize the following results:

-Reduced time to launch new lines of business from six months to two weeks
-Increased time software engineers can devote to development from 50 to 80 percent
-Built foundation for multi-tenant HSX cloud service

For a little more detail you can download the CareCore National case study.

The private cloud methodology allows your IT team to create a single virtualized set of resources that can be offered on-demand as a service across your organization. Your infrastructure becomes easier to scale and quicker to deploy without major considerations given to hardware installations and integration. It also establishes an architecture that enables secure transactions, measured service and accountability for specific cost centers.

Contact us to learn more about our partnership with VCE and discuss how we can provide your organization with a converged infrastructure solution that delivers a complete private cloud along with pervasive virtualization.

Two Years of Cancer Research

On July 1, 2010 TBL Networks began a partnership with the World Community Grid. The World Community Grid allows organizations with idle compute capacity to donate it for use in research projects ranging from cancer research to clean energy. When idle, a member computer will request data on a specific project from World Community Grid’s server, and perform computations on this data, sending the results back to the server, and then ask the server for new work. Each computation that a computer performs provides scientists with critical information that accelerates the pace of human discovery. In 2010, TBL Networks fired up a 40 machine Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environment using VMware View on our Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) dual B-series blade farm and dedicated all of those machines’ computing power to find a cure for cancer.

On our first anniversary, we reported that the 365 days of donated capacity had resulted in 18 years, 352 days and 6 hours of computing power.  With 95,993 results returned, TBL Networks was ranked 546 out of 561,794 members throughout the world.

Today, after two years or partnership with the World Community Grid, I am happy to announce that TBL’s VMware View cluster has computed 43 years, 311 days and 3 hours of runtime towards finding a cure for cancer. That amount of CPU cycles has generated 215,463 results for medical researchers around the globe, which now ranks TBL # 267 out of the now almost 600,000 members.

Dr. Igor Jurisica, Senior Scientist at the Ontario Cancer Institute, will be conducting a live webcast to discuss the Help Conquer Cancer project and how the project will ultimately help researchers who work on finding cures for cancers.

The webcast will take place on August 22, 2012, starting promptly at 12:00PM Eastern Time. You will be able to access the webcast by clicking here. Whether or not you are able to join for webcast, please let your friends know about this easy way to participate in helping humanity! That’s what we call techumanity, and we think it’s pretty cool.