StateTech: Why the Massachusetts Open-Cloud Project Is a Big Deal
December 1, 2014 from StateTech
A project team of academia and industry experts is making headway on a multimillion-dollar cloud computing initiative announced by Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick in April.
If all goes as planned, the three-year project, known as the Massachusetts Open Cloud (MOC), will pave the way for cloud consumers to customize infrastructure and platform services to best meet their needs. Patrick is hopeful that MOC’s public cloud computing infrastructure will spur Big Data innovation in the state.
Azer Bestavros, director of the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering at Boston University, likens the new model to a shopping mall, where customers can choose from multiple retailers and mix and match products and services. In the cloud computing world, this model doesn’t exist, Bestavros says. “All you have are stores like Walmart. They own and operate everything.”
Boston University leads the MOC project team. The MOC project received $3 million in state funding, according to Bestavros. “We have commitments of up to $20 million from universities and industry.”
MOC is an architecture and a model for other governments, he adds. It functions similar to a shopping mall in that technologies from multiple MOC service providers will be located in the same location or data center. Ideally, MOC won’t be restricted to government customers. The general public and companies will be able to buy cloud services using an online user interface, much like the one offered by Amazon Web Services.
Cisco, Intel, Red Hat and Juniper Networks are among the growing number of companies partnering with the MOC project. Academia partners include Northeastern University, University of Massachusetts, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Jan Mark Holzer, a senior consulting engineer at Red Hat, says his company is helping MOC build the cloud infrastructure around OpenStack. Red Hat has moved some hardware into the MOC-designated data center and will continue to install hardware and software for at least the next six months. Hozer stressed that the MOC and its member partners are not interested in promoting a particular vendor or product. It’s an open project.
Hozer says he is hopeful that MOC will be open for research use fairly soon, which could mean months, rather than years.
It’s too early to say how much the MOC services will cost, but the price points have to be competitive because agencies aren’t required to use the services.